Powderhorn

Today's development is that I'm committing theft from content creators on YouTube.

OK. So, you think I, as an unemployed writer, am responsible for "content creators"? What the fuck does that mean, anyway? I've shot porn, written lots of columns and editorials, and taken photos.

This is back when we didn't call it "content." So what's your point? Up-and-comers need more money than corporate America and me?

I'm going to need a more compelling argument than "you're stealing if you use an adblocker." I simply don't have the energy to point out that if losing work as an editor makes me a thief, you should direct your ire to the media companies that no longer care to hire us.

If I were making six figures and owned my home, as I should at 46, sure ... fair play. I can afford YouTube Premium. Neither is true, so this feels mostly like a case of "shut up, nationally award-winning pleb who has literally run newspapers; you don't understand the media industry."

And in a manner of speaking, they're right. I understood it only while we had the audacity to commit journalism.

I was raised on the scripture of the 1990s: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen. It was the Golden Rule. The dating equivalent of Slip, Slop, Slap. Whispered at sleepovers. Bolded in the margins of Dolly magazine. Never pick up on the first ring. Never say you’re free on a Saturday. Be the prize, not the contestant.

In my 20s, this felt like power. (It was mostly fear in better lighting but I didn’t know that yet.) I mastered breezy indifference. I timed my texts to the minute: double the time he took, plus 10 for mystery. I thought I was teaching men my value. I thought I was training them to love me.

But I am 51 now. Looking back on that first year of dating after divorce at 50 – the apps, the profiles, the quiet violence of being matched and discarded by an algorithm – I realise something uncomfortable: I wasn’t training them. I was hiding.

There is a specific humiliation in dating at midlife that we rarely discuss: the dissonance between who we are in the world and who we become the moment a man with a nice jawline delivers the modern cruelty of the read receipt – the blue tick that confirms he saw your message, and chose silence.

In my real life, I am capable. I have interviewed politicians for the BBC. I have managed budgets. I have navigated the death of parents and the collapse of a marriage. I am a woman of substance. Yet give me a “maybe” from a man I met on an app, and I regress three decades. I stare at my phone. I debate the semiotics of an emoji with a girlfriend who is also a high-functioning professional. We analyse the silence like Kremlinologists.

Meeting people sucks in midlife.

To me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion’s 1987 book, Miami, which begins like this: “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.”

I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact. And then I compared all of it unfavorably with the flailing and feeble way in which I would have pursued the same goals. I marked up my copy of the book in a somewhat desperate fashion and then became depressed.

That type of copying is pretty normal, and they teach it in school. It’s how you learn (and how you become depressed). But in the age of generative AI, there are many new kinds of copying. For instance, Wired reported last week on a tool offered by Grammarly, which briefly offered users the opportunity to put their writing through something called “Expert Review.” This produced AI-generated advice purportedly from the perspective of a bunch of famous authors, a bunch of less-famous working journalists (including myself, per The Verge’s reporting), and a bunch of academics (including some who had recently died).

China’s BYD will aim to take on Porsche and BMW in the European luxury car market with a premium electric vehicle that can be charged in just five minutes.

BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV maker last year, first demonstrated its “flash charging” technology, which enables an EV to be charged almost as quickly as filling a car with petrol, a year ago.

The Z9GT model, part of the premium Denza brand, can be 70 percent charged in five minutes and be almost full in 12 minutes, even in temperatures as low as -30° C.

The vehicle has a range of up to 800 km and will be launched in Europe next month and in the UK in the summer. Pricing is yet to be revealed.

BYD’s international chief Stella Li said the Z9GT marked an important milestone as it began the global rollout of flash charging.

The Chinese carmaker has aggressively expanded in the UK and Europe with affordable EVs and plug-in hybrids as sales in the home market have come under pressure from a government crackdown on pricing competition.

In January 2025, a measles outbreak erupted on the western edge of Texas and soon spilled over to New Mexico and other states. The overall outbreak would become the largest the country has seen since 2000, when measles was declared eliminated from the US. In Texas, it was the largest outbreak recorded since 1992. And in New Mexico, it was the first measles outbreak the state had even seen since 1996.

But the trajectory of the two states’ measles cases diverged. Texas declared the outbreak within its borders over on August 18, with an end tally of 762 cases. In New Mexico, officials declared its outbreak, which began in February, over on September 26, with a total of just 99 cases.

One of the key differences, according to a new study, was that in New Mexico, the rapid spread of the highly infectious virus spurred a massive surge in measles vaccinations among children and adults. Overall, shots of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine increased 55 percent statewide from January to September compared to the same period in 2024.

The study, appearing in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, further broke down the increase in shots. Over the whole year, the number of MMR doses given to children (defined as less than age 18) increased 18 percent compared to 2024—from 27,988 in 2024 to 32,890 in 2025. Doses in adults (aged 18 and up) skyrocketed by a whopping 291 percent— from 5,748 in 2024 to 22,500 in 2025.

Huh. Who'd have thought "competent health authorities produce better results"?

This is only 18 minutes and change, but a good luck at how fucked we are.

In the playground of the rich, nobody wanted this war. For decades, Dubai built itself up as a sanctuary of unadulterated consumerism visited by tourists the world over.

But now, the city in the United Arab Emirates faces an existential threat, as the war between the US and Israel and Iran has shaken the foundations of the “Dubai dream” that so many foreigners had bought into.

The UAE has borne the brunt of more than two-thirds of Iran’s strikes; the state targeted in part, say analysts, for its deep military and intelligence partnerships with western powers, and Dubai’s reputation as a favoured centre for global finance and western holidays.

“The shine has definitely been taken off,” said John Trudinger, a British resident of Dubai for 16 years, who is a headteacher at an Emirati school in Dubai. He employs more than 100 teachers from the UK and said most have been so “deeply traumatised and really struggling to cope” with the sudden arrival of war in Dubai that they have left and won’t come back.

They are among the tens of thousands of residents and tourists that have fled Dubai since the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran almost two weeks ago. The city’s large population of migrant workers largely don’t have that privilege.

Software giant Atlassian has announced it is laying off about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 1,600 positions, and replacing its chief technology officer as it restructures to invest further in artificial intelligence.

Shares of the company rose more than 4% in extended trading on the Nasdaq.

The company’s co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, told employees the move was “the right decision for Atlassian” in a note circulated late Wednesday, US time.

“But that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” he said. “Far from it. I know this has a huge impact on each of you, and it weighs heavily on me and Atlassian today.”

About 640 affected employees are in North America, 480 in Australia and 250 in India, with the remainder spread across Japan, the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a spokesperson said.

In the three decades between 1993 and 2024, measles in the US was relatively rare—a few hundred cases each year, at most. But suddenly, the disease has become so entrenched in American life that it sometimes fails to make headlines when a new outbreak erupts.

As of March 2026, measles has been continuously circulating around the US for more than a year, starting with an outbreak in Texas that lasted from January to August 2025. Before that outbreak was declared over, an outbreak on the Utah and Arizona border began in August and is ongoing. An outbreak in South Carolina began in September, drastically increased in January 2026, and continues.

Thirty states have had measles cases this year; 47 have seen cases since the start of 2025. Health officials across the US have confirmed 1,300 infections already this year as of March 6, putting the country on track to surpass 2025’s numbers, which were the highest in 35 years.

We study outbreak preparedness and response at Brown University’s Pandemic Center, and we view the return of measles in the US as a grim signal of what’s to come.

Low levels of vaccination across the country mean measles outbreaks will continue to occur, needlessly hospitalizing and killing the unvaccinated. But beyond these harms, the disease’s resurgence serves as a serious warning about the country’s capacity to manage infectious disease threats of all kinds.

Last month, the New York Attorney General (NYAG) brought a lawsuit against Valve accusing the company of promoting “illegal gambling” through its randomized in-game loot boxes. On Wednesday, Valve issued its first public comment on the case, comparing its digital loot boxes to randomized real-world purchases like blind-bagged toys or packs of trading cards.

“Generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive,” Valve wrote. “On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu.”

Though that may seem like an apt comparison on the surface, Valve’s loot boxes differ from these real-world examples in large part because of Valve’s control of the Steam Marketplace, which serves as the only legitimate way to exchange or resell those items. While owners of real-world items are free to trade or sell them however they want, Valve has cracked down on many third-party sites that enable the exchange of in-game items—especially when those items are used as glorified chips for gambling games.

Lawyers told Ars last month that Valve’s control of that marketplace—and its 15 percent commission on item resale—helps establish the inherent economic value of the randomized items it sells, both to players and to Valve itself. That could be a crucial legal element in a courtroom in turning a mere “random purchase” into legally defined “gambling.”

The tech billionaire Hemant Taneja admits that AI is a bubble. In fact, he welcomes it: “Bubbles are good,” Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst, a venture-capital firm, told me in an email. If AI comes crashing down, it will lead to “some spectacular failures,” he said—companies will go under and people will lose their jobs—but that’s a price worth paying for “enduring companies that change the world forever.”

His view is widespread in Silicon Valley. Some, such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, reject the notion that their companies are overvalued. But many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in tech are embracing the idea of an AI bubble. Jeff Bezos has argued that AI might be a “good” kind of bubble. Sam Altman has made similar comments, predicting that AI will be a “huge net win for the economy” even if “a phenomenal amount of money” is lost along the way.

Indeed, a phenomenal amount of money is at stake: OpenAI, which is still far from profitable, is currently worth more than Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Disney combined. This year, Big Tech plans to spend some $650 billion on the AI build-out—a sum that far exceeds the GDP of most countries. Investors are banking that AI will spur a productivity boom and deliver unimaginable corporate profits, but that future could be far off. If the spending dries up first, the bubble could pop—perhaps dragging the rest of the economy down with it. Nonetheless, Silicon Valley thinks that the present mania will eventually pay back its returns through scientific discovery and economic growth. “Stop trying to make bubbles go away,” as the entrepreneur James Thomason recently wrote. “The benefits of innovation outweigh the costs of volatility.” In other words: Be grateful for the bubble.

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.

The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without being directly liable for infringement if that display turns out to be unlawful. The server test is the straightforward application of the same principle in the online context. A user that links to a picture, video, or article isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world, nor are they in a good position to know whether that content violates copyright. In fact, the user doesn’t even control what’s located on the other end of the link—the person that controls the server can change what’s on it at any time, such as swapping in different images, re-editing a video or rewriting an article.

But a news publisher, Emmerich Newspapers, wants the Fifth Circuit to reject the server test, arguing that the entity that embeds links to the content is responsible for “displaying” it and, therefore, can be directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. If they are right, the common act of embedding is a legally fraught activity and a trap for the unwary.

Suing your readers always ends well.