Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Nearly half of all cellphone calls next year will come from scammers, according to First Orion, a company that provides phone carriers and their customers caller ID and call blocking technology. The Arkansas-based firm projects an explosion of incoming spam calls, marking a massive leap from 3.7 percent of total calls in 2017 to more…
With the rise of AI personalities like Lil Miquela, who can be anyplace at any time, the future landscape of fame is here. So where do humans fit into it? Lil Miquela herself weighs in. Michael Jackson and Lil Miquela. Miquela wears hat and vest by PRADA. Photograph from Getty Images from the Getty Images Entertainment collection,…
Larry Page was a no-show. The co-founder and de facto leader of Google is famous for his wild bets on airborne taxis and space elevators, but he apparently couldn’t make the flight to Washington, D.C. Page had been called to testify on Capitol Hill, alongside Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg,…
When Mangesh Gururaj’s wife left home to pick up their child from math lessons one Sunday earlier this month, she turned on her Tesla Model S and hit “Summon,” a self-parking feature that the electric automaker has promoted as a central step toward driverless cars. But as the family’s $65,000 sedan reversed itself out of…
Mercedes-Benz unveiled its dream of a fully autonomous multipurpose vehicle this week. The announcement was full of buzzwords—the modular Vision Urbanetic “enables on-demand, sustainable and efficient movement of people and goods” and “reduces traffic flows, relieves inner-city infrastructures and contributes to an improved quality of urban life.” Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that…
Brian Lesser sits in the shadow of Comcast. It’s an unusually cool New York City summer morning, and as Lesser, the CEO of AT&T’s advertising and analytics unit, details his grandiose plans to upend the TV ad industry from the roof-deck of AT&T’s offices in Rockefeller Center, the peacock logo of Comcast’s NBC division…
storytext Twitter banned far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website InfoWars from its platform Thursday afternoon, a month after several of its Silicon Valley counterparts did so. Jones was suspended from Twitter for one week last month after he posted a video in which he said, “Now is time to act on the enemy…
Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service Medium: Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL. I don’t understand why any publication, even a personal blog, would use Medium without a custom domain name. It’s not just about branding now,…
.entry-header Scene: the perfect vacation experience, fueled by rented products. Go on vacation and you’ll undoubtedly encounter at least one couple who snaps photos of their perfectly manicured brunch experience. They took an Uber to get to the general area, asking the driver to play their favorite Spotify playlist for the 17 minute drive. Rather than walk the final…
Adult actress Natasha Nice is onscreen giving Alex Adams — who is not her step-brother, whatever the video title might promise — an impressively enthusiastic blowjob. Meanwhile, down in the comment section, people are talking about Jesus. The thread spirals on for another 35 comments. One includes an entire Latin prayer; there are also plenty of joking references to Satan and…