Borrowed reading: stories from our extended colleagues

Readers don’t typically care who owns what media property, we realize, but last year, we became part of a broader portfolio, a move that has come with some decided benefits, including what amounts to a bigger extended family with cool cousins. Now, in addition to our TechCrunch channels in Slack, we can talk with the writers and editors of CIO, Computerworld, and PCWorld, among other outlets. We also find ourselves reading more of their work and figured you might like it, too.

Here’s a handful of pieces I was just enjoying while watching the Warriors-Clippers game, which, as I type, is a little too close for comfort:

• Apple recently put a faster chip into the iPad mini and gave it an OLED screen, improving its color reproduction and also allowing it to slim down the display panel, and still, Macworld’s David Price isn’t entirely convinced it matters. In his view, Apple has built the “world’s fanciest horse and cart,” just as a Tesla Roadster with SpaceX thrusters has appeared on the scene in the form of the new foldable iPhone Duo. In short, he sees the mini as a Duo you can’t close. It’s a fun read, one that ends with a surprisingly practical plan to save this product.
• Google has a new laptop platform, the Googlebook, and Mark Hachman of PCWorld spent time with the Lenovo Googlebook 15 specifically, so you don’t have to. Hachman’s verdict on this one is a hard pass, with cons that include “I hate the keyboard,” which he means so literally that he gave up writing the review on it, “webcam biometrics work sporadically,” and, for good measure, “battery life isn’t great.” (He does like the $479 Chromebook at less than half the price.) If you’ve been wondering whether this is the laptop you’ve been waiting for, wonder no longer!
• You shared your secrets and insecurities with a chatbot, and now its parent company has gone belly up. Bloop. In Computerworld, Mike Elgan looks at what happens to your confessions when the AI company that absorbed them announces Chapter 11. (Yes, this is largely centered on Character.AI, which filed for bankruptcy last month, and whose privacy policy, in particular, turns out to be “spectacularly vague,” notes Elgan.) He also reminds readers why deleting your chats may not delete them from the model. (Of course, the safest advice may be to channel the late Andy Grove, Intel’s longtime chief, who famously said only the paranoid survive. Grove was talking about the chip industry, but some would argue that’s solid advice generally.)
• PCWorld’s Ben Patterson built a security-minded AI agent to keep his data safe, then, surprise, the agent snitched on its own loophole. More specifically, BenBot, Patterson’s homemade Raspberry Pi assistant, wrote a blog post announcing that one of its tools was “accidentally acting as a jailbreak,” though it turned out the claim was only partly true. Patterson’s coding bots confirmed the hole was real and worse than advertised, and that BenBot had also slipped past its own fact-checker to publish the post. It’s an instructive read about vibe coding; Patterson readily admits BenBot hallucinated in the absence of information it needed. It’s also an interesting look at how AI agents turn into tattletales.
• Over at CIO, Sarah White looks at how AI is reshaping tech hiring, noting it’s a complicated picture right now. Companies are hiring again and paying a premium for AI skills, with the average AI job listing offering around $177,000 compared to $80,000 for non-AI roles, according to LinkedIn. But burnout among tech workers has doubled as daily AI use has quadrupled, and women are seemingly being left behind; they accounted for just 26% of AI hires in the U.S. last year, versus 50% of hires in non-AI roles. You can check out White’s story here.