Richard Lawler

Brief, Sweet, and Chill options launched in January for Alexa Plus, and now there’s also Sassy, an “unfiltered personality with razor-sharp wit, playful sarcasm, and occasional censored profanity.”

You can find more details on the tech billionaire-backed plan to build a new 400,000-resident city in Northern California in this episode of the Volts podcast. Host David Roberts is interviewing its leader, former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, and in this first segment, starts to dive into things like water, urban design, and wildfires.

The results from a new March 2026 NBC News poll of 1,000 registered voters showed the only two items on their list with lower negative net ratings than AI’s 26 percent positive / 46 percent negative split were Democrats and Iran.

The Financial Times reports Palmer Luckey’s ModRetro is in talks to raise funds at a $1 billion valuation, which sounds like a lot for a retro gaming company.

While end-to-end encryption can keep an account’s data private and hidden even from a service provider, the name of who paid for the account and other metadata is harder to hide.

The new GPT-5.3-Instant model rolling out today is supposed to be more accurate, understand the context of questions, and “reduces unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative phrasing that can interrupt the flow of
conversation.”

It’s a posthumous one because, as Buzzfeed reported in 2019, someone on 4chan of all places confirmed Epstein’s death more than half an hour before the first media reports. Now, Business Insider reports that within the files recently released, there are documents showing how the Justice Department and FBI investigated by subpoenaing 4chan, T-Mobile, and AT&T, trying to find the source.