At least six lawmakers discreetly removed their AI bills from the table this spring somewhere in the hallways of the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge. No press conference, no floor drama. Proposals that had taken months to draft simply vanished from the docket after a slow retreat that included phone calls here and meetings with the governor’s office there. People in state capitals from Sacramento to Albany are paying close attention to this kind of political retreat, which seldom makes the front page. The figures provide a clear enough narrative. More than 20 bills, ranging from chatbots that target…
Author: Melissa Hogan
Melissa Hogan
Melissa Hogan is the Senior Editor at Temporaer, and quite possibly the person on the internet who has thought the most about what happens to your data when a hard disk drive fails. She is a self-described storage hardware obsessive — the kind of person who reads NVMe specification documents for fun, tracks NAND flash fab yield rates with genuine emotional investment, and has strong, considered opinions about why QLC cells are misunderstood by mainstream tech media. She came to technology writing the way many of the best specialists do: not through a newsroom, but through an obsession that simply refused to stay quiet.Melissa, a stay-at-home mother, is an example of what the technology industry frequently undervalues: the serious, self-made expert who exists entirely outside of the institutional pipeline. She developed her technological expertise solely through self-directed learning, practical hardware experimentation, and an extraordinary appetite for technical documentation. She doesn't have a degree in journalism or experience in corporate technology, but what she brings to her editorial work at Temporaer is something more uncommon: a sincere, unfulfilled passion for how computers store, retrieve, and safeguard data, along with the patience to fully comprehend it and the ability to articulate it.
Read More
Outside of Fort Worth, there is a section of land where, until recently, only the occasional cattle fence or grain elevator broke up the flat Texas horizon. That is evolving. The Chisholm Grid Battery Energy Storage System was more than just another infrastructure project when work on it began in August 2020. Located in the middle of ranch country, it was the largest standalone battery storage system under construction outside of California at the time, making a subtle statement. The project, which was created by Able Grid Energy Solutions, MAP Energy, and Astral Electricity, measured 100 MW and, when finished,…
There is an almost uncomfortable moment in the study. In front of a split screen, participants converse with what they thought were two people at the same time—one human, one machine—and are then asked to determine which was which. The majority of them made a mistake. Not every now and then. People pointed at GPT-4.5 and said, “That one’s human,” 73% of the time when it was on the other side of the conversation. Cameron Jones and Benjamin Bergen, two cognitive scientists at UC San Diego, conducted the study, which was released as a preprint in March. It’s important to…
Watching Oracle’s layoff announcement circulate on LinkedIn on a Tuesday morning, with staff members posting thoughtful, formal farewells while the company’s executives discuss AI demand “exceeding supply” during earnings calls, is somewhat ironic. senior engineers. experts in cloud infrastructure. program managers with institutional expertise spanning decades. According to a senior manager’s LinkedIn post, the email said, “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role.” detached and clinical. The language used in the tech sector has practically become standard. CategoryDetailsCompany NameOracle CorporationFounded1977HeadquartersAustin, Texas, USAChairmanLarry EllisonEllison’s Net Worth$189 billion (Forbes estimate)Total Employees (as…
In science, there are times when the data returns and everyone in the room falls silent, not in amazement but in bewilderment. When scientists analyzed data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, they reportedly discovered readings from a small, obscure planet orbiting a dead star about 3,000 light-years away. Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory actually said, “What the heck is this?” It’s important because it’s not exactly the measured language you’d expect from a published scientist. CategoryDetailsTelescopeJames Webb Space Telescope (JWST)Operated ByNASA, ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency)Launch DateDecember 25, 2021Object DiscoveredPSR J2322-2650bObject TypeExoplanet…
In practically every classroom, there is a time when the students teach the lesson while the professor is paying attention. Recently, Dan Kennedy, who teaches a graduate ethics seminar at Northeastern University in Boston, encountered that exact situation, and it took him by surprise. Kennedy had created an artificial intelligence course. He gave his five students access to Claude, the artificial intelligence tool that his university licenses through an enterprise agreement with Anthropic, and assigned them a practical assignment: take a transcript of a journalism interview, run it through the AI, and assess the results. CategoryDetailsTopicAI Skepticism Among Journalism StudentsInstitutionNortheastern…
Conversations that the public isn’t exactly supposed to hear are currently taking place in government research labs, university hallways, and late-night Zoom calls. Not because anyone is concealing something evil, but rather because some discoveries come before language. prior to the existence of an appropriate framework for their explanation. Before scientists are confident enough to publicly state what they believe they have discovered. It feels like that moment is happening once more. concurrently, in entirely unrelated fields. CategoryDetailsPrimary DiscoveryiGluSnFR4 Glutamate Sensor — engineered protein for observing incoming brain signalsDeveloped ByAllen Institute & HHMI’s Janelia Research CampusLead ResearcherKaspar Podgorski, Ph.D. —…
Holding a piece of glass the size of a sugar cube and knowing that it holds more data than the average home computer will ever see in its lifetime is a subtly peculiar experience. Scientists have discovered a way to directly carve information into the atomic structure of silica glass using laser light pulses so fast they are measured in femtoseconds. This is not due to clever compression or some sort of sleight of hand. For comparison, a femtosecond is equivalent to one second to roughly 31 million years. That is the type of number that momentarily stops you. CategoryDetailsTechnology…
People in the AI community still discuss a certain, somewhat subdued moment from 2016. A Go board. A grandmaster from Korea. A device. Then, on move 37, something happened that caused one of the greatest human players alive, Lee Sedol, to push back his chair and leave the room for fifteen minutes. He wasn’t upset. He was not vanquished. He was perplexed. Every strategic instinct developed over centuries of human play had been violated by AlphaGo’s placement of a stone. It wasn’t incorrect. Simply put, it came from somewhere else. There was a location in the possibility space where no…
At one point in early 2023, there was a certain optimism in tech circles: the idea that you could make six figures just by being able to communicate with a machine. No boot camp for coding. No degree in computer science. Just the right words entered into a chat box in the right order. In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous. It seemed at the time to be a real fissure in the wall that had always kept technical jobs apart from the rest. Prompt Engineer was the name of the profession. And it was real for about eighteen months. The reaction…