“How can I help you today?” my servant asks. “Please can you use this,” I command, passing over a covering letter, “to respond to this job advert,” giving my guy the bullet-pointed brief. Within seconds, a new letter is rattling out, my skills, experience and achievements having been shuffled into formation like diligent soldiers. The…
An 11-year-old boy has died after having apparently taken part in a TikTok challenge nicknamed “chroming”. Tommie-Lee Gracie Billington was found unresponsive by paramedics at a friend’s house in Lancaster on Saturday, having suffered a suspected cardiac arrest. He is thought to have taken part in a craze that involves inhaling toxic chemicals, often from…
The Guardian has placed a limit on the number of stories that readers can access free of charge on its app. In a sign of growing financial pressure on the newspaper, people will be able to see 20 stories on the app until they have to pay to continue to use it or wait until…
Chris Dixon does not pull his punches. “I think I’ve been excommunicated from the mainstream tech world.” As that world tunes its sights and capital on the future of artificial intelligence, the Andreessen Horowitz partner is looking in another direction, doubling down on crypto, the blockchain and Web3, the new iteration of the internet. Society…
‘Black mirror” is Charlie Brooker’s superbly eerie term for the smartphone — the slim hypnotic box of glass, metal and plastic that now commands our attention for much of the waking day. I have long been its victim: a chronic scroller, an addict of ephemeral internet scandals, a connoisseur of comic videos of animals, helplessly…
Valentine’s Day in the modern world takes an awful lot of planning, so with only eight days to go now I hope you’ve got all your ducks in a row. Have you, for example, decided which vomitous menus of romantic pink food you’re not going to touch with a bargepole? Do you know for sure…
One super power I wish I possessed is the ability to see around corners. While I thrive on tackling the unexpected, I like to be prepared for it. So I feel for John Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group owns Liverpool Football Club. In November, Jürgen Klopp — one of the club’s most successful managers —…
Many artificial intelligence start-ups are set to fail because they will not be able to manage the technology’s demands for computing power, the head of Google’s AI division has said. Sir Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, was speaking weeks after the AI company Inflection, started by his old friend Mustafa Suleyman, was effectively…
★★★☆☆Facebook has rather declined from its early 2000s pomp. Everyone good-looking is on Instagram. Everyone young is on TikTok. Everyone pompous is on LinkedIn. Everyone who likes either being a fascist or accusing other people of being a fascist is on X/Twitter. There’s been a great migration across cyberspace. Only the senile and mentally feeble…