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Posts by Harry McCracken’s Stuff

Anthropic’s ‘Mythos’ AI proves that obsessing over AGI is folly Maybe LLMs will beat humanity at everything someday. But they’re adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities right now—and we can’t wait for fixes. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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The web can still be wonderful, and Flipboard’s Surf proves it This new app lets human beings weave together worthwhile stuff from across the internet, in a way that’s uniquely rewarding—and sometimes even beautiful. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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With Sora’s death, AI’s age of frivolity may be ending I’m not embarrassed to admit I liked OpenAI’s synthetic video social network. But I understand why it’s going bye-bye. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Before we get underway, a little self-promotion: Apple’s 50th anniversary is on April 1. As the big day approached, I realized that many people present at the company’s creation were still very much with us. So I interviewed 23 of them for an oral history, “How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History of its Earliest Years.” It’s chock-full of great tales as told by everyone from cofounder Steve Wozniak to Liza Loop, the first Apple user. Hearing these pioneers reminisce, I felt like I had been there, too—and so will you, I think. Here’s the article.

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How Apple became Apple: The definitive oral history of the company’s earliest days The true story of how Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and other bright young tech hobbyists of the 1970s joined forces to ignite a revolution. Before there was an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple Watch—before there was a Macintosh or Apple II or even an Apple-1—there were a couple of kids who came of age in Silicon Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s plan to make Gemini the only AI that matters Under Pichai, the company that invented modern AI is finally winning the race to deploy it—and making ‘AI everywhere’ a business reality. Sundar Pichai was blindsided by ChatGPT. Soon after being named Google CEO in 2015, he’d declared that the world was entering an AI-first era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn’t prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epoch-shifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google’s research labs in the first place.

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How Reddit CEO Steve Huffman got the upper hand with AI Reddit isn’t just striking deals with AI behemoths like OpenAI and Google. It’s smartly using AI technology itself to serve users and marketers. Last fall, Chives took over Reddit.

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Is it even possible to decentralize social networking? Bluesky is getting a new CEO, but I hope the bigger dream that gave us the company in the first place remains intact. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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MacBook Neo review: niceness on a budget Apple’s long-awaited laptop is even cheaper than the pundits expected, and still feels like a Mac. For over 40 years, “Mac vs. PC” has been technology’s most iconic rivalry. Yet in many ways, it’s been an indirect one. Apple, being Apple, has mostly stuck to computers with four-digit price tags—a rarefied territory where it can make the products it wants to make, not just the ones a given price point allows. Meanwhile, one of the best things about Windows PCs is that there’s something for everyone, including folks who don’t have a ton of money to spend.

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A brief history of surprisingly cheap Apple products The MacBook Neo’s $599 price is notable, but hardly unprecedented. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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No, AI is not about to kill the software industry Instead of falling victim to the technology, software’s established players have every shot at leveraging it to their own advantage. Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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The equal time rule is no match for the YouTube age The nearly 100-year-old FCC mandate has never felt more behind the times. Hello again, welcome to Fast Company’s Plugged In, and a quick note: A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a game I was vibe-coding using Claude Code, and said I would share it once I finished it. Here it is, along with more thoughts on the uncanny experience of collaborating with AI on a programming project.

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AI is still both more and less amazing than we think, and that’s a problem Somehow, people have trouble acknowledging that a technology can be simultaneously incredible and flawed. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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Vibe coding is coding, period As AI tools such as Claude Code take off, most of the world’s software may end up being written by software. Hello, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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Amazon Go is dead. Was grab-and-go retail a fantasy? For a time, it felt like cashierless checkout would soon be everywhere. Now it’s on life support. Hello, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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Got an AI skill? Now you can prove it on LinkedIn Users of several trendy AI tools will now be able to demonstrate their proficiency with the software directly in their LinkedIn profile. On January 28, the company announced partnerships with three vibe coding platforms—Lovable, Relay.app, and Replit—that will allow qualified users to link their accounts on those apps to their accounts on LinkedIn, adding certificates based on their proficiency with the tools. […] Users of several trendy AI tools will now be able to demonstrate their proficiency with the software directly in their LinkedIn profile. On January 28, the company announced partnerships with three vibe coding platforms—Lovable, Relay.app, and Replit—that will allow qualified users to link their accounts on those apps to their accounts on LinkedIn, adding certificates based on their proficiency with the tools. The level of certification can increase over time as people continue to use a tool and demonstrate their sophistication with it, says Pat Whelan, head of career products at LinkedIn.

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There’s only one Woz, but we can all learn from him The world has benefited from the Apple cofounder’s generosity of spirit for 50 years now—and it’s not just about the PC revolution his genius helped catalyze. Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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The bill for tech’s Trump 2.0 appeasement may be coming due A year into Trump’s second term, Big Tech has made nice when tenable and otherwise kept its mouth shut. But its ‘This is fine’ strategy may be slipping. Hello again, and thanks for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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Apple’s new Creator Studio isn’t just about getting you to subscribe to apps Yes, the company is turning software into a service. But its new creativity bundle also helps clarify its strategy around pro tools, AI, the iPad, and more. On the surface, Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of a subscription service called Apple Creator Studio does not demand a whole lot of explanation or analysis. The Mac/iPad/iPhone offering, which bundles the Final Cut Pro video editor, Logic Pro audio editor, Pixelmator Pro image editor, and other apps for making and manipulating media for $13 a month or $129 a year, is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect the company to get around to introducing.

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Brick-and-mortar bookshops look better than ever in the Amazon age Digital books haven’t killed print ones. And even the smallest local stores can transcend Amazon’s increasingly chaotic shopping experience. Welcome to the first Fast Company’s Plugged In of 2026, and Happy New Year to you.

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The 27 best new apps of 2025 From productivity boosters to time-wasters, these were the year’s greatest apps. As always, many of this year’s best apps are ones you’ve probably never heard of.

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This AI startup is extending an olive branch between humans and machines Bill Nguyen, a 30-year Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, has teamed up with five college students, including his son, to build Olive, an AI startup focused on teaching language models what we mean beyond the words we use. In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasn’t the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over thirty years—longer than his fellow founders had been alive.

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How AI made me more (and less) productive in 2025 These are the AI tools I found useful every day—and the ways the technology is still failing to live up to its potential. Thank you once again for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In. A quick programming note: We will be taking the next two Fridays off. Happy holidays to all, and I look forward to resurfacing in your inbox next year.

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With Apple’s help, storytellers are figuring out Vision Pro The headset opens up immersive new opportunities for dramas, documentaries, music videos, and beyond. Some filmmakers and developers are diving right in. More than any other Apple product, the Vision Pro is still—to quote Bob Dylan by way of Steve Jobs—busy being born. Announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 5, 2023 and shipped the following February, the $3,500 spatial computing headset has evolved some since its first release. This year brought a meaty operating system upgrade and a slightly revised version of the device sporting Apple’s powerful new M5 chip.

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Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe charts a new course for autonomous vehicles Scaringe on the EV maker’s AI-first approach, how it developed its own chip, what the public misunderstands about lidar, and why the car ownership versus robotaxi debate is all wrong. “Somehow, it didn’t leak.”

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The strange triumph of Rosie the Robot In 1962, ‘The Jetsons’ flopped. But the tech industry has never stopped trying to bring the show’s lovable and trusty robot maid to life. Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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Meet the private space company building satellites—cheaper, faster, and better—in an old San Francisco shipyard Astranis is modernizing an essential piece of modern communications infrastructure—and doing it in its own urban factory. Once upon a time, San Francisco was a manufacturing town. For decades, the Union Iron Works built ships—such as the U.S. Navy’s U.S.S. Oregon (1893) and U.S.S. Wisconsin (1898)—in its plant on Pier 70 in the neighborhood now known as Dogpatch. In recent years, that sprawling, long-abandoned complex has been rehabbed and filled with office space, housing, retail, and art studios. Among its tenants are startup accelerator Y Combinator and HR platform Gusto, neither of which has much in common with the Union Iron Works.

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ChatGPT’s AI lead may be more fragile than we thought Suddenly Google’s Gemini is looking a whole lot more formidable, especially since it’s remarkably easy to hop from one AI chatbot to another. Greetings, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

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Figma wants to make working with AI more like working with humans Figma AI chief David Kossnick on why the tech industry needs to move past prompting and create experiences that are ‘more visual, more exploratory.’ Over the past decade, Figma has transformed how people within companies collaborate to turn software ideas into polished products. Now the company is itself being transformed by AI. The technology is beginning to show its potential to take on much of the detail work that has required human attention in design, coding, and other domains. But the end game involves far more than typing chatbot-style prompts and waiting for the results.

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Sesame’s Rachel Taylor trains AI assistants to behave The former ad biz creative director recently left Microsoft to work on a startup’s talking AI assistants, with more to come. Rachel Taylor began her career as a creative director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. “I had control of the script,” she remembers. “I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes.”

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Meet Ed Zitron, AI’s original prophet of doom Zitron has built a small media empire on spleen-venting rants arguing that AI is not only a bubble but a fraud—one that’s headed for a spectacular crash. What if he’s right? Ed Zitron peels off his green button-up shirt to reveal the gray tee beneath. Now properly uniformed, two cans of Diet Coke queued up before him, he’s ready to record this week’s episode of his podcast, Better Offline, at audio behemoth iHeartMedia’s midtown Manhattan studio.

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