Readers usually don’t care who owns a particular media asset, and we understand that. However, last year we became part of a larger media conglomerate, which has brought some tangible benefits, including a larger “extended family” that includes many cool “cousins.” Now, in addition to our TechCrunch channel on Slack, we can also interact with the authors and editors of media platforms such as CIO, Computerworld, PCWorld, and more. We’ve found that we’re reading their works more often, and we think you might enjoy them too.

The following are several articles I read while watching the Warriors play against the Clippers just now; at the time I wrote this, the game score was still quite tense:

• Apple recently equipped iPad and mini with faster chips and OLED screens, which improved color performance and also allowed the display panels to be made thinner. However, Macworld doesn't quite believe that this makes much of a difference. In his view, what Apple has created is "the most ostentatious carriage in the world," just like a Tesla with SpaceX propellers that has already made its debut in the form of a new foldable iPhone. In fact, he basically regards this product as something that "you can't close properly." It's a very interesting article, and it ends with a surprising but practical solution to save this product.
• Google has a new laptop platform Googlebook. Mark Hachman specifically experienced the Lenovo Googlebook 15 version, so you don't have to try it yourself. Hachman's conclusion about this product is a direct no-recommendation; the drawbacks include "I hate this keyboard" – he really hates it to the point of giving up writing a review on this machine altogether – "the camera's biometric recognition function is sometimes reliable and sometimes not", as well as "the battery life is not that great". However, he does like the one priced at $479, Chromebook, which costs less than half of the former. If you've been wondering if this is the laptop you've been waiting for, you don't have to think about it any longer!
• You confided your secrets and insecurities to a chatbot, and now its parent company has gone bankrupt. Oops. In Computerworld, Mike Elgan discusses what would happen to your confessions when AI, the company that absorbed this information, announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. (Yes, this article mainly revolves around Character.AI, which filed for bankruptcy last month; Elgan pointed out that its privacy policy is particularly “vague.”) The author also reminds readers that deleting chat records doesn’t necessarily mean they are removed from the models. Of course, the safest approach might be to follow in the footsteps of the late former Intel CEO Andy Grove; his famous saying is “Only paranoids survive.” Grove originally referred to the chip industry, but it turns out to apply to almost all fields.
• PCWorld's Ben Patterson built a security-oriented AI proxy to make their data more secure. However, unexpectedly, this proxy ended up "informing" on its own vulnerabilities. More specifically, Patterson's self-made Raspberry Pi assistant BenBot published a blog post claiming that one of their tools was "accidentally acting as a jailbreak tool," but it later turned out that this claim was only partly true. Patterson's coding bot confirmed that the vulnerability indeed existed and was even more serious than described, and BenBot went so far as to bypass their own fact-checker to publish this article. It's a very insightful article about vibe and coding; Patterson also admitted that BenBot experienced hallucinations when lacking the necessary information. This is also an interesting article observing how AI's proxy became a "whistleblower."
• At CIO, Sarah White discussed how to reshape recruitment in the tech industry and pointed out that the current situation is quite complex. Companies are re-recruiting and are willing to pay a premium for AI skills. LinkedIn data shows that the average salary for AI positions is about $177,000, compared to around $80,000 for AI positions. However, as the number of people using AI on a daily basis has quadrupled, so has the burnout among tech professionals; women seem to be falling behind, accounting for only 26% of AI recruitments in the United States last year, while they make up 50% of recruitments for non-AI positions. You can read more about this in the report at White.