Could a Delaware native who grew up just a few miles from the Chancery Court push Elon Musk to go through with his Twitter deal? — Kathaleen McCormick wasn’t having it. The Delaware judge hearing Twitter’s case vs. Elon Musk listened incredulously as Musk’s lawyers asked her to postpone the trial. Twitter, they said, had concealed damning vulnerabilities that its ex-head of security, Peiter Zatko, just revealed in a whistleblower report. Zatko’s claims didn’t come up…

Spain and Germany are experimenting with free rail travel. It’s working and worth emulating. — With inflation soaring and fuel prices riding high, countries in Europe are getting creative. Free or reduced rail travel — already in vogue in smaller European nations — is taking off among their larger counterparts. The early results are so promising they suggest the U.S. …

Well before the social media backlash, YouTube tried to recommend videos based on quality, not just engagement. It didn’t work. — Hi Everyone, my aim at Big Technology is to cover the machine, not just the outputs. To learn why Big Tech acts the way it does, we must understand its systems, not only what they produce. That’s why I’m excited this week to publish a story that reveals YouTube’s long-running…

You might soon speak with LaMDA as a friend and get it to shape your online experience. — When I sat down with Blake Lemoine last week, I was more interested in the chatbot technology he called sentient — LaMDA — than the sentience issue itself. Personhood questions aside, modern chatbots are incredibly frustrating (ever try changing a flight via text?). …

“We wish Blake well,” Google said in a statement. — Google has fired Blake Lemoine, the engineer who said he believes the company’s LaMDA conversational technology is sentient. Lemoine shared the news of his firing in a taping of Big Technology Podcast on Friday, just hours after Google dismissed him. The full podcast episode will air shortly. In his conversations…

In April, Meta said it might post a quarterly revenue decline for the first time in its history. Next week, we’ll see the results. — Meta may report its first-ever revenue decline when it releases its second-quarter earnings next week, a potentially stunning slowdown for a business that once seemed to have no ceiling. Until last year, Meta reliably grew revenue by 20% or more each quarter, demonstrating formidable business strength even amid reputational chaos…

The old way has tradition, circumstances, ceremony, and etiquette to keep those in power entrenched there. The new way says to hell with that. …

Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter. Will the courts make him pay up? — Elon Musk will probably pay Twitter a lot of money. He’s on the hook after signing a deal to buy it, throwing a tantrum, and trying to back out last week. …

Inflation surged — in part — thanks to a broken supply chain and skyrocketing shipping costs. Now that things are getting better, can we get back to normal? — In May 2021, a shipping source told me to expect inflation. His cost to ship containers from China to the U.S. had jumped from $2,000 pre-pandemic to $20,000. So companies selling imported goods — from clothing to food — would soon pass that 10X increase to us. …