All posts tagged: idea

The Allbirds Pivot Is a Terrible Idea … Right?

The Allbirds Pivot Is a Terrible Idea … Right?

Published by Daniella Wilson

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Walk into any Silicon Valley office in the late 2010s, and you’d probably see at least one pair of Allbirds. Woolly and eco-friendly, the sneakers once epitomized a certain kind of corporate culture (even Barack Obama was a fan), and the company behind them was valued at roughly $4 billion at its peak, in 2021. But for several years, sales have flagged. Attempts to replicate the success of its signature product—see: wool leggings and wool underwear—didn’t do much to keep the business afloat. Earlier this year, Allbirds sold most of its holdings for pennies and closed its remaining retail stores. Now it has a last-ditch idea: a hard pivot to AI. The plan, announced yesterday, is to change its name to NewBird AI and spend $50 million from an unnamed investor on specialized chips called GPUs, which it will …

Richard Gadd says he ‘couldn’t shake’ idea of Half Man amid toxic masculinity crisis

Richard Gadd says he ‘couldn’t shake’ idea of Half Man amid toxic masculinity crisis

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd is returning to our screens after two years with a new BBC drama – but the idea had been haunting him long before he found global fame with his controversial Netflix debut. The 36-year-old writes and stars in Half Man – a miniseries that follows meek teenager Niall (Jamie Bell) as he’s forced to live with his volatile but fiercely loyal stepbrother Ruben (Gadd). While the pair are inseparable in their youth, it’s a different story decades on when an older Ruben gatecrashes a horrified Niall’s wedding day. Speaking about the new drama, Gadd revealed at a screening for Half Man that he came up with the idea before writing Baby Reindeer – the critically-acclaimed 2024 thriller based on Gadd’s real-life experience with a stalker. “I had the idea quite a long time ago. I wrote one …

This is how we do it: ‘I love the idea of only knowing one person intimately for the rest of my life’ | Life and style

This is how we do it: ‘I love the idea of only knowing one person intimately for the rest of my life’ | Life and style

Published by Sam Flores

Veronika, 18 double quotation markThere have been days when we’ve been on the phone for 10 hours at a stretch Part of me always hoped I’d have a love story like my parents, who were college sweethearts and are still crazy about each other 30 years later. Maybe that’s why it felt so natural to me that Fabio and I were serious about our future together from the moment he asked me out two years ago. We were just 16 and 17 at that point, and still dealing with the madness of A-levels (not to mention applying to universities on different sides of the Atlantic), but while most of our friends split up after sixth form, we never even considered it, though admittedly long-distance has been way harder than I expected. Before Fabio and I started dating, I’d only ever been kissed once – badly – so he’s the first person I’ve shared my body with in any real way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hook-up culture, but I’ve always been clear that …

OpenAI Says Not to Worry About UBI, Because It Has Another Idea

OpenAI Says Not to Worry About UBI, Because It Has Another Idea

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech As AI companies warn of mass automation and the end of work as we know it, ChatGPT maker OpenAI has published a sweeping policy paper outlining its vision of who should call the shots once “superintelligent AI” goes online. Beneath the paper’s flowery rhetoric is something familiar: a powerful corporation arguing that the best way to provide for the poorest people in the world is to let the richest do whatever they want. The paper starts off by warning — ironically — that superintelligent AI could concentrate wealth among a small number of companies. Its solution to this problem, at a time when nearly 48 million Americans already struggle with hunger, is a “public wealth fund,” which would be a program that provides “every citizen” with a “stake in AI-driven economic growth.” Instead of expanding tested programs like a universal basic income or unemployment insurance, in other words, OpenAI’s proposal is to hitch the public’s wellbeing to the …

I wanted to switch my broadband provider. I had no idea what I was signing myself up for

I wanted to switch my broadband provider. I had no idea what I was signing myself up for

Published by Sam Flores

Now armed with the figures, I entered my address on Virgin’s site to confirm I could get the fastest speed (Gig1) in my area, closed my laptop and made a note to sort it out before the annual price increase on April 1st. That was where I went wrong. In the four days that followed, I had six missed calls from Sky, presumably hoping to convince me to sign a new contract, and 12 from Virgin hoping to seal the deal. These came every couple of hours until I got so fed up, I blocked the number. By the fourth day I was so angry that I contemplated no broadband at all just for some peace. Instead, I did what Virgin was no doubt hoping I would do: I opened my laptop back up and completed the switch. It took 10 minutes. Before doing this, I rang Sky to see if it was able to match Virgin’s price for a similar speed. I’d always recommend this. Sadly, it came out £11 a month more expensive, …

Is fake grass a bad idea? The Astroturf wars are far from over.

Is fake grass a bad idea? The Astroturf wars are far from over.

Published by skeptic

New York City has 286 municipal synthetic-­turf fields, with more under construction. In Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, two fields were approved via Zoom meetings during the pandemic, and Massimo Strino, a local artist who makes kaleidoscopes, says he found out only when he saw signs announcing the work on one of his daily walks in Inwood Hill Park, along the Hudson River. He joined a campaign against the plan, gathering more than 4,300 signatures. “I was canvassing every weekend,” Strino says. “You can count on one hand, literally, the number of people who said they were in favor.”  But that doesn’t include the group that pushed for one of those fields in the first place: Uptown Soccer, which offers free and low-cost lessons and games to 1,000 kids a year, mostly from underserved immigrant families. “It was turning an unused community space into a usable space,” says David Sykes, the group’s executive director. “That trumped the sort of abstract concerns about the environmental impacts. I’m not an expert in artificial turf, but the …

I found Windows’ built-in crash history tool — it goes back years and I had no idea it existed

I found Windows’ built-in crash history tool — it goes back years and I had no idea it existed

Published by skeptic

Last week, my Windows laptop started acting up. During an intense gaming session, out of nowhere, my entire PC restarted. When I started looking into this matter, I found that some apps were quietly closing in the background, without any reason. I went through the event logs on Windows Event Viewer, but the cryptic codes made me feel like I was trying to read an ancient language. Thanks to my habit of researching stuff on the internet, I came across a secret tool that Windows was hiding. There is a hidden tool that tracks every crash, failed update, and all software hiccups your laptop has experienced. It has weeks, months, and even years’ worth of records, and it is called Windows Reliability Monitor. Here’s how to use it. Related I finally disabled these Windows services and my PC is happier for it Your PC might be secretly working harder than you are, and not always in ways that benefit you. You don’t need to install anything This effective troubleshooting tool is just a command away …

40 years ago, “Frames of Mind” cracked open the idea of intelligence. It’s not done.

40 years ago, “Frames of Mind” cracked open the idea of intelligence. It’s not done.

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Who owns intelligence?” Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, or what, has it? More than a century ago, psychometricians staked their claim by proposing the almighty g, or general intelligence. They measured it with IQ tests, which assess cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. Eventually, psychometricians convinced much of Western society that, through IQ, they were the arbiters of intelligence. While the IQ test has been used nobly — to identify students in need of extra help with reading or writing, for example — it has also been used to deterministically sort people into groups and write off others entirely. Seeing injustice justified with IQ, educators grew increasingly fed up with the indicator in the second half of the 20th century. Such a narrow definition of intelligence simply didn’t comport with the range of cognitive …

I had no idea 5G was actually slowing my phone down

I had no idea 5G was actually slowing my phone down

Published by skeptic

5G was hailed as the transformative change in cellular internet connectivity. Gigabit speeds, near-zero latency, and instant downloads were all parts of the pitch. I’ve been on a 5G phone for years now, and network coverage has spread far and wide. Despite that, something feels off. Pages load at the same speed, if not slower. Videos can sometimes buffer, and internet speed tests don’t really show much of a difference. If anything, my 5G network seems to be delivering worse speeds than good old LTE somehow. 5G isn’t always the upgrade you think it is Why some “5G” connections are barely better than 4G 5G is not a single technology. Instead, it’s a range of frequencies grouped into three different tiers: low-band, mid-band, and high-band (also called mmWave). Each one of these behaves differently, almost like a completely different network. The mmWave 5G you commonly see in advertisements runs at frequencies above 24 GHz and can theoretically achieve speeds over 1 Gbps. But it comes with a major catch: terrible range. It can’t penetrate walls, …