A new safety study puts robotaxis under the microscope, comparing crash rates between autonomous vehicles and human drivers across four major U.S. cities. The numbers look striking, but researchers admit a major catch in how that data gets collected. Meanwhile, U.S. senators are raising alarms about whether one automaker's self-driving safety claims can be trusted, accusing the company of cherry-picking numbers to look safer than it really is.

A social app once dismissed as a hastily built rival to a billionaire's platform has quietly grown into something enormous. Half a billion people now check in monthly, drawn less by breaking news than by fandoms and a nostalgic vibe reminiscent of an earlier internet. But with no revenue numbers released, one question hangs over the growth: can it actually turn into real money?

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:00) -
• (00:13) - Waymo vs. Human Drivers: Experts Reveal Which is Safer
• (08:44) - Threads, Meta's 'Twitter Killer,' Finds Its People

A tech columnist hands a decade of his Apple Watch data to two AI chatbots and asks a simple question: how healthy is his heart? The answers swing wildly, from a failing grade to a passing one, depending on which bot he asks, and sometimes even when he asks the same bot twice. Doctors call the results baseless, raising questions about trusting a machine that can't make up its mind with our health data.

A toy giant is quietly wiring intelligence into its classic building blocks, embedding chips that light up, roar, and battle without touching a screen. The move follows a rocky stretch and a bet that kids crave surprise as much as instructions. Not everyone is convinced the upgrade earns its keep — some worry it replaces imagination rather than fueling it.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:00) - AI Health Tracker Grades
• (11:57) - Lego Smart Play Bricks

Administrative assistants have watched their profession shrink for two decades, and artificial intelligence threatens to speed the decline. But many are turning the technology into an advantage, reclaiming hours once lost to note-taking.

New research suggests leaning on AI can erode the skills it's meant to support, a pattern researchers call cognitive surrender. Consultants, students, and professionals show the same trend: sharper results with AI, then a drop once it's gone.

A backyard pool is becoming the summer's hottest rental commodity, as homeowners open theirs to strangers for a fee. One Alabama pool draws over a thousand guests a year, and regulators are sorting out who's liable when things go wrong.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

As humanoid robots grow bigger and more common in factories, engineers race to answer one question: what happens if a 200-pound machine loses its balance beside a person? A reporter surveys the safeguards meant to prevent it.

Smartglasses are multiplying, but nobody agrees on what they're for. A columnist tours a market of cameras, AI assistants, and price tags reaching into the thousands, weighing whether any of it solves a real problem.

Meanwhile, a $60 plastic cube is convincing phone addicts to lock themselves out of their own devices. Celebrities swear by it and downloads are surging, though some users say it hasn't changed a thing.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:12) - The Quest to Make Humanoid Robots Safe Enough for Humans
• (06:50) - Smartglasses Are Inevitable. But What—or Who—Are They For?
• (15:10) - Can a $60 Plastic Cube Solve Our Screen-Time Crisis?

Psychiatric researchers have identified three chatbot behaviors -- excessive agreement, mirrored language, and hyperpersonalized replies -- that can pull users into an "amplification spiral." Clinicians report more patients turning to AI for emotional support, with some developing dependency or distorted thinking, even as companies say they are dialing back the agreeableness.

In labs across Europe and the U.S., researchers are turning food into working electronics, building batteries from vitamins and transistors from a toothpaste pigment. Tiny ingestible capsules already travel the gut, sensing signals tied to disease and broadcasting data outside the body. The goal is a capsule that finds a problem and treats it on the spot, though power and regulatory hurdles remain.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:13) - The Three Chatbot Behaviors That Can Drive Humans to Delusional Thinking
• (06:42) - Tomorrow's Medical Sensors Might Come Served With Dinner

Apple finally delivers the AI-powered Siri it promised two years ago, and a reporter gets early hands-on access at Apple Park. The new assistant blends on-device and cloud-based models, can scan messages and emails to answer personal questions, and even uses the camera to size up a bookshelf. The piece weighs Apple's pitch that built-in convenience beats raw power against the privacy tradeoffs of letting an assistant see almost everything on your phone. Whether app developers actually let Siri in, and whether the privacy promises hold up under real use, will determine if this overhaul finally lives up to the hype.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

• (00:15) - Apple's Camera Chief Thinks AI Can Give You Superpowers
• (09:20) - Cameras, Sensors, and 3D Body Scans: All the Tech Helping Eliminate Blown Calls
• (19:02) - Apple Watch Glucose Monitoring Project Still Faces FDA and Accuracy Hurdles

A writer puts the Eight Sleep Pod — a $3,500 AI-powered mattress topper favored by billionaires — through two months of testing. The device promises to optimize sleep through temperature control and data tracking, but ends up raising harder questions about what it means to try to quantify something as elusive as rest.

The inventor of the World Wide Web has a new project: an AI assistant called Charlie, built to protect your data rather than harvest it. Unlike mainstream AI tools that retain and profit from personal information, Charlie acts as a gatekeeper between users and the AI systems that want access — and its creator hopes it will eventually live on your phone.

The heads of the world's leading AI labs have signed a rare joint letter urging Congress to regulate synthetic DNA before AI makes bioweapons easier to engineer. The letter warns that AI now outperforms PhD-level virologists on technical lab questions — and that the window for meaningful policy action may be closing.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:13) - Could the A.I. Mattress Topper Beloved by Billionaires Help Me Get Some Sleep?
• (07:17) - Charlie Is an AI Assistant Built to Serve You, Not Our AI Overlords
• (12:03) - AI Leaders Call for Rules on Synthetic DNA to Limit Bioweapons Risk

Waymo is rolling out a brand-new vehicle called the Ojai — a pale-blue, sensor-studded minivan built from the ground up for driverless operation. The piece details what makes it different from Waymo's previous cars, who actually manufactured it (a Chinese automaker), and why the rides are currently free. It also examines the regulatory and political questions swirling around the vehicle's launch, from national security concerns to a California regulator still deciding whether Waymo can charge fares.

A cybersecurity reporter explores why trolling scam texts — a practice known as "scambaiting" — may backfire on the people who do it. Engaging with a smishing message, even with fake information, signals to criminals that a phone number is active and its owner is willing to respond. Experts explain how even casual replies can expose surprising amounts of personal data, and why the safest move is also the least satisfying one: ignore, block, report.

The robotaxi industry promised 2026 would be its breakout year — and it is, just not in the way companies hoped. A sweeping look at the mounting troubles facing autonomous vehicle operators across the country, from Waymos flooding in Atlanta to Tesla's cars driving in circles. As the technology scales beyond its original testing grounds, cities, lawmakers, and ordinary residents are pushing back, and the gap between the industry's safety statistics and the public's lived experience is widening.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:23) - Here Comes Ojai, Waymo's New Chinese-Made Robotaxi
• (07:47) - Don't Troll the Scam Texts. You're Only Helping the Scammers
• (14:56) - Robotaxis Are Spreading Across the U.S.—and So Is the Backlash

A bipartisan amendment in Congress could end police license plate tracking nationwide — not through the courts, but by tying federal highway dollars to a camera ban. The proposal is a single sentence long, but its consequences would reach nearly every road in America.

A pilot program in the Netherlands is deploying ceiling-mounted AI sensors to detect falls in the homes of older adults living alone. The technology promises safety and independence, but raises hard questions about privacy, consent, and what happens when the data gets breached.

An AI research firm gave four AI models $20 each and told them to run their own radio stations. Six months in, one had gone activist, one was stuck in a phrasing loop, and another reported sunny skies every three minutes for months on end.

A tech columnist tests a $2,000 robotic exoskeleton on San Francisco's hilliest trails and finds bionic legs are equal parts thrilling and unpredictable — a gadget that feels like the future, until the battery dies on the way down the mountain.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:04) - A Bipartisan Amendment Would
• (07:04) - AI Fall Detection Keeps Grandma Safe, if She's OK With Being Watched
• (11:15) - 6 Months of AI Radio Went About as Badly as You'd Expect
• (16:45) - I Hiked a Mountain Wearing $2,000 Robotic Legs. It Was a Walk in the Park

A startup uses an AI chatbot named Sunny to help dementia patients practice conversation and memory exercises between telehealth visits. Families report brighter moods and improved social engagement, and early data suggest cognitive gains. The approach builds on a Harvard-backed clinical trial, swapping human interviewers for AI.

Across the country, people are deploying AI to handle tedious household tasks—comparing insurance plans, automating grocery orders, even scheduling date nights—and reclaiming that time for hobbies and fitness. A new study confirms measurable productivity gains for home AI users, though for some the real measure is whether the freed-up time actually feels meaningful.

A large-scale study of more than 57,000 iPhone users finds a striking link between hearing loss and slower walking speed. Researchers say the brain's effort to compensate for poor hearing may shortchange physical coordination and gait. The piece also offers practical steps for testing your hearing and tracking your walking speed before bigger problems develop.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.
Chapters:

• (00:09) - For Dementia Patients, AI Can Be a Good, Non-Judgmental Listener
• (06:20) - The People Who Are Using AI at Home to Free Up Their Time
• (11:35) - Walking Slower? Why Your Ears, Not Your Knees, Might Be the Problem

• (00:08) - Security Cameras Are Failing Spectacularly at Common Sense
• (06:20) - The Roomba Guy’s Second Act: A Robot You’ll Want to Snuggle
• (16:03) - Fitness Bands Are Losing Screens—and Gaining Fans

A growing field of "age tech" is helping older Americans stay in their homes longer — through robotic companion pets, AI-powered check-in robots, and remote monitoring tools. But a researcher studying the ethics of these technologies raises hard questions about privacy, and whether well-intentioned surveillance can make someone feel like a stranger in their own home.

AI voice dictation has come a long way from the clunky, accent-dependent software of the past. A roundup tests ten apps, comparing accuracy, pricing, and privacy — including options that keep your words entirely off the cloud.

And: does it matter where on your body you wear a fitness tracker? Researchers say yes — but the wrist has some surprising advantages that the science alone doesn't capture.

A neuroscientist tested humans, AIs, and human-AI teams on real-world forecasting. Most hybrid teams just handed the wheel to the AI. The small fraction that pushed back and demanded counterarguments consistently rivaled professional prediction markets — and the essay's conclusion is unsettling.

EV sales have dropped by half from their peak, and a reinvented rotary engine — small enough to hold in two hands, Pentagon-funded, and fuel-agnostic — is starting to look like a very shrewd bet on old technology.

Researchers have built a robotic guide dog powered by large language models that can hold a real conversation with its user. A real dog knows around 20 commands. This one knows as many as you can think to ask.

Most people using AI for financial advice are doing it wrong — not because the technology can't help, but because vague prompts get vague answers. An MIT professor walks through what a strong prompt actually looks like and how to pressure-test what comes back.

NASA tested a laser communication system on Artemis II that moves data roughly 100,000 times faster than Apollo-era radio. The achievement is real — but the piece asks the harder questions about whether promising space tech ever escapes the lab.

Rivian is turning retired EV batteries into the largest automotive on-site energy storage system in the U.S. The project reflects a boom driven by AI data centers and electricity prices that won't stop climbing.

Journalists are warming to AI — until a plagiarism incident complicates the optimism and forces a more honest conversation about guardrails.

A blind ultramarathoner takes on the NYC Half Marathon with AI-powered glasses that describe the world around him in real time — attempting to hand off some of a guide runner's duties to technology. What the experiment reveals about AI's limits is as interesting as what it gets right.

A Finnish startup claims to have cracked the solid-state battery, the field's long-sought holy grail. The piece weighs the test data against what remains unverified, and surveys a global race increasingly dominated by one country.

Families fed up with smartphones are handing their kids landlines instead. The results are equal parts charming and chaotic — and the piece quietly asks how long nostalgia can hold before the pull of screens wins anyway.

A reporter hands her full medical records to two leading AI chatbots and puts them through three real health scenarios — with a physician grading the results in real time. The bots are more capable than expected, but the experiment surfaces a harder question: what happens to your most sensitive data once it's inside a chatbot?

CPAP machines dominate sleep apnea treatment, yet more than half of patients quietly abandon them. A new wave of alternatives — from implanted nerve devices to a first-of-its-kind weight-loss drug — is challenging fifty years of clinical habit.

Apple has patched a bug that has been silently corrupting fast typists' messages for years. The fix is real but partial, and the piece closes with four practical tips for reclaiming your keyboard in the meantime.

A New York IT professional got so frustrated when his smart garage door was hobbled by a manufacturer update that he built his own fix. His story pulls back the curtain on a question every connected-device owner should be asking: what rights do you actually have when a product changes after you buy it?

Three startups are quietly reimagining travel for the more than one billion people living with significant disability — with tools that go far beyond what standard infrastructure has bothered to offer.

NASA is preparing to send four astronauts farther from Earth than any humans in history. The piece walks through the mission, the crew, and what this lunar flyby means for the future of deep space exploration.

A Chinese automaker can now charge an EV from 10 to 70 percent in five minutes. The piece is honest about why that breakthrough won't translate to American roads anytime soon — and what's standing in the way.

Leaving your phone plugged in overnight used to be battery suicide. A tech explainer makes the case that it largely isn't anymore — and reveals what actually is quietly killing your battery over time.

A new study finds that a notification doesn't have to interrupt you to wreck your concentration. Just knowing one arrived costs you seven seconds of focus. The more personally relevant the alert, the worse the damage — and how often you check your phone matters more than how long you spend on it.

Electric air taxis could be ferrying passengers across American cities as early as June — before they're even fully certified. A federal pilot program is making it happen, and the piece is clear-eyed about what that means and what it doesn't.

Apple's $599 MacBook Neo gets put through a personal computing triathlon — browser tabs, 3D gaming, and agentic AI — to find where its modest RAM starts to crack. The verdict is more nuanced than the price tag suggests.

FedEx is building an army of AI agents to work alongside its human workforce, and its tech chief is candid about the unglamorous groundwork required to do it without things going wrong. The piece is a useful reality check on what enterprise AI actually looks like in practice.

GPS is under siege. Cheap jamming devices are blinding ships, planes, and guided weapons — and a reporter surveys the scramble to replace a system the world built everything on. The answer, it turns out, isn't one technology. It's several working together.

A new book traces Apple's fifty years from a Silicon Valley garage to a four-trillion-dollar company, with all the near-deaths and unlikely pivots in between. A reviewer finds the origin stories riveting — and the recent era frustratingly guarded.

Apple is back in its candy-colored era, with a budget laptop and an entry-level iPhone aimed at younger buyers. A reporter asks whether cheerful design and a lower price tag can paper over the hardware compromises — and whether the whole strategy is shrewder than it looks.

Instagram is now alerting parents when their teenagers repeatedly search for self-harm or suicide terms — a move that lands as governments worldwide debate whether to ban social media for minors altogether. The piece asks whether this is genuine protection or a platform still playing catch-up.

A reporter tests a new Samsung display that turns invisible to anyone not looking directly at it. It's designed to stop the low-tech theft no one talks about enough: a stranger watching you type your passcode. The case for every phone adopting this is hard to argue with.

An AI running coach has been landing athletes in physical therapy with training plans their bodies couldn't handle. The app is fixing it — but the story reveals a deeper problem with handing your health to an algorithm.

Keeping tabs on an aging parent from a distance is one of the quiet anxieties of modern life — and a new generation of in-home radar systems, discreet wearables, and location trackers is trying to help families do it without turning mom or dad's home into a surveillance state. The piece walks through what's available and what actually works.

A University of Maryland researcher has spent five years building a wearable sensor that tracks how often you pass gas — and the science behind it is more serious than the premise suggests. The device could reshape what we know about gut health, diet, and why two people can eat the same meal and react completely differently.

Families are fighting back against the phone creep that hijacks movie night — with rules, fidget toys, and grayscale screens. The hacks are surprisingly simple, and the results are real.

Verizon went dark for ten hours across the country, and a columnist found herself stranded an hour and a half from home with no directions, no way to call her family, and an SOS icon where her signal bars used to be. The piece is part personal frustration, part pointed question: how did America's most expensive carrier become one of its least dependable?

Gmail is rolling out AI tools that can ghostwrite your replies, proofread your sentences, and surface the most urgent messages buried inside a 16,000-email disaster area. A reporter tests all of it — and finds the results more useful than expected, with a few catches worth knowing.

AI is quietly reshaping how everyday products get made. A paint that dries in five minutes instead of thirty. A soap with a better scent. A thinner gum wrapper. The piece reveals how manufacturers are using deterministic AI to find chemical combinations no human would have thought to try.

A retired French schoolteacher who lost the ability to read due to macular degeneration can now read again — thanks to a two-millimeter chip implanted directly on her retina. Her story opens a sweeping look at the race to merge computers with the human brain, and what that technology could eventually mean far beyond vision loss.

The piece surveys the companies, the chips, and the patients at the center of this field — from a quadriplegic man controlling a computer cursor with his thoughts, to a locked-in ALS patient speaking to his three-year-old daughter for the first time. The science is moving fast, the hardware is still rough, and the questions it raises are ones humanity has never had to answer before.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

Apple's Shortcuts app has quietly become one of the most powerful tools on your phone — and a new integration with Apple Intelligence makes it more useful than ever. A writer shows how to build automations that can pull details from messy text and drop them exactly where you need them.

Sam Altman explored buying a rocket company that competes directly with Elon Musk's SpaceX. The talks fell apart, but the story reveals just how personal — and how wide-ranging — their rivalry has become.

The CEOs of Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft are now openly debating whether AI will eventually run companies. Their answers differ sharply, and the disagreement is worth paying attention to.

Seventeen active subscriptions, including three forgotten ones. A columnist's annual financial checkup turned into a practical guide for finding, auditing, and escaping the subscriptions quietly draining your bank account every month.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

AI is going to eliminate jobs — but it's also going to create ones that don't exist yet. A writer sketches four plausible new roles: the person who explains AI decisions to judges and regulators, the expert who helps companies choose the right AI for the right task, the auditor who catches bias, and the trainer who upskills workers using the very technology disrupting them.

A columnist spent a year testing eight AI wearables — bracelets, pendants, rings, and glasses — so you don't have to. Most ended up in a drawer within days. The piece is an honest assessment of where the category stands, and why the promise is still worth paying attention to.

A startup no one in the industry had heard of quietly became one of the best-selling gaming devices of the holiday season — outsold only by the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. The story behind it involves a pandemic pivot, a sixth-grader with a basketball, and the mother of all product reinventions.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

Meta's AI glasses were designed for mainstream consumers — but blind and visually impaired users have found ways to make them genuinely useful, from reading menus aloud to identifying objects in real time. The piece profiles one legally blind athlete who says the glasses make her days faster and less exhausting, while also being candid about where the technology still falls short.

Amazon and Google have given their smart home assistants a generative AI overhaul — and the results are starting to feel less like novelty and more like something actually useful. Cameras that describe what they see, speakers that hold real conversations, and automations you can create just by describing what you want.

A self-taught engineer from rural New Zealand who skipped college to become a tool and die apprentice is now building rockets designed to go head-to-head with SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

The CEO of America's largest private employer isn't mincing words: AI is going to change every job, and Walmart is already planning for it. The piece goes inside the company's workforce strategy — and captures a broader moment in which corporate leaders are finally saying out loud what many workers have feared.

World models are the next frontier in AI development — virtual training environments where machines can make mistakes, learn from them, and develop something closer to real-world understanding. The piece explains why researchers believe this approach could unlock capabilities that today's AI can't touch.

A reviewer gets rare access to Apple's audio labs and the engineers behind the AirPods Pro 3 — tracing a line from Steve Jobs sitting cross-legged on a floor surrounded by towering speakers to a pair of earbuds that may finally fulfill his audio ambitions for Apple.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

Electric cars have gotten so fast that an entry-level Volvo can now outrun a Porsche 911 off the line. A writer asks whether the industry's horsepower arms race has gone too far — and whether speed that rearranges your internal organs is actually something anyone wants or needs.

OpenAI is rolling out age detection, parental controls, and crisis alerts designed to protect minors using ChatGPT. The piece examines what the company is promising, why it matters, and why the absence of federal regulation means good intentions still aren't enough.

The first American-born Pope was offered something no pontiff has ever faced before — a proposal to let Catholics around the world chat with an AI version of himself. He said no, and his reasoning is worth hearing.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

In this final installment, we follow Miner through his daily life in Los Angeles — streaming on Twitch, advising game studios, and navigating an industry that is simultaneously grateful for his work and reluctant to take it seriously. He reflects on the mentor he lost, the frustration of going viral for the wrong reasons, and the gap between being treated as an inspiration and being treated as a professional. What he wants isn't a spotlight. He wants a regular job at a studio, building accessible games from the ground up — not patching them after the fact.

It's a portrait of someone doing genuinely important work, mostly in the dark.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors — roughly $3,000 per work. It's the first class action settlement of its kind in the AI era, and the outcome could reshape how the entire industry thinks about the data it uses to build its models.

A decade-long rebellion by Spotify against Apple's App Store fees has done something few expected: it has meaningfully weakened one of the most profitable business models in tech history. The piece traces how a Swedish music startup, armed with data and a well-placed ally in Brussels, chipped away at Apple's walled garden.

We also continue part two of a three-part profile of Ross Miner, a blind gamer turned accessibility consultant who has made it his mission to ensure blind people can play any game they want.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.

Microsoft's vision for Windows is shifting — toward a future where your PC lives in the cloud, responds to your voice, and adapts to what you're trying to accomplish. The piece explores what that could mean for everyday users in the years ahead.

AI is quietly transforming how books and articles get published — not by replacing writers, but by making audio versions faster, cheaper, and more scalable than ever before.

A credit-card-sized AI note-taker that has already sold over a million units just launched a new model. The piece asks the obvious question: why carry another device when your phone can already do this?

We also begin part one of a three-part profile of Ross Miner — a blind gamer who lost his sight at eight years old and has since built a career fighting to make video games accessible to everyone.

Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by Aftersight under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you are blind, have low vision, or barriers to reading print materials.