Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending November 7, 2015)
Reconsider
The programmer David Heinemeier Hansson was scheduled to speak at this week’s massive Web Summit in Dublin but did not. In the (profanity-laced) speech he says he would have given, he derides VCs and their cult of “disruption.”
—Brian Bergstein, Executive Editor
Confessions of a Paywall Journalist
Why putting paywalls around journalism is bad for democracy.
—Brian Bergstein
First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses
Inside the mad experiment Zappos seems to be running on its workers.
—Will Knight, Senior Editor, AI
Explaining Extreme Events of 2014
Tropical cyclones in Hawaii. Extreme drought across East Africa. Massive floods in Jakarta and across the Canadian prairie. Heat waves in Australia. All of these weather events were caused, to some degree, by human-induced climate change, according to the newly published report, “Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective,” published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The annual report examines scientific studies from around the world to “break out various factors that led to the extreme events, including the degree to which natural variability and human-induced climate change played a role.” The report editors avoid the loaded word “caused,” opting for “influenced.” But the conclusion is clear: “human-caused climate change greatly increased the likelihood and intensity for extreme heat waves,” and other weather events, last year. More of the same is sure to follow.
—Richard Martin, Senior Editor, Energy
The Kernel of the Argument
Most of the servers that power the Internet run the open source software Linux, which is also found in many other gadgets large and small. But the software’s mercurial inventor and maintainer is accused of making security too low a priority.
—Tom Simonite, San Francisco bureau chief
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why
We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.