Tech

if you’re bored with your home screen, I have good news for you. With iOS 18, you can finally personalize it however you’d like. You can now change the color of app icons and widgets (and even match them to your wallpaper), change the size to make them look larger, …

We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent across countless interviews. For some reason, this week he felt it necessary to distill those opinions in a succinct blog …

For months, speculation has raged in Washington over the future of Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair and face of the Biden administration’s crusade against monopoly power. Overturning decades of antitrust norms, charged by Khan with failing to curb extreme concentrations of corporate power, the administration has routinely scrutinized …

Mindlessly scroll through TikTok long enough and you’re bound to stumble on one: An older person, possibly a boomer, gesturing blithely at something—maybe it’s a B&B, maybe it’s a set of blinds—and unfurling a litany of Gen Z slang. “Northumberland Zoo hits different”; “slay”; “no cap”; “It’s giving literate.” To …

If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle. You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las …

Yonker and her colleagues will administer larazotide to 32 patients between the ages of 7 and 21, who will take the drug for eight weeks; a further 16 patients will receive a placebo. To qualify for the trial, patients must have a detectable presence of the Covid-19 spike protein in …

The popular perception of sex machines (thanks mainly to porn) is usually a dildo on the end of a long rod attached to a motor. That visual might be intimidating, but Lovense made it downright cute with the Lovense Mini Sex Machine (8/10, WIRED Recommends). A smaller, compact version of …

Chinese regulators likely learned from the EU AI Act, says Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor of Political Science at George Washington University. “Chinese policymakers and scholars have said that they’ve drawn on the EU’s Acts as inspiration for things in the past.” But at the same time, some of the …

Under Chinese law, only 10 percent of a company’s staff is supposed to be made up of labor dispatch workers. But Zhang says the regulations are often not rigorously enforced. She noted that companies can also circumvent the limit by hiring workers categorized under different outsourcing schemes that function in …

Departures might be dominating the week’s OpenAI-related headlines. But comments on AI bias from Anna Makanju, the company’s VP of global affairs, also grabbed our attention. Makanju, speaking on a panel at the UN’s Summit of the Future event on Tuesday, suggested that emerging “reasoning” models such as OpenAI’s o1 …