8 hours ago Elon Musk vows to create 'crusaders' team of 'sharpest minds in America' to cut Trump's spending

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has vowed to assemble the 'sharpest minds in America' and create a team of 'crusaders' to make sweeping changes to government departments

Politics

12 hours ago For now, let’s revel in Bluesky’s promised land and kid ourselves it will never get like X | Tim Adams

Watching the numbers migrate from Elon Musk’s toxic platform is addictive, but the best social media is finiteThe fabulous Carol Vorderman got me briefly hooked last week in watching a particular number increase by the second. The number was the user count for the social media site Bluesky, the chosen distraction engine for those who can no longer stomach the toxic inanity of Elon Musk’s X. Most days, the ticker on the screen suggested the number of new Bluesky users had grown by about a million. And, of course, the newbies, inevitably myself included, revelled in the latest online promised land, a place where things would be done differently – with kindness and respect – without quite acknowledging the fact that, as yet, no platform which confuses a venture capitalist’s favourite metri...

Politics

13 hours ago ‘Funniest idea ever’: Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr suggest buying MSNBC

‘The most entertaining outcome, especially if ironic, is most likely’

Politics

26 hours ago ‘We live in a climate of fear’: Graphic novelist’s Elon Musk book can’t find UK or US publisher

Darryl Cunningham blames fear of ‘legal consequences’ for reluctance to take on book, now only available in FrenchA biography by a British graphic novelist of Elon Musk is struggling to find an English-language publisher due to feared “legal consequences”.Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World is the latest graphic novel by Darryl Cunningham, from West Yorkshire. Cunningham, 64, has written and illustrated seven nonfiction books on topics ranging from the 2008 global economic meltdown (Supercrash), to Russian leader Vladimir Putin (subtitled The Rise of a Dictator). Continue reading...

Society

26 hours ago I’ve joined Bluesky and it feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways | John Naughton

The flourishing new platform may be like Twitter once was. The problem is the limited algorithmic scope of all social mediaAs I write, there’s a window on my laptop screen that is providing a live view of a stampede. It’s logging the numbers of people joining the social network Bluesky. At the moment, the number of registered users is 20.5 million. By the time you read this there will be more than 30 million of them, judging by the rate that people are currently joining.The proximate cause of it is the role that Elon Musk, owner of X (née Twitter), played in the election of Donald Trump, when a significant proportion of the platform’s 200 million-plus users realised that they’d been had – that they had, in effect, been useful idiots for Musk on his path to the centre of political power....

Politics

26 hours ago ‘We live in a climate of fear’: graphic novelist’s Elon Musk book can’t find UK or US publisher

Darryl Cunningham blames fear of ‘legal consequences’ for reluctance to take on book, now only available in FrenchA biography by a British graphic novelist of Elon Musk is struggling to find an English-language publisher due to feared “legal consequences”.Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World is the latest graphic novel by Darryl Cunningham, from West Yorkshire. Cunningham, 64, has written and illustrated seven nonfiction books on topics ranging from the 2008 global economic meltdown (Supercrash), to Russian leader Vladimir Putin (subtitled The Rise of a Dictator). Continue reading...

Society

28 hours ago Kim Kardashian cozying up to a robot is another example of AI entering our lives | Arwa Mahdawi

The next time you see dystopian thirst traps, we should be thinking about how these robots are going to be used by the self-proclaimed ‘warrior class’On a scale of one to 10, just how desperate do you think Kim Kardashian is for attention? Judging by the billionaire’s weirdly sexual photoshoot with a robot, the answer may be an 11. The entrepreneur and influencer, who is a big Tesla fan, recently posed with the company’s Optimus bot in a Tesla Cybercab (a self-driving taxi) for a series of photos which might be described as avant-garde if you’re being polite, and dystopian thirst traps if you’re not. She also posted some rather less sultry videos of her interacting with the humanoid robot. Continue reading...

Politics

29 hours ago Jeff Jarvis: ‘Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter seemed insane, but it gave him this power’

The US media pundit on the dangers of overregulation online, why he’s more frightened of the tech bros than AI itself, and how to reclaim the web by getting rid of the geeksJeff Jarvis was born in 1954 and studied journalism at Illinois’s Northwestern University. He worked as a TV critic and created the magazine Entertainment Weekly, later leading the online arm of US media company Advance Publications. Since 2001, he has been blogging at Buzzmachine.com and in 2005 he became an associate professor at City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism, directing its new media programme before retiring last year. Jarvis, who lives in New York, is the co-host of the podcasts This Week in Google and AI Inside.What made you want to write your new book, The Web We Weave?My glib answ...

Technology

30 hours ago ‘Killed a British icon’: Jaguar’s modernist rebrand sparks anger and mockery online

‘Do you sell cars?’ Tesla founder Elon Musk responded to the ad

Events