Rhiannon Williams

Runna Pushed Some Runners Into Injuries. The Virtual-Coach App Is Now Easing Up. More people than ever are signing up for marathons—and using the app to train for them. Its makers are adding ways to tone down plans some users found to be too aggressive.

I stopped using Runna ages ago because of its poorly paced, overly-aggressive training plans and know plenty of others who found its AI suggestions unhelpful—interesting to see just how widespread the issue actually is: www.wsj.com/tech/persona...

whoops sorry!

hi Kevin, you're supposed to chase the singular blue dots that appear on the sphere—they're the 'food' that makes your snake grow. You've got to avoid touching your own body, that's what causes the game to end. Hope that helps!

The AI relationship revolution is already here Chatbots are rapidly changing how we connect to each other—and ourselves. We’re never going back.

You can check out the original piece here too: www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/13/1... 🧵3/3

The first part features an interview with Amir Mizroch, a father I spoke to who used Google NotebookLM to bring a long-dormant project to life (www.wbur.org/endlessthrea...), while I speak to host Amory Sivertson about what I discovered in the second part (www.wbur.org/endlessthrea...) 🧵 2/3

Earlier this year, I wrote an article for our print magazine about how AI is changing our relationships with others and ourselves. Now, the brilliant team at WBUR have released a two-part Endless Thread podcast based on my reporting! 🧵1/3

this is actually drawn from my real hair, but I’m flattered if it could be mistaken for a wig!

tip @techmeme.com

Earlier this summer, I visited Synthesia's London offices to be turned into a hyperrealistic AI avatar. It was unnerving and eye-opening in equal measure.
Check out my story, featuring weirdly smooth hands, addictive AI, and Ed Sheeran bad-mouthing (sorry Ed) www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/04/1...

Thanks, those are good suggestions! I’ll have to investigate

Thank you Carol, that’s the highest compliment!

I wrote about my favourite podcast (and Instagram account)
Every Outfit for MIT Technology Review magazine! Fuckettes in STEM, rise up! You can read the full story here: www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/25/1...

pointerpointer.com Please hold still while we locate your pointer...

@inafried.bsky.social fun fun fun...

surfaced by @rhiannonwilliams.bsky.social at MIT-TechReview...

"This fun website refreshes every few seconds with a new picture of someone pointing at your mouse pointer."
pointerpointer.com

haha thanks Rob, glad you enjoyed it!

Hi Tim, I am indeed! Thanks for your kind words

fao @techmeme.com

Google’s generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem The AI model is still slapping garbled, nonsensical captions on videos more than a month after launch, even when users explicitly ask for no captions at all.

Google’s generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem.
The AI model is still slapping garbled, nonsensical captions on its videos more than a month after launch, even when users explicitly ask for no captions at all: www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/15/1...

thank you Caroline, that's very kind!

Not Jeremy Hunt using ChatGPT to write his new book 🥴

I'm so excited that my daily newsletter The Download won Best Technology Newsletter 2025 at this year's Publisher Newsletter Awards! it's truly an honour to be recognised among such a crowded field of amazing writers

Nitzer Ebb - Join in the Chant YouTube video by A.M.V.

Incredibly sad news about Nitzer Ebb's Douglas McCarthy. A huge influence on so many of my favourite musicians, and one of Essex's finest: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGHM...

I was lucky enough to see Brian, Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplain perform on the Pet Sounds 50th anniversary tour in 2016 and I'll never forget it. He was the rarest talent.

The Beach Boys - God only knows (1966) fully restored video YouTube video by Mike Adams

Brian Wilson was a visionary who changed popular music forever. He will be dearly missed www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpd4...

Anthropic’s new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time The company claims its ability to tackle complex, multistep problems paves the way for much more proficient AI agents.

Anthropic's new hybrid AI model, Claude Opus 4, can play Pokémon Red for more than 24 hours. The company claims its ability to tackle these kinds of complex, multistep problems over a prolonged period of time paves the way for much more proficient AI agents: www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/22/1...

Anthropic’s new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time The company claims its ability to tackle complex, multistep problems paves the way for much more proficient AI agents.

The company claims its ability to tackle complex, multistep problems paves the way for much more proficient AI agents.

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket Pocket had a nearly two-decade-long run.

I’ve been worried about this ever since I noticed the discover tab get decidedly worse, but this is a genuine shame. Is no one else obsessively saving stuff to read later? :’(

www.theverge.com/news/672924/...

Pocket shutting down is a CRIME

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do OpenAI’s GPT-4 is much better at getting people to accept its point of view during an argument than humans are—but there’s a catch.

Millions of people argue online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models (LLMs) might do a better job—suggesting that AI could become a powerful persuasive tool, for better or worse: www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/19/1...

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do OpenAI’s GPT-4 is much better at getting people to accept its point of view during an argument than humans are—but there’s a catch.

Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a powerful tool for persuading people, for better or worse.

Thank you for reading!