标签：#tech

Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website. Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture - an e-commerce tool for businesses that use […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 130, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, don't forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Victor Wembanyama and mahjong and Merlin Mann's pearls of […]

E-food delivery is a trillion-dollar market . And most of that trillion is not going to farmers, store owners, or the people who actually move food around. It's going to the infrastructure layer sitting between them — the platform tax, the per-order cut, the SaaS subscription that charges you to exist inside someone else's garden. The walled garden isn't accidental. It's the product. What if food delivery was a protocol, not a platform? Not an app. Not a marketplace. A protocol — like HTTP, like SMTP — that any node can speak, that no single company owns, and that costs near zero to run. That's what DIFP is. The Djowda Interconnected Food Protocol. An open wire format for connecting food ecosystem participants — farms, stores, restaurants, wholesalers, delivery nodes, end users — directly to each other, without a platform in the middle extracting rent at every step. The spec covers: Presence & discovery — participants announce themselves to their spatial cell, others find them by location Orders, asks, and donations — not just commerce, but demand signals and surplus distribution in the same protocol Spatial routing — the MinMax99 grid maps the entire planet into ~500m cells; every message knows where it's going Decentralized registry — nodes find each other through a federated lobby system, no central server required Version 0.4 of the spec dropped a few weeks ago. Today we're publishing the first working implementation. The gRPC preview — what we built DIFP-gRPC is a skull implementation of the full protocol stack over gRPC. Thin, end-to-end, every domain wired — nothing production-hardened yet, everything clearly marked for what it is. What's inside difp.proto — the entire DIFP v0.4 spec as a single protobuf file. Two services, 30+ message types, the full DifpEnvelope wrapper with a oneof payload that covers every domain: message DifpEnvelope { string id = 1 ; string type = 2 ; // "trade.ask" | "presence.announce" | "node.ping" | … string version = 3 ; MessageSen

The Enhanced Games — a singular sporting competition where a majority of the athletes were on performance enhancing drugs — may herald a new business model that the tech industry is ready to embrace.

Soon-to-be-laid-off Meta contractors say they’re being treated differently than Mark Zuckerberg’s full-time employees, who stand to receive more generous severance packages.

The Acer Nitro Blaze Link might run on Linux, but it's no Steam Deck. Acer says it's a "streaming-first handheld and companion device," like a PlayStation Portal for your PC. Announced ahead of Computex on Friday, it's launching in Q4 2026 with a 7-inch (1920 x 1200) display, Wi-Fi 6, just 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM, […]

This week, an AI training startup called Shift said it would clean New Yorkers' homes for free. It has plans to expand into other cities as well, including London, and looking around my flat, I get the appeal. But there's a catch. There's always a catch. In exchange for the cleaning, Shift wants footage of […]

I pondered the other day what's next for Microsoft's Surface PC lineup, and it looks like we're about to find out. Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri has just teased "something new is coming for developers," complete with a mysterious image of what looks like a curved display edge. Davuluri notes that whatever is coming […]

Pope Leo XIV may not be able to disarm AI, but he’s got the attention of the industry.

Border security czar Tom Homan keeps threatening to "flood" New York City with ICE agents. But a new investigation shows that ICE has been quietly ramping up arrests in the New York area already - and disproportionately targeting Latino neighborhoods. The City, a local nonprofit news organization, found 430 street arrests in the metropolitan area […]

If you’re looking for a fast iPhone or AirPods charger that’s easy to toss into your purse, backpack, or carry-on, Anker’s Zolo Magnetic Wireless Charger is a smart pick. It’s tiny and comes with a built-in USB-C cable, and you currently can buy two for $23.99 ($16 off) at Amazon and Anker (with code WS7DV2PK68EW), […]

For nearly 80 years, Ferrari occupied a unique cultural space where its cars were aspirational, even for people who resented those who could afford them. The price, the exclusivity, and the opacity of the buying process allowed Ferrari to sail above ordinary criticism. You might not be able to afford one, but you still wanted […]

Acer is aiming to take on the MacBook Neo more directly with a new Swift Air 14, a new 14-inch laptop that starts at $699. The laptop will use Intel's lower-cost Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" chips - either Core 5 or Core 7 models, both of which are six-core processors. It comes in green, […]

AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch - because, despite what its website says, there's always a catch - is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, tidy, and wash, and use that footage to train robots. Shift announced the unusual offer on social media on […]

The alert was raised on May 5. Four health-care workers in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had died from an unknown illness within four days. Rapid response teams were sent to investigate, and tests at a research center in Kinshasa revealed the culprit: the Bundibugyo virus, one of the viruses…

Most software projects focus on producing outputs. Most AI projects focus on producing predictions. But real organizations don't operate on outputs or predictions alone. They operate on decisions. A decision has consequences. A decision creates risk. A decision consumes resources. A decision changes the future state of a system. Over the last few months, I've been studying and building systems around a simple question: How can we make decisions more explainable, auditable, and repeatable? This led me toward concepts such as: event-driven architectures decision logging risk evaluation pipelines audit trails feedback loops operational intelligence systems Instead of asking: "Can we predict what will happen?" I'm becoming more interested in asking: "Can we explain why a decision was made?" and "Can we reproduce that decision six months later?" Current areas I'm exploring: Financial decision systems Risk infrastructure Event-driven architectures Blockchain compliance workflows Operational intelligence platforms One of the projects I'm currently building is an Event-Driven Decision Logging System (EDDL), designed to explore how organizations can record, audit, and replay critical decisions over time. Still learning. Still building. Still refining my understanding of how complex systems operate under uncertainty. Looking forward to sharing the journey here. systemsdesign #architecture #backend #fintech #softwareengineering #eventdriven #riskmanagement

Startup Battlefield applications are due tomorrow, so now's the time to put the finishing touches on your submission!

The Rockstar Game Workers Union has members across the developer's UK offices.

The Gemini exchange already paid a $5 million fine following the agency's lawsuit.

Microsoft is launching a revamped version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, offering a cleaner design that the company claims loads twice as fast. As part of this update, Copilot will provide more reliable and structured responses that are easier to scan, according to Microsoft. The redesign, which is rolling out across desktop and mobile devices, comes […]