Elon Musk admits millions of Tesla owners need upgrades for true 'Full Self-Driving' | TechCrunch The admission could open Tesla to legal challenges after it spent years promising customers they were just one software update away from owning fully autonomous cars.

The admission could open Tesla to legal challenges after it spent years promising customers they were just one software update away from owning fully autonomous cars.

Global energy markets are on the verge of a disaster Scenarios now range from bad to awful

Three factors are pushing the world towards the cliff edge. Oil cargoes available to buy are drying up. Refineries are slashing output of fuel. And demand remains artificially high, especially in Europe. www.economist.com/finance-and-...

i am incredibly proud of this paper and very very grateful to get to work with people as brilliant and thoughtful and kind as justine and su lin ❤️

it also involved a lot of psychic damage via staring at AI marketing, go read it if you want to understand what the hell LLMs are and what they do.

A treemap-style chart shows the predominant land use within satellite-detected damage clusters in Tehran: 32% military, 25% industrial, 21% civilian, 19% commercial, 2% government, and 1% unclassified. Below, a large grid of small treemap tiles represents individual damage clusters, showing that many damaged areas classified as military or government also include nearby civilian and commercial assets. A callout highlights one cluster around the headquarters of Tehran’s internal security forces, hit on March 1: nearly half of detected land-use types were civilian or commercial assets.

🇮🇷 The US and Israel have said they carry out “precision strikes” on Iranian regime assets.

But a Bloomberg News analysis reveals that targets can often be found in mostly residential or commercial areas, with many civilian buildings suffering extensive damage ⤵️
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

a chart showing india's trajectory to avoid the coal boom

This is really interesting. "leapfrogging" fossil fuels was often hypothetical but in India it really seems to be happening

Back to books - Sweden's schools cutting back on digital learning Swedish classrooms swap laptops for books, pens and paper, raising concerns from the tech sector.

The sooner the better.
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture ​mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its ‌artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad ...

Meta will begin keystroke logging US employees at work -- complete with mouse movements and periodic screenshots -- to train better AI agents.

This comes after Boz posted about a future in which AI will "primarily do the work" at meta.

It's a new era for tech labor. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Open or Shut, the Strait of Hormuz May Not Go Back to Normal

Whether it is open or closed, the Strait of Hormuz will never be the same again -- and that means the oil and gas industry need to make some big changes. by @rebeccafelliott.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/b...

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?

"I would put money down that a mandatory measles vaccine will do more for the survival of American children than anything OpenAI has accomplished with all of its billions of dollars to date."

www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...

A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/u...

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?

from the annals of getting high on your own supply (gift link) www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?

Hook this to my veins:

The Forces of Scarcity Hitting Asia May Soon Spread Across the World

Pain spreads fast…

The Forces of Scarcity Hitting Asia May Soon Spread Across the World www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/w...

How the United States Used Tariff Deals to Weaken Tech Regulation Around the World At least ten countries signed off on deals or frameworks that benefit American tech companies in 2025, according to an investigation led by Agência Pública.

The Trump administration used tariff threats to pressure countries into gutting their own tech regulations. From Indonesia to Brazil, Big Tech's wish list became US trade policy, according to an investigation led by Agência Pública as part of the series The Invisible Hand of Big Tech.

India has splurged billions on metro trains. But where are the commuters? Without better last-mile connectivity and affordable fares, metro use is unlikely to improve quickly, say experts.

Super interesting piece on why many of the new Indian metro systems have not got as many passengers as expected: bad modelling; fares too high; metros not integrated with other transport; and safety are some of the reasons given www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“These ‘chains of thought’ are essentially LLMs writing fanfic about themselves. Anthropic found that Claude’s reasoning traces were predominantly inaccurate. As Walden put it, ‘reasoning models will blatantly lie about their reasoning.’”
aphyr.com/data/posts/4...

pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/a...

The postmortem of the *last* big outage shows that it was because they DOS'd themselves through vibecoded slop.

Only US Votes Against Women’s Rights Document At UN Commission - Health Policy Watch President of the UN General Assembly Annalena Baerbock told the opening of CSW that the backlash against women's rights "feels as though we are forced to

For the first time in decades, consensus broke at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The United States cast the lone “no” vote on a document aimed at improving justice systems for women and girls worldwide. Misogyny is the official policy of the US under Trump.

Sources suggest Anthropic's holding back from a wider Mythos release until it can reliably serve it to customers; Anthropic has suffered outages in recent weeks (Financial Times)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired? The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction

Really important piece in the Guardian, on Harvard’s slow-walking and stone-walling of its historical complicity with the slave trade, featuring testimony from amazing scholars @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social and @carladmartin.bsky.social 🗃️

Traders placed over $1bn in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war. What is going on? Suspicious wagers on the US-Israel war in Iran are creating huge windfalls and raising concerns among lawmakers

Meanwhile:
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

"The fossil fuel industry continues to pocket massive profits and subsidies.

Meanwhile, everyday people bear the costs of climate catastrophe – from rising insurance premiums to lost livelihoods.

Those who shoulder the blame must foot the bill." @antonioguterres

#ActOnClimate

Opinion | Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense Right Now

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/o...

This is equivalent to when people notice a problem in these AI systems and then others check and claim it's fake. You just cannot know because the web is continually being scraped by these systems. It's "please, just one more if-statement, bro" and shifting sands. Any nonsense can be patched in.

In its push to become Big Tech’s data center hub, India is overlooking local resistance Google and Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar projects under construction in India are facing backlash from farmers, while the government offers huge tax relief to foreign companies setting up data cente...

While India offers a 20-year tax holiday to become a global AI hub, the push is triggering fierce resistance from farmers over opaque land acquisitions and threats to local water resources restofworld.org/2026/india-data-center-t...

MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged Conspiracy theories about the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting have ramped up in recent weeks as once steadfast Trump supporters turn on the president.

NEW:

Much of MAGA is now convinced that the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, PA was staged

www.wired.com/story/maga-i...

For all the talk about the rising gig economy it’s crazy how much self employment has plummeted!

A few comments on this chart:

1/ People unfamiliar with economic history don’t realize how enormously transformative the transportation & communication revolution of the 19th century was

2/ it’ll be a high bar for AI to be that transformative because…

(Chart by @finmoorhouse.bsky.social )

Here’s the story of one of them. Awful www.thestranger.com/forced-out/f...