Bill Gates is deeply worried about AI, and he’s no longer staying quiet
Bill Gates is deeply worried about AI, and he’s no longer staying quiet

Bill Gates has been reflecting a lot on AI lately, and the process has triggered a stark awakening. Once a staunch AI optimist, the Microsoft cofounder is now deeply pessimistic about what AI means for our collective future. Having been conspicuously quiet on AI issues recently, Gates is back with a nearly 6,000-word essay seeking […]

Microsoft employees built their own pay spreadsheet, and it shows two companies
Microsoft employees built their own pay spreadsheet, and it shows two companies

Around 600 Microsoft employees have entered their pay into a crowdsourced spreadsheet circulating internally, and the resulting picture is of a company that now compensates two quite different populations. Base salaries run from $111,000 at level 59 to…

Take a look at Microsoft’s new 25th anniversary Halo accessories
Take a look at Microsoft’s new 25th anniversary Halo accessories

The new Designed for Xbox 25th Anniversary collection features a handful of limited edition gadgets available for pre-order today. Paying homage to the Halo special edition of the original Xbox, almost everything in the collection is translucent “OG Green,” matching the Xbox Series X25 limited edition console it announced in June at E3. That includes […]

How Google, Microsoft and OpenAI came to shape what US children learn
How Google, Microsoft and OpenAI came to shape what US children learn

On a humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, Microsoft representatives waited as about 200 teachers filed into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan. The subject was AI chatbots. The team presented Copilot and had the teachers practise using it to wri…

An okay laptop with 16GB of RAM is better than a nice laptop with 8GB, and this $520 HP OmniBook proves it
An okay laptop with 16GB of RAM is better than a nice laptop with 8GB, and this $520 HP OmniBook proves it

Laptop prices are out of whack. $500 used to get you a tolerable laptop, and $900 got you a really good one. They often had similar CPU, RAM, and storage options because that stuff was comparatively cheap; the difference was often in build quality and screen rather than power. But RAMageddon has thrown everything off. […]

Meta pays Microsoft hundreds of millions a year to rent AI models
Meta pays Microsoft hundreds of millions a year to rent AI models

Meta is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year buying access to AI models through Microsoft’s cloud. The company runs trillions of tokens a week through Azure, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be id…

China is removing Microsoft’s Windows 10 from state agencies
China is removing Microsoft’s Windows 10 from state agencies

China is removing a government version of Microsoft’s Windows 10 from state agencies, earlier than planned. The Ministry of State Security recently told some state-linked entities to uninstall the customised software, Bloomberg reported, citing people …

Cursor Origin is on by default for paid users, and its data terms are unpublished
Cursor Origin is on by default for paid users, and its data terms are unpublished

Cursor started rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, on Monday morning. About three and a half hours later GitHub fell over. The order matters, because most of the internet reversed it. Matt Palmer works at Cursor. He quote-tweeted his own…

GitHub disputes Wiz’s claim that Copilot Autofix wrote a Snowflake flaw
GitHub disputes Wiz’s claim that Copilot Autofix wrote a Snowflake flaw

A security company said on Monday that an AI wrote a critical flaw into Snowflake’s code, and that another AI found it and broke in. The second half holds up. The first half came apart in about eight hours. What is left is still worth your attention. I…

A RAMageddon guide to back-to-school laptop shopping
A RAMageddon guide to back-to-school laptop shopping

If you’re a student looking for an affordable laptop, I have bad news and I have good news. The bad news is that computer prices are out of whack due to the ongoing RAM and storage crunch, making some a little pricier than they used to be and others wildly more expensive. The good news? […]