Category: 404 Media

It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for almost all current employees that would have checked if they’re using AI enough. This follows extreme ...

It’s a small pleasure, but receiving an “I Voted” sticker after casting my ballot is one of my favorite parts of the whole voting process. I slap the sticker on my chest and spend the rest of the day feeling like I accomplished a little something. I participated in democracy ...

Welcome back to the Abstract—and Happy Halloween! Here are the studies this week that smashed into Earth, put aliens on ice, drank mummy wine, and hugged it out. First, a century-old theory that comets enriched Earth with the stuff of life is upended by new models of ancient impacts. Then: ...

In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.   On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization ...

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss customer service and Proton fallout. JASON: Since I wrote about ChatGPT turning me into tech support for people’s random problems, I have ...

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six ...

Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a ...

My ears perked up when I heard Apple’s new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it’s releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the ...

Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for “maintenance” on Thursday. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that ...

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast ...