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I finally got the chance to drop by one of my favorite podcasts, The Vergecast, where David Pierce had me on to talk about the recent conversation about Apple's moves around video podcasts , as well as the much broader big-picture considerations around keeping podcasts open. We started with grounding the conversation in the idea that "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement . The episode also starts with a wonderful look back at Apple's first half-century as they celebra...

Yesterday, I had the chance to witness someone who's one of the most dedicated, competent advocates for privacy and digital rights bring that message to a whole new platform. It turns out, it's pretty delightful, especially in a moment when our civil liberties and rights online couldn't matter more! Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , has been a tireless fighter for protecting everyone's digital civil liberties, and I was lucky enough to get to tag along as...

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat. It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it on the Internet over the last few decades. The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely...

For the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I talked to Clive Thompson about one of the conversations that I'm having most often these days: What happens to coders in this current moment of extraordinarily rapid evolution in AI? LLMs are now quickly advancing to where they can virtually become entire software factories, radically changing both the economics and the power dynamics of software creation — which has so far mostly been used to displace massive numbers of tech workers. But it's not s...

Last week, Apple released a parade of hardware announcements, and the one that captured the most attention across the industry was the $600 ($500 if you’re in education!) MacBook Neo , the brightly-colored low-end laptop that they launched to great fanfare. The conventional wisdom is that this product opens up Apple to the low end of the laptop market for the first time, radically changing the dynamics of the entire market, and throwing down the gauntlet to the garbage Windows laptop market, as ...

TL;DR: Apple is adding support for video podcasts to their podcast app Podcasts are built on an open standard, which is why they aren’t controlled by a bad algorithm and don’t have ads that spy on you Apple’s new system for video podcasts breaks with the old podcast standard, and forces creators to host their video clips with a few selected companies The stakes are even higher because all the indie video infrastructure companies have been bought by private equity, while Trump’s goons go after TV...

A big tech headline this week is Anthropic (makers of Claude, widely regarded as one of the best LLM platforms) resisting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s calls to modify their platform in order to enable it to support his commission of war crimes . As has become clear this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has declined to do so . The administration couches the request as an attempt to use the technology for “lawful purposes”, but given that they’ve also described their recent crimes as legal,...

Many of the topics that we’ve all been discussing about technology these days seem to matter so much more, and the stakes have never been higher. So, I’ve been trying to engage with more conversations out in the world, in hopes of communicating some of the ideas that might not get shared from more traditional voices in technology. These recent conversations have been pretty well received, and I hope you’ll take a minute to give them a listen when you have a moment. Galaxy Brain First, it was nic...

In my last piece, I talked about the harms that AI is visiting on children through the irresponsible choices made by the platforms creating those products. While we dove a bit into the incentives and institutional pressures that cause those companies to make such wildly irresponsible decisions, what we haven’t yet reckoned with is how we hold these companies accountable. Often, people tell me they feel overwhelmed at the idea of trying to engage with getting laws passed, or fighting a big politi...

I have to begin by warning you about the content in this piece; while I won’t be dwelling on any specifics, this will necessarily be a broad discussion about some of the most disturbing topics imaginable. I resent that I have to give you that warning, but I’m forced to because of the choices that the Big AI companies have made that affect children. I don’t say this lightly. But this is the point we must reckon with if we are having an honest conversation about contemporary technology. Let me get...

I wanted to share one of the bits of advice that I find myself most frequently giving to teams when they’re working on a product, or founders who are creating a new company: launch it three times. What I mean by that is, it often takes more than one time before your idea actually resonates or sticks with the people you’re trying to reach. Sometimes it takes more than twice! And when I say that you might need to launch again, that can mean a lot of different things. It might just be little tweaks...

In each successive generation of code creation thus far, we’ve abstracted away the prior generation over time. Usually, only a small percentage of coders still work on the lower layers of the stack that used to be the space where everyone was working. I’ve been coding long enough that people were still creating code in assembly when I started (though I was never any good at it!), though I started with BASIC. Since BASIC was an interpreted language, its interpreter would write the assembly langua...

Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry” . It’s more true than ever. There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies that happen to create tech platforms. Whatever shorthand we use for the biggest tech companies, they almost never have much in common—whether it's how they make money, what products they make, how they make decisions, who lead...

This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typical industry affairs, the usual glad-handing about deal-making and pleasantries. But a lot have been d...

There's been a remarkable leap forward in the ability to orchestrate coding bots, making it possible for ordinary creators to command dozens of AI bots to build software without ever having to directly touch code. The implications of this kind of evolution are potentially extraordinary, as outlined in that first set of notes about what we could call "codeless" software. But now it's worth looking at the larger ecosystem to understand where all of this might be headed. "Frontier mi...

I've been working in and around the technology industry for a long time. Depending on how you count, it's 20 or 30 years. (I first started getting paid to put together PCs with a screwdriver when I was a teenager, but there isn't a good way to list that on LinkedIn.) And as soon as I felt like I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to pay the next month's rent without having to eat ramen noodles for two weeks before it was due, I felt like I'd really made it. And as soon as you've made it...

Something actually new? There’s finally been a big leap forward in coding tech unlocked by AI — not just “it’s doing some work for me”, but “we couldn’t do this before”. What’s new are a few smart systems that let coders control fleets of dozens of coding bots, all working in tandem, to swarm over a list of tasks and to deliver entire features, or even entire sets of features, just from a plain-English description of the strategic goal to be accomplished. This isn’t a tutorial, this is just tryi...

When Wikipedia launched 25 years ago today , I heard about it almost immediately, because the Internet was small back then, and I thought “Well… good luck to those guys.” Because there had been online encyclopedias before Wikipedia, and anybody who really cared about this stuff would, of course, buy Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM, right? I’d been fascinated by the technology of wikis for a good while at that point, but was still not convinced about whether they could be deployed at such a large sca...

Last week, we talked about one huge question, “ How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? ” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give to all of you. They're a short list of questions that help you judge whether a job that you’re considering is going to crush your soul or not. Obviously, not everyone is going to get to work in an environment that has perf...

Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglo...