Author: Melissa

The legal machinery that powers America’s biggest court settlements has an almost imperceptible quality. The majority of people receive a notice in the mail informing them that they might be eligible for compensation from a class action lawsuit; occasionally, this notice ends up in the spam folder. They quickly scan it, believe it to be a scam, and discard it. They are unaware that a highly developed operation is on the other end, prepared to handle their claim and write them a check. Most of the time, Kroll Settlement Administration is that operation. Kroll has over fifty years of experience…

When heard in the proper context, a certain moment tends to land differently. Early in January, Dean Beeler, the tech chief and co-founder of Juice Labs, shared on Facebook that a few months prior, he had spent about $300 on 256 gigabytes of RAM, which is the most that his motherboard can handle. “Who knew,” he said, “that would end up being ~$3,000 of RAM just a few months later.” It’s not a rounding error. In less than a year, that is a ten-fold price increase in a product category that most people consider to be a commodity.In a nutshell,…

A picture started making the rounds among Taiwanese stock traders early on January 7. It featured a Taiwanese semiconductor company called Phison’s NAND flash controller chip inside Nvidia’s recently released Vera Rubin server, which had been on stage at CES in Las Vegas the previous evening. Phison shares had reached their daily limit by the time trading resumed. More people had seen the picture than any press release. Furthermore, the answer to the question it posed—is flash actually becoming a part of Nvidia’s AI computing stack?—turned out to be more intriguing and significant than the stock move indicated. CategoryDetailsPlatformNVIDIA Vera…

With more than a billion registered users, Ryan Roslansky’s platform gives him a firsthand look at how the labor market is changing in real time. He didn’t call a panel of futurists or commission a survey about what the market might look like in 2030 when he and Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, sat down to determine the human skills they felt AI truly couldn’t replace. They spoke with talent leaders, behavioral economists, organizational psychologists, and neuroscientists. The outcome is a framework known as the 5Cs, and the list is more intriguing for what it contains than…

This past weekend, an Apple Watch Ultra 2 was discounted by $300. Not a display unit, not a refurbished model, and not the band-scratched model from the previous year. The price of a brand-new Apple Watch Ultra 2 was reduced from $799 to $499. It was the steepest discount they had ever seen on any new Apple Watch, according to Rolling Stone’s shopping team, which has covered enough deal events to develop sincere skepticism about “steepest ever” claims. If you didn’t see it, you might not see it again for the remainder of 2026. CategoryDetailsEventAmazon Big Spring Sale 2026DatesMarch 25–31,…

One of the most famous athletes on the planet, Steph Curry, appears to be teasing a new wearable from Google in a video that is making the rounds. It doesn’t appear to be a watch. It appears more like a simple band, the kind that doesn’t ping, light up, or attempt to display an email notification. Only a band. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the company that killed Fitbit smartwatches is developing a screenless fitness tracker, and the timing is telling, even though Google hasn’t confirmed exactly what it is.2023 saw the release of the Fitbit Charge 6.…

The room where Kathleen Kennedy made her most intriguing remarks regarding artificial intelligence has something noteworthy about it. It was an AI summit hosted by Runway, the New York-based generative AI startup, which means the audience was not assembled to hear skepticism. The purpose of businesses like Runway is to market AI’s capabilities to the creative industries. However, Kennedy and Runway co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela were on stage when Kennedy said something that went against the event’s overall theme.She stated, “A machine is not tuned to create curiosity.” “Taste is so essential to the creation process. It’s instructive; it’s life experiences.…

Every Nvidia H100 has a flaw that isn’t mentioned in the marketing materials. The chip itself is remarkable; it is an engineering marvel that performs calculations at speeds that would have seemed unattainable ten years ago. However, memory—more especially, the High Bandwidth Memory stacked around it—accounts for about half of its manufacturing costs, and that memory is barely keeping up. Because the processor is so quick, a significant amount of its time is spent waiting for data that the memory system is unable to deliver quickly enough. This is known as the memory wall, and it is arguably the most…

There is sodium everywhere. in the sea. beneath the earth. Every kitchen table in the world has a salt shaker. Depending on how you count, it is between 400 and 1,000 times more abundant than lithium, a metal that has become one of the most contentious geopolitical resources on Earth over the past 20 years. It’s difficult to ignore the irony. The goal of the energy transition was to release the world from its reliance on politically sensitive, limited resources. Rather, it exchanged oil fields for cobalt deposits in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and lithium mines in Chile.…

Dunkelflaute, which translates to “dark doldrums” in German, sounds poetic until you realize what it actually means for a power grid. It describes those long stretches of time when the sun doesn’t shine for days at a time and the wind stops blowing. Hawaii experienced cloud cover for six weeks in a row in 2006. Wind droughts have lasted far longer than a week in Europe. The same unsettling question comes up each time a grid manager sees a Dunkelflaute roll in while renewable generation flatlines: where is the backup power coming from?Fossil fuels were the solution for decades, and…