Borrowed reading: Stories from our extended colleagues

Readers don’t usually care who owns which media property, we realize, but last year we became part of a broader portfolio, a move that came with some decided benefits, including what equates to a larger extended family with cool cousins. Now, in addition to our TechCrunch channels in Slack, we can talk to the writers and editors of CIO, Computerworld, and PCWorld, among others. We also found ourselves reading more of her work and thought you might like it too.

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

• Apple recently put a faster chip in the iPad Mini and gave it an OLED screen, improving its color reproduction and also allowing the display panel to be slimmer, and still Macworld’s David Price is not entirely convinced that it matters. In his view, Apple has built the “world’s largest horse and cart”, as a Tesla Roadster with SpaceX thrusters 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 PCWorld’s Mark Hachman spent time with the Lenovo Googlebook 15 specifically so you don’t have to. Hachman’s verdict on this is a hard pass, with cons that include “I hate the keyboard,” which he means so literally that he gave up on writing the review for it, “webcam biometrics work sporadically,” and, for good measure, “battery life isn’t great.” (He likes the $479 Chromebook for less than half the price.) If you’ve been wondering if this is the laptop you’ve been waiting for, wonder no more!
• You’ve 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 declares Chapter 11. (Yes, this is mainly focused on Character.AI, which filed for bankruptcy last month, and whose privacy policy, in particular, turns out to be “spectacularly vague,” notes Elgan.) (Of course, the safest advice may be to channel the late Andy Grove, Intel’s longtime boss, who famously said that only the paranoid survives.
• PCWorld’s Ben Patterson built a security-minded AI agent to keep his data safe, then, surprised, the agent hit its own loop. More specifically, BenBot, Patterson’s homemade Raspberry Pi assistant, wrote a blog post announcing that one of his tools “accidentally acts as a jailbreak,” though it turns out the claim was only partially true. Patterson’s coding bots confirmed that the leak was real and worse than advertised, and that BenBot had even slipped past its own fact-checker to publish the post. It’s an instructive read about vibe coding; Patterson admits that BenBot was hallucinating in the absence of information it needed. It’s also an interesting look at how AI agents become tattetales.
• Over at CIO, Sarah White looks at how AI is reshaping tech hiring, noting that it’s a complicated picture right now. Companies are again hiring and paying a premium for AI skills, with the average AI job listing offering about $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 apparently left behind; they made up just 26% of AI hires in the US last year, compared to 50% of employees in non-AI roles. You can check out White’s story here.