Do You Need a Fancy Bread Knife?

I’m a big fan of using the right tool for the job in the kitchen. No surprise there, yet I frequently get that FOMO-y feeling that something new or different might be better than what I own. Several months ago, I looked at a set of carbon steel knives made in Oregon by Steelport. They…

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Kids sure love video game movies

“A Minecraft Movie” isn’t just a hit — after three weekends in theaters, the film is estimated to have grossed $344 million domestically and $720 million worldwide. That makes it the biggest movie of an admittedly underwhelming year at the box office (so far), and the second biggest video game movie of all time. Coming…

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OpenAI’s o3 AI model scores lower on a benchmark than the company initially implied

A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the…

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The Made in America iPhone: How much would it cost?

President Donald Trump’s tariff policy has thrown the global economy into crisis, with the stated goal of bringing manufacturing back to the United States. In addition to global tariffs of 10 percent, the president has imposed a seemingly ever-increasing reciprocal tariff on imported Chinese goods (the White House’s latest figure is 245 percent). Considering how…

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Palantir exec defends company’s immigration surveillance work

One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work. The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s…

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