Saturday, July 11, 2026
ArchiveBeijing's factories are automating faster than any labor policy anticipated, and the Times went to find the people already on the other side of it. The quotes are the story here.
Tao's Java applets from 1999 had been dead for years — browsers stopped supporting them. He pointed a coding agent at the corpse and had them all running again by evening.
Vermeer got the fame; De Hooch got the doorways. Spend a few minutes inside one 1663 interior and you start noticing everything the painter deliberately declined to show.
The stat went viral because it's so specific: 9.7 years, not 'about a decade.' The BBC's numbers desk walks it back to the study and finds what that figure cannot mean.
Doctorow's argument is a translation exercise: every time a platform says flexibility, substitute the word risk and read the sentence again. It holds up unnervingly well.