The internet is an archive of so many different versions of ourselves. If you’re Gen Z or a millennial, there’s a good chance you preserved almost every stage of your life online: old fandoms, old friends, old opinions. And with that comes an inevitable cringe.
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What to do when you regret a social media post, explained
So what do you do when you see something embarrassing you posted years ago? You may be tempted to go scorched earth, but journalist and Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel says that’s not necessarily the best course of action. “I think that you need to think about deleting things you’ve posted as curation,” she told Vox.
“The Internet Archive keeps snapshots of all kinds of things on the internet, so you need to be aware that when you delete something, it might be deleted for you,” Samuel said. “That doesn’t mean it’s deleted from the internet. I think when you delete things, it’s always a good idea to back them up before you delete them.”
What other options do you have when you look back on an old post and cringe? And how should we be thinking about our life’s digital archive? We answer these questions on Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Samuel, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Was there a moment when online regret and shame first grabbed your attention?
Absolutely. In June 2011, Vancouver lost the Stanley Cup to Boston, and people went nuts. There was this riot in the streets, and what made that riot notable is that for the first time, it was captured in real time on social media. It was the heyday of Twitter. People were tweeting photos. People were making videos and posting them on YouTube. There was initially a lot of excitement about the idea that like, “We’re going to be able to catch the people who are flipping cars and breaking into store windows.”
I saw this unfolding literally that evening, online. And I thought, “This is not a good plan.” History teaches us that when we start narcing on our fellow citizens and stepping into that quasi-surveillance role, it tends to go very, very badly. I wrote a piece that evening for the Harvard Business Review about why this phenomenon of citizen surveillance through social media was so problematic. And I got a lot of pushback.
It’s interesting that so many people’s gut reactions were like, “Okay, but what if I snitched?”
I think there’s something really delightful about outrage as a subjective experience. We live in a really complicated world. There’s a lot of gray. There’s a lot of nuance. It’s really hard to feel like a morally upright person if you shop on Amazon and put gas in your car. And these moments where we’re shaming people online give us a little moment of moral superiority.
What’s the argument for not deleting old posts?
Imagine a scenario where you’ve posted something on Instagram or TikTok. You realize afterwards that you were kind of an idiot, and you wish you hadn’t said what you said. Maybe you even had a back-and-forth in the comment thread where someone pointed out why what you said was insensitive and you showed some capacity for learning. If you delete it without archiving it [and] it comes back to haunt you, you don’t have that evidence of you learning. It’s much better to take the screenshots, archive the thread, and back up all that context so that if it does still come back to haunt you or even if you just want to reflect on it, [you can].
I don’t know if you’ve ever gone back and read old journals, but I have. And every time I think, “What old me thought is none of my business.”
It’s funny you said that. I’ve literally had that exact experience of rereading old journals. We just all need to realize that by definition, anything that is a snapshot is a two-dimensional image of something that we experienced. Whether you’re looking at your own history of something that you did, or if you’re looking at something someone else said, I just wish we could have a little more tenderness and empathy and focus on what people learn and how we grow rather than judging everyone by their most awful moment.
Do you have any advice for best practices when it comes to having a social media presence you won’t be ashamed of in 10 or 20 years?
Trying to have a social media presence where you never regret anything is a recipe for having a completely meaningless and stupid social media presence. Conversely, I think it’s important to resist the lure of the hot take. What you need to do is try and chart that middle ground where you don’t court controversy for its own sake. When you’re deliberately pushing people’s buttons, that’s when you end up saying things that don’t reflect what you truly believe. But if your goal is to have a social media presence where you never regret anything, then truly don’t be online. I actually think it’s a really, really good option now. If I were not a journalist for whom part of the job is showing up online, I do not know if I would use social media anymore.
It sounds like if you’re going to share anything online, that feeling of regret may be inevitable. How do you survive it?
The first thing to do is take yourself out of it, depersonalize it, and think, “If this were happening to a friend, what would I think here?” Don’t hesitate to admit if you think you were wrong, but don’t rush to respond either. You need to close the computer, put the phone down, walk away. Talk to somebody with good judgment and ask what they think. The internet moves quickly, but unless you are a celebrity and you’re getting a hundred thousand responses an hour, there’s actually no reason that three crappy comments can’t wait to be addressed the next day.
And then you absolutely can say you’re wrong. I actually think one of the most powerful things that we can do as humans, as professionals, and as internet users: Show that you can be wrong and you can even be wrong on the internet, and it doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t destroy your value as a human.
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When the American Academy of Pediatrics first set limits for children’s screen time in 2016, the phrase had an entirely different meaning — and connotation — than it does a decade later.
“It was created around research on TV viewing — and taking that literature and translating it into today’s world is so much more complex,” says Libby Milkovich, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Children’s Mercy hospital in Kansas City.
For the first time in 10 years, the AAP has released updated guidance on children’s and teen’s “screen time” — though what exactly that consists of is up to interpretation.
The new technical report and policy statement aim to offer families, health care professionals, educators, policymakers and industry leaders a research-backed perspective on “digital ecosystems, children, and adolescents.”
“People really want the concrete, easy advice, and trying to communicate the nuance is really difficult; how do you communicate ‘what is digital media?’” Milkovich, a co-author of the AAP report and policy statement, says.
The guilt around screen time snowballed in the last few years, with many parents fretting over what exactly constitutes screen time — like if podcasts count, for example — with other researchers lumping interactive assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa, into the screen time category.
One of the biggest shifts from 2016 to 2026: no set screen time limit. In contrast, 10 years ago, the AAP suggested limiting children to two hours of screen time a day.
“The recommendations historically made to parents have become almost impossible,” Milkovich says.
In an age when screens are ubiquitous, from classrooms to restaurants to airplanes, it seems unreasonable for families to bear all responsibility, Milkovich says, adding that the purpose of the new policy is in part to “take away some pressure of putting it on parents and taking away the shame, when it’s really all these systems and digital media devices themselves.”
Instead, Milkovich and the AAP recommend multiple avenues of attack for right-sizing the amount of exposure kids have to digital media:
- Reviewing programming to see if it’s high-quality through Common Sense Media. The AAP recommends PBS Kids and Sesame Workshop as high-quality programming — although those programs are also at risk of getting cut.
- Offering kids activities to replace screen time, like after-school sports, rather than simply cutting out screen time with no replacement.
- Sharing a family tablet, versus giving a child their own.
- Finding alternatives outside media consumption to help with emotional regulation.
- Looking into underlying causes of media usage (like boredom or social disconnection) and brainstorming alternative pathways.
- Screening for medical conditions like ADHD and depression if a child’s usage is problematic, including affecting sleep, academic performance and relationships.
The important strategy, Milkovich says, is to try and meet families where they are at. Cutting out screen time could be easier for some families than others: for example, if a child lives in an unsafe neighborhood, they cannot simply go to the park to play outside instead of watching TV.
“Some families are very passionate about, and value having, healthy digital media habits, but others have different resources and digital media balance may not be at the top of their priorities,” Milkovich says. “We can look into these really straightforward guidelines versus these big, broad conversations on the content and purpose [of media] if the families are not there.”
The AAP also recommends a “family media plan” in which family members, as a whole, tackle boundaries for media consumption. One small step that Milkovich recommends families start with is to have a device-free meal time. Sharing meals is predictive of healthy children, she says, adding that going device-free could help with social interactions and connection.
“I think my big takeaway when I talk about it with families is, it’s not ‘how to regulate screen time,’ but it’s how to use them as a family,” Milkovich says. “Parents: Make sure you’re modeling good behaviors, because that’s how kids are learning.”
The report also points toward the “5 C’s,” which was initially recommended by the AAP’s Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health a few years prior.
Source: Southern Med Pediatrics and healthychildren.org
The AAP plans to release its next report on screen time quicker than another decade from now, though the research has to go through years of vetting. In its next iteration, Milkovich hopes to further explore the relationship between schools and screen time, as most now implement a 1:1 device program and rely more on digital textbooks than physical.
“I think we have to navigate our role a bit as pediatricians in supporting families in school and having healthy kids have healthy digital habits,” Milkovich says. “And it’s recognizing in our role we can’t be prescriptive in telling families what to do, because we don’t know their culture, community or needs.”
The association is also working on multiple reports tackling artificial intelligence: one about AI use in pediatric medicine and the other with a broader focus, similar to the screen time report.
BMW faced a wave of criticism in 2022 when heated seats were offered as part of its ConnectedDrive functions-on-demand program in markets like the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Korea. Owners could pay the equivalent of around $18 per month to access the feature – more than the $12 per…
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Unlike traditional automakers, who are much more deliberate and forthcoming about making changes to their product lineups, Tesla is well known for making quick adjustments and additions to its vehicles. It could involve adding a new version of an existing model, discontinuing trim levels, or adjusting prices — including sometimes slashing prices to quickly move inventory. Its latest move is the addition of a new, more affordable trim level of its best-selling Model Y electric crossover.
This latest Model Y variant is positioned at the more affordable end of the price range, slotting in above the Model Y RWD Standard. The main difference is the addition of a second motor, giving it AWD capability and a major jump in performance over the RWD model.
Tesla’s new Standard AWD model becomes the fifth member of the current Model Y lineup and could be an enticing option for those who want the power and traction of a dual-motor Y without the expense of the crossover’s Premium versions. It will be up to buyers to decide on the value proposition of the new $41,990 (plus $1,390 destination fee) Model Y Standard AWD when compared to the rest of the Model Y lineup and EV competitors from other brands.
More power, but less range
Given how much the Tesla Model Y dominates the sales charts, it’s a fairly big deal whenever a new version of it becomes available. Tesla launched the heavily refreshed “Juniper” Model Y in early 2025 and has been expanding the lineup in the months since. Prices now range from just under $40,000 to the high $50,000s, depending on range, features, and performance.
Right now, the cheapest 2026 Tesla Model Y one can buy is the $39,990 (plus $1,390 destination) Model Y Standard RWD, which has a single electric motor driving the rear wheels. This has an EPA-estimated range of 321 miles. For a $2,000 premium, the Standard AWD adds a second, front-mounted electric motor. This gives it AWD traction and significantly better performance.
According to Tesla, the Model Y Standard AWD will hit 60 mph in 4.6 seconds, more than two seconds quicker than the 6.8-second time the company claims for the RWD version. The improved performance comes at the cost of range, though: The new AWD model uses the same battery as the base Model Y, giving it an EPA-estimated range of 294 miles — the lowest of all current Model Ys.
The sweet spot of the Model Y lineup?
Previously, buyers who wanted a dual-motor Model Y had to step all the way up to the $48,990 (plus $1,390 destination) Premium AWD version, so the new trim represents a significant cost savings in that light. The Premium model does have features the Standard AWD doesn’t, though. These include a larger battery with more range and additional amenities like a rear passenger display and ventilated front seats. Performance is identical, though, with no difference in 0-60 times between the two according to Tesla’s estimates.
Whether one considers this new $42,000 Model Y “cheap” is subjective, but at the very least, the $2,000 upcharge feels like a reasonable price to pay for the added benefit of AWD and a 0-60 time that’s over two seconds quicker than the base model. And the range penalty is relatively minor, all things considered. Of course, if you want maximum acceleration from a new Model Y, you’ll likely want to step up to the $57,490 Model Y Performance, which has a blistering 0-60 time of 3.3 seconds.
The Tesla Model Y faces more competition than ever, with many rivals gunning for its throne. However, the addition of this new version may entice EV buyers who want dual-motor traction and performance without breaking the bank.
- Workers feel energized, not exhausted, by new tech and AI tools
- Companies need to respond even quicker to prevent shadow AI use
- Employees also want to feel heard at work
Three in four (72%) UK workers say they’ve experienced organizational change over the past year, with the most common change being new technology (42%), outpacing restructuring (35%) and leadership changes (33%), but a new study from Qualtrics says this might be a good thing.
The report notes technology change might actually be energizing employees, not exhausting them, with tech change broadly resulting in higher engagement rather than burnout.
Much of the change is driven by AI, which rose employee engagement nine points – half of UK employees now frequently use AI tools at work.
New tech at work is actually keeping workers active
Artificial intelligence is now proving vital across faster task completion (73%), improving work quality (62%) and boosting productivity (52%), but Qualtrics says companies might not be evolving quickly enough, remarking a rise in shadow AI where only around one-quarter (26%) of the 2,000+ UK employees surveyed say they exclusively use company-provided AI tools.
“Humans are saying yes to AI but we need to offer employees more support with using it in the right way,” Employee Experience Strategy Director Simon Daly wrote.
Qualtrics also found that employees who feel listened to are more likely to stay in their companies. Their wellbeing nearly doubles from 44% to 86% when organizations listen more frequently, yet despite the desire for more human interaction and top-down listening, few workers reported this actually happened.
“The companies thriving through change are the ones checking in regularly with their people, understanding what support they need, and then following through with action,” Daly added.
Looking ahead, while it’s clear that providing updated and more suitable tools really helps workers to feel energized, employers must also take the time to reaffirm that human connection and ensure the tools they’re providing are adequate.
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Remote-first AI coding startup Kilo doesn’t think software developers should have to pledge their undying allegiance to any one development environment — and certainly not any one model or harness.
This week, the startup — backed by GitLab co-founder Sid Sijbrandij — unveiled Kilo CLI 1.0, a complete rebuild of its command-line tool that offers support for more than 500 different underlying AI models from proprietary leaders and open source rivals like Alibaba’s Qwen.
It comes just weeks after Kilo launched a Slackbot allowing developers to ship code directly from Salesforce’s popular messaging service (Slack, which VentureBeat also uses) powered by the Chinese AI startup MiniMax.
The release marks a strategic pivot away from the IDE-centric “sidebar” model popularized by industry giants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, or dedicated apps like the new OpenAI Codex, and even terminal-based rivals like Codex CLI and Claude Code, aiming instead to embed AI capabilities into every fragment of the professional software workflow.
By launching a model-agnostic CLI on the heels of its Slack bot, Kilo is making a calculated bet: the future of AI development isn’t about a single interface, but about tools that travel with the engineer between IDEs, terminals, remote servers, and team chat threads.
In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Kilo CEO and co-founder Scott Breitenother explained the necessity of this fluidity: “This experience just feels a little bit too fragmented right now… as an engineer, sometimes I’m going to use the CLI, sometimes I’m going to be in VS Code, and sometimes I’m going to be kicking off an agent from Slack, and folks shouldn’t have to be jumping around.”
He noted that Kilo CLI 1.0 is specifically “built for this world… for the developer who moves between their local IDE, a remote server via SSH, and a terminal session at 2 a.m. to fix a production bug.”
Technology: Rebuilding for ‘Kilo Speed’
Kilo CLI 1.0 is a fundamental architectural shift. While 2025 was the year senior engineers began to take AI vibe coding seriously, Kilo believes 2026 will be defined by the adoption of agents that can manage end-to-end tasks independently.
The new CLI is built on an MIT-licensed, open-source foundation, specifically designed to function in terminal sessions where developers often find themselves during critical production incidents or deep infrastructure work.
For Breitenother, building in the open is non-negotiable: “When you build in the open, you build better products. You get this great flywheel of contributors… your community is not just passive users. They’re actually part of your team that’s helping you develop your product… Honestly, some people might say open source is a weakness, but I think it’s our superpower.”
The core of this “agentic” experience is Kilo’s ability to move beyond simple autocompletion. The CLI supports multiple operational modes:
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Code Mode: For high-speed generation and multi-file refactors.
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Architect Mode: For high-level planning and technical strategy.
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Debug Mode: For systematic problem diagnosis and resolution.
Solving multi-session memory
To solve the persistent issue of “AI amnesia”—where an agent loses context between sessions—Kilo utilizes a “Memory Bank” feature.
This system maintains state by storing context in structured Markdown files within the repository, ensuring that an agent operating in the CLI has the same understanding of the codebase as the one working in a VS Code sidebar or a Slack thread.
The synergy between the new CLI and “Kilo for Slack” is central to the company’s “Agentic Anywhere” strategy. Launched in January, the Slack integration allows teams to fix bugs and push pull requests directly from a conversation.
Unlike competing integrations from Cursor or Claude Code —which Kilo claims are limited by single-repo configurations or a lack of persistent thread state — Kilo’s bot can ingest context from across multiple repositories simultaneously.
“Engineering teams don’t make decisions in IDE sidebars. They make them in Slack,” Breitenother emphasized.
Extensibility and the ‘superpower’ of open source
A critical component of Kilo’s technical depth is its support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This open standard allows Kilo to communicate with external servers, extending its capabilities beyond local file manipulation.
Through MCP, Kilo agents can integrate with custom tools and resources, such as internal documentation servers or third-party monitoring tools, effectively turning the agent into a specialized member of the engineering team.
This extensibility is part of Kilo’s broader commitment to model agnosticism. While MiniMax is the default for Slack, the CLI and extension support a massive array of over 500 models, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini.
Pricing: The economy of ‘AI output per dollar’
Kilo is also attempting to disrupt the economics of AI development with “Kilo Pass,” a subscription service designed for transparency.
The company charges exact provider API rates with zero commission—$1 of Kilo credits is equivalent to $1 of provider costs.
Breitenother is critical of the “black box” subscription models used by others in the space: “We’re selling infrastructure here… you hit some sort of arbitrary, unclear line, and then you start to get throttled. That’s not how the world’s going to work.”
The Kilo Pass tiers offer “momentum rewards,” providing bonus credits for active subscribers:
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Starter ($19/mo): Up to $26.60 in credits.
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Pro ($49/mo): Up to $68.60 in credits.
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Expert ($199/mo): Up to $278.60 in credits.
To incentivize early adoption, Kilo is currently offering a “Double Welcome Bonus” until February 6th, giving users 50% free credits for their first two months.
For power users like Sylvain, this flexibility is a major draw: “Kilo Pass is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I can use my credits when I need them and save them when I don’t—it finally fits how I actually use AI.”
Community, security, and competition
The arrival of Kilo CLI 1.0 places it in direct conversation with terminal-native heavyweights: Anthropic’s Claude Code and Block’s Goose.
Outside of the terminal, in the more full featured IDE space, OpenAI recently launched a new Codex desktop app for macOS.
Claude Code offers a highly polished experience, but it comes with vendor lock-in and high costs—up to $200 per month for tiers that still include token-based usage caps and rate limits. Independent analysis suggests these limits are often exhausted within minutes of intensive work on large codebases.
OpenAI’s new Codex app similarly favors a platform-locked approach, functioning as a “command center for agents” that allows developers to supervise AI systems running independently for up to 30 minutes.
While Codex introduces powerful features like “Skills” to connect to tools like Figma and Linear, it is fundamentally designed to defend OpenAI’s ecosystem in a highly contested market.
Conversely, Kilo CLI 1.0 utilizes the MIT-licensed OpenCode foundation to deliver a production-ready Terminal User Interface (TUI) that allows engineers to swap between 500+ models.
This portability allows teams to select the best cost-to-performance ratio—perhaps using a lightweight model for documentation but swapping to a frontier model for complex debugging.
Regarding security, Kilo ensures that models are hosted on U.S.-compliant infrastructure like AWS Bedrock, allowing proprietary code to remain within trusted perimeters while leveraging the most efficient intelligence available.
Goose provides an open-source alternative that runs entirely on a user’s local machine for free, but seems more localized and experimental.
Kilo positions itself as the middle path: a production-hardened tool that maintains open-source transparency while providing the infrastructure to scale across an enterprise.
This contrasts with the broader market’s dual-use concerns; while OpenAI builds sandboxes to secure autonomous agents, Kilo’s open-core nature allows for a “superpower” level of community auditing and contribution.
The future: A ‘mech suit’ for the mind
With $8 million in seed funding and a “Right of First Refusal” agreement with GitLab lasting until August 2026, Kilo is positioning itself as the backbone of the next-generation developer stack.
Breitenother views these tools as “exoskeletons” or “mech suits” for the mind, rather than replacements for human engineers.
“We’ve actually moved our engineers to be product owners,” Breitenother reveals. “The time they freed up from writing code, they’re actually doing much more thinking. They’re setting the strategy for the product.”
By unbundling the engineering stack—separating the agentic interface from the model and the model from the IDE—Kilo provides a roadmap for a future where developers think architecturally while machines build the structure.
“It’s the closest thing to magic that I think we can encounter in our life,” Breitenother concludes. For those seeking “Kilo Speed,” the IDE sidebar is just the beginning.
Tech
Microsoft Cordless Phone System from 1998 was Designed to Blend Everyday Calls With The Growing Capabilities Of Home Computers
The Microsoft Cordless Phone System debuted quietly in late 1998, marking the company’s first move into hardware. It plugged directly into a Windows PC, aiming to combine ordinary calls with the power of home computers. This product was launched on October 6th, and by November, it was available in stores for an anticipated price of $199.95 ($395 today).
The system consisted of three major components: a 900MHz cordless handset, a base unit, and a separate charging dock. People would simply plop the dock down wherever they thought it most convenient. The base unit would simply plug into a conventional landline and communicate with the computer via a serial port. Without the computer, you’d just receive a standard cordless phone, good for basic calls, with respectable range, clear sound, and 40 interference-free channels. It included all of the normal functions you’d expect, such as a hold button, redial, volume control, out-of-range alerts, and low power notifications.
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When it was connected to the PC, things became much more fascinating. Microsoft included Call Manager software that worked with Windows 95 and 98. The application requires a Pentium 90 or higher processor, at least 16MB of RAM (32MB was suggested), a sound card with a microphone and speakers, and an open serial connection. It wasn’t like you could just turn off the computer and let it do its thing; for complete functionality, the machine needed to be powered on with the program operating quietly in the background.
Call Manager was able to import contacts from the Windows address book, allowing you to manage phone numbers, set priorities, and even give personalized messages to certain callers. When you received an incoming call, the phone would read the caller’s name from the address book aloud if the Caller ID matched a contact, which could be useful for deciding whether to answer the phone right away.
Voice commands stood, as you would click a button on the phone, wait for the tone, and then simply say, “Call Dad,” and it would dial the appropriate number. Similar actions, such as “call back” and “delete message,” allow you to manage communications. On the PC side, Microsoft had included Voice integration, which allowed you to select a number off the screen and dial it up with a single voice command.
Voicemail has all the bells and whistles, with messages kept on the computer’s hard drive rather than a separate unit, and it could hold thousands of messages depending on how much space was available. You might create individual voicemail boxes for different members of your family or workplace, with bespoke greetings for each caller. Your top priority contacts would ring through, while others would be routed to voicemail or banned. Anyone could even access the messages remotely, which was quite handy. There’s your call log, which automatically records every incoming and outgoing call so you can readily review recent calls.
The package also included features like speed dial, do not disturb options, and voice notes. The phone was also capable of taking up calls on the handset and then routing them to the PC speakers. Sales, however, were more or less flat, since one of the most significant constraints was that in order to use it at all, you had to leave your Windows 9x system on all the time, which most people were not doing back in ’98, especially when they went to bed in the dark of night. Furthermore, it was more expensive than your average cordless phone, thus it only lasted a year or so on the market. After that, Microsoft largely abandoned the cordless phone concept and went on to other projects.
from the cascading-failure dept
It’s darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn’t funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we’re proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak in America continues to rage, immigration detention camps are starting to feel the effects.
Earlier this week reports indicated the Dilley detention center in Texas was going on a sort of soft lockdown due to confirmed cases of measles among those detained.
“ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking “appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection.”
“All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” she added.
We are definitely in “prove it” territory when it comes to this administration and immigration questions. That’s all the more so if the government, as they’ve done via other excuses in the past, limits or restrains entry to these facilities from other lawmakers who want to check DHS’ homework and uses the measles outbreak as the reason for it.
Neha Desai, a lawyer for the California-based National Center of Youth Law, which represents children in U.S. immigration custody, said she hopes the measles infections at Dilley are not used to “unnecessarily” prevent lawmakers and attorneys from inspecting the detention center in the near future, citing broader concerns about the facility.
“In the meantime, we are deeply concerned for the physical and the mental health of every family detained at Dilley,” Desai said. “It is important to remember that no family needs to be detained — this is a choice that the administration is making.”
It’s also worth remembering that the spread of disease is a recurring feature in the concentration camp industry. Deaths from disease as well. And, unlike the trope mentioned above, these are infections immigrants are getting from America, not bringing to her soil.
And it’s not just one detention camp, either. The Florence Detention Center in Arizona is also dealing with measles infections.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports one ICE detainee in the Florence Detention Center in Pinal County tested positive for measles on Jan. 21.
Two more measles cases have recently been confirmed among people who are also in federal custody in the county, according to a spokesperson for the Pinal County Public Health Services District. But the spokesperson did not provide details about which facility the other two infected individuals are in, or whether any of the three cases in the county are linked.
As Desai said in the quote above, this is a choice. Or, rather, a series of choices. It’s a choice made by Trump and his minions to carry out this inhumane, disorganized, haphazard campaign of brutality on illegal immigrants. This could have gone many ways, but Trump chose cruelty on purpose. It’s a choice to put RFK Jr. in charge of America’s health and then watch idly, leaning back with folded arms, as the country experiences the worst measles outbreak in decades over the past 13 months. It’s a choice to not pivot on any of the above.
And it’s a choice to leave South Carolina swinging in the wind as the measles outbreak there will no doubt continue to spread to the rest of the country.
State health officials are reporting 29 new cases of measles in the state since Friday, bringing the total number of cases in South Carolina related to the Upstate outbreak to 876. The South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) said there are currently 354 people in quarantine and 22 in isolation. The latest end of quarantine for these cases is Feb. 24.
Those numbers will continue to rise, but they are already breathtaking. 2025 saw a measles infection count nationwide of 2,267. South Carolina has generated nearly 40% of that total in one month in one state. 18 states have already had measles infections within their borders this year. The 2026 totals are going to make 2025 look like peanuts.
And it could potentially be hardest on the human beings who are shoved like sardines into these immigrant detention camps. Diseases like the measles will spread incredibly fast there. And, despite DHS’ claims to the contrary, I just can’t find it in me to believe that this administration is going to put a priority on detainee’s health.
Filed Under: arizona, concentration camp, dilley detention center, donald trump, florence detention center, ice, immigration, kristi noem, measles, rfk jr., south carolina
Amazon is betting that an AI assistant best known for turning on lights and answering trivia questions can become a sought-after benefit of its Prime membership, in the same league as free shipping and streaming video.
The company is making Alexa+, the generative AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant, available free starting today to all U.S. Prime members, nearly a year after it was unveiled.
Tens of millions of customers used Alexa+ through an early access program, the company says. Today’s rollout opens it up to Amazon’s full U.S. Prime membership base, which is estimated at more than 200 million individual members by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
Alexa+ offers more natural, free-flowing conversations than its predecessor, along with agentic capabilities such as ordering takeout, and booking dinner reservations and rides, in addition to core features such as coordinating across family calendars and checking smart-home cameras.
But the broad rollout comes more than three years into the generative AI era, with AI habits already ingrained for many users around ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others.
Given its late start, Amazon is hoping that unlimited access to Alexa+ via Prime (including a browser-based chat experience at Alexa.com) will help close the gap against those rivals.
In that way, the option to subscribe to Alexa+ for $19.99/month outside of Prime feels less like a play for standalone subscribers and more like a way to reinforce the market value of what Prime members will be getting for free.
Amazon is also offering a free but limited version of the Alexa+ chat experience at Alexa.com and in the Alexa app for non-Prime users.
ChatGPT’s free tier limits users to a handful of messages before downgrading to a less-capable model. Google plans to replace its Google Assistant with the AI-powered Gemini across Android devices, making Amazon’s timing all the more urgent.
Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Echo, said in an interview that the Prime benefit is aimed at customers who use AI tools but can’t or don’t want to pay for a standalone subscription.
Rausch cited the example of students and others who “bounce around between different chat assistants” when they hit usage limits on free tiers. He said offering unlimited access to what amounts to a paid AI service, without those usage caps, is “a really big deal for Prime customers.”
Whether consumers see it as a true replacement for other AI chatbots remains to be seen. Working on this story, for example, I tried uploading the interview transcript, past coverage, and Amazon’s blog post to Alexa.com for reference and analysis. The site was only able to accept one document at a time, unlike other chatbots that can handle multiple uploads simultaneously.
It’s a small but telling limitation for anyone accustomed to the competition.
But that’s a business use case that may not represent consumer patterns. Amazon’s larger pitch isn’t that Alexa+ is a better ChatGPT, it’s that it can do things other AI assistants can’t.
For example, having uploaded those materials individually, I can now ask Alexa+ on my Echo devices to reference them in its responses — something I’ve been doing already in the Alexa+ early access program with emails from our kid’s school and other family documents.
Rausch said 76% of what customers do with Alexa+ is unavailable in any other AI, according to Amazon’s own internal data. He cited functionality such as smart home controls, family calendar management, music discovery, booking reservations, and the thousands of device and service integrations that Amazon has built up over a decade.
Based on the early access period, customers are conversing with Alexa+ two to three times more than they did with the original version, according to Amazon, and engagement continues to grow week over week rather than tapering off after an initial honeymoon period.
Once somewhat of an outcast in Hollywood, today ElevenLabs counts some big stars on its roster, and it has just raised a $500m series D round.
ElevenLabs has raised $500m in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital with partner Andrew Reed joining the board. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq participated, with new investors coming on board including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and Bond.
The new round gives ElevenLabs an $11bn valuation, more than tripling its valuation in the space of a year. ElevenLabs started out in 2022, developing a human-like AI text to speech model that got it into hot water in the early days with various Hollywood stars like Emma Watson. Voice actors took them to court at the time and ElevenLabs subsequently settled the lawsuit.
These days some of Hollywood’s elite are fully on board. In November 2025 it launched its Iconic Marketplace, adding actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey to its roster. Having been burnt early on, the company today describes Iconic Marketplace as solving “a key ethical challenge in AI-driven media creation by enabling the ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognisable voices”.
“We started by building a voice that could sound human – and we did,” said said Piotr Dabkowski, co-founder of ElevenLabs. “Today we are building foundational models across the full audio stack – text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-leading research team.”
“This funding helps us go beyond voice alone to transform how we interact with technology altogether. We plan to expand our Creative offering – helping creators combine our best-in-class audio with video and Agents.”
ElevenLabs says the funding will help it to continue its international expansion across London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris and Mexico City, where they plan to have “go-to-market teams” to support enterprise adoption.
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Interlune digs into the development of an excavator for helium-3 and construction projects on the moon
Interlune is leveraging a $150,000 NASA contract to develop develop lunar trenching and excavation technology — and although the primary goal is to extract valuable helium-3 from moon dirt, the project also signals the company’s broader play for lunar infrastructure.
Interlune’s work on the Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 contract, done in partnership with the Colorado School of Mines, demonstrates that the Seattle-based startup’s business model isn’t limited to helium-3. In the years ahead, the technologies pioneered by Interlune for resource extraction can also be used for building roads, base camps and other construction projects on the moon.
For example, the excavator that’s the focus of the NASA funding — known as the Scalable Implement for Lunar Trenching, or SILT — will support Interlune’ plan to sift through tons of lunar soil. But it will also support NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable lunar presence in the 2030s.
“We’re looking at some other tools that would move regolith around, or prepare a site for making a road or building a radiation berm, burying a certain piece of infrastructure like a nuclear reactor,” Interlune CEO Rob Meyerson told GeekWire. “So, we’re very interested in participating in the Artemis program in broader ways, and we think the technology we’re developing for helium-3 extraction can support that.”
Lunar helium-3 extraction leads the list of Interlune’s priorities because Meyerson and the company’s other founders believe that could be a lucrative line of business.
Helium-3 can be used in quantum computers, medical imaging systems, nuclear weapon detectors and even future fusion reactors — but it’s so rare on Earth that it sells for up to $20 million per kilogram. Interlune is betting that it can make a profit by extracting helium-3 that’s deposited on the moon by solar wind.
“In the U.S., we produce one kilogram of helium-3 per year from tritium decay, give or take,” Meyerson said. “On the moon, we intend to extract 10 kilograms of helium-3 per year from our first helium-3 harvesting operation in the 2030s. And if we had helium-3 fusion, we would need 100 kilograms of helium-3 to power a city the size of Seattle for one year.”
The excavator development project builds on work that Interlune has conducted in partnership with Vermeer Corp., an Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer. Last year, the two companies unveiled a full-scale prototype for an excavator that would be capable of ingesting 100 metric tons of moon dirt in an hour.
Under the terms of the NASA contract, Interlune and the Colorado School of Mines will focus on optimizing the excavator’s design for the lunar environment and minimizing its power consumption. Work on the current phase of the project is due to wrap up by mid-2026, and if the results are sufficiently positive, Interlune could get the go-ahead for follow-up funding.
Meyerson cited other areas where Interlune’s work on the core technologies for its lunar harvesting system is attracting government support:
- The Texas Space Commission provided a grant of up to $4.8 million to support a facility in Houston that focuses on creating better substitutes for moon rocks and soil. “The first one will be a regolith simulant that has implanted solar wind in it. … And we’re working on a device that will actually implant helium and/or hydrogen into the regolith,” Meyerson said.
- The Department of the Air Force’s AFWERX program granted Interlune a $1.25 million contract to work on a new method to separate helium-3 from domestic helium for use in cooling quantum computers. “We’re working very closely with the Air Force Research Lab, and we’re also working with an industrial gas partner that we haven’t announced yet,” Meyerson said. “We would plug into their helium plant and extract helium-3, and so that’s a very important project for us.”
- NASA’s TechFlights program awarded $348,000 to support reduced-gravity testing of Interlune’s regolith-processing system.
- Interlune won a $246,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on its soil-sorting technology.
Interlune was founded in 2020 by Meyerson, a former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, and other aerospace veterans including Apollo 17 moonwalker Harrison Schmitt. The team has since grown to about 25 employees in Seattle, Houston and Washington, D.C.
So far the company has brought in $18 million in seed funding, and it recently reported raising more funds through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE. “We elected to do this because we wanted to raise some additional money in anticipation of some of these contract awards, like the one we’re talking about today. And we’ve got some more announcements coming,” Meyerson said.
A multispectral camera built by Interlune in partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center could begin surveying lunar terrain for helium-3 as early as this summer. Interlune says it already has more than half a billion dollars’ worth of purchase orders and government contracts for helium-3.
Meyerson said helium-3 will be a “great first product” for Interlune.
“But once we get established on the moon, and we have all this infrastructure on the moon — excavating and sorting and extracting and separating — we can then start to evolve and add capability to produce water and split that into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen,” he said. “We can extract metals, rare earths and silicon, and help with construction and excavation, like we’re doing under this NASA contract. Those are all important adjacent services that will help to build the in-space economy. And we think that is going to be huge.”
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