Austin Carr

NEW @BW caper about the Microsoft engineer who stole 152,000 Xbox gift cards + was living off the proceeds in a $1.6 million home with plans to buy a ski chalet, yacht, and seaplane bloomberg.com/features/2021-…

LOVE IS BLIND: BOSTON 🥂 Coming this Fall

Why are Mac minis suddenly hard to find? A boom in Claude-powered AI agents has turned Apple’s smallest desktop into essential hardware bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

new book from @MattCampbell coming this summer. the evil Indiana Jones behind the Khmer artifacts that fill the world's museums. i've read it and it kicks ass. get your pre-orders in, book him on your podcasts, put him in your celebrity book club, etc

@WillManidis @bhalligan Not agreeing/disagreeing with any of your main points, but isn't your estimate for Boston creating just ~$100bn in enterprise value in last couple decades a bit low?

we've talked about this, but i think the solutions are all very simple in concept and hard in execution. bio/tech needs to throw serious dollars behind the upcoming election cycle, kowtowing to try to get research funding back isn't enough. very clear this is the new normal, and the institutions need to find self sufficient paths to this work. even the keller article above has the same asinine frame "trump killed boston", that gets you nowhere. venture community should maintain public blacklists of bad behavior, im happy to send names. tech broadly is going to get hammered in the next election cycle, healthcare broadly is about equally unpopular. you should expect broad scale popular action against both. this uniquely disadvantages boston. you could tulsa the city quite easily. any number of a dozen of people could George Kaiser boston. pay remote workers to show up, subsidize office space, aggressive blacklist bad actors, spam local seats + the state house with high quality candidates. state capitalism is the new state religion and if you take that seriously then the only real option to restore bostons economy. no one is coming to save you and its time the business communnity starts acting like it.

@bananapeele "This is the Upper East Side...saloon capital of the world"

The cure for people living in their phones and young people not drinking: flair bartending

The strange story of how professors from MIT, Rice and UC Irvine got tangled up in a charismatic tech CEO’s alleged Ponzi scheme bloomberg.com/news/features/…

For anxious crypto investors, a growing number of firms and third parties are selling peace of mind through supplementary criminal insurance or warranties. But the fine print suggests customers have far less coverage than they think bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

New @BW feature on the professors from MIT, Rice & UC Irvine who got caught up in what the SEC called an "IP-rich" Ponzi scheme. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

@TheStalwart I'm assuming you personally funded this museum exhibit? 🐋

@MikeIsaac instagram.com/reel/DUOlbWUke…

i saw one lady leave a note on her saved space that said "i pop tires MFers!!!!" and i suport her my position as a californian who does not have to deal with this: if you spend an hour shoveling a mountain of snow out of a spot, you have the right to save it with an orange cone

i genuinely enjoy stories about weird unspoken rules and regional social niceties that can be thrown into upheaval by one bad egg (and to be clear, i go fully costanza mode when someone breaks with decorum)

@DKThomp Well, certainly not with Copilot

I simply do not think that "most tasks professionals currently undertake" will be "fully automated by AI" within the next 12 to 18 months.

How a crew of crypto-focused hackers moved from SIM swap attacks to coordinated, violent home invasions and kidnappings, targeting small-time crypto investors (@austincarr / Bloomberg) bloomberg.com/features/2026-… #a260104p10" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/260104/p10#a26… 📥 Send tips! techmeme.com/contact

Very well researched article by @AustinCarr that covers the tactics employed by an organized crypto crime ring that started off with SIM swaps and progressed to wrench attacks. bloomberg.com/features/2026-…

Rising prices and the irreversible nature of crypto transactions have led to a surge of brutal home invasions and kidnappings. bloomberg.com/features/2026-…

@MikeIsaac Wild that Ted Sarandos once said Netflix's "goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us” Then just ~12 years later, Ted enters agreement to buy HBO as just 1 piece of deal valued at less than 1/5th Netflix's market cap. I guess HBO Now/Go/Max/etc did not move fast enough

truly did not expect this, thought paramount had acquisitions on lock netflix’s achilles heel was always not owning any real franchise IP. (though not for lack of trying) WBD library is brimming with em. a goliath among streamers, now on steroids nytimes.com/2025/12/05/bus…

Newspapers are closing at an emergency-level rate—over the past 20 years, America has lost more than 3,000. For the past six years, the photographer Ann Hermes has been documenting the lives lived in these dying places across the country. See more images: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/059DXx

@sharonwaxman @nytimes I don't get it. Any other journalist who did something like this would be blackballed. But she gets a new job at Vanity Fair and a photo spread in the NYT.

my book EMPIRE OF ORGASM!!! available for preorder now!! out next tuesday!!

As the world moves toward digital artificiality, Airbnb's redesign and Apple's Liquid Glass UI bring back skeuomorphism and dimensionality to digital interfaces (@austincarr / Bloomberg) bloomberg.com/news/articles/… #a250614p7" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/250614/p7#a250… twitter.com/Techmeme/statu…

Fwiw, Apple designers essentially agree with you. They're not bringing back leather stitching for iCal or other similarly noisy, one-off visual metaphors. They've said the aim with Liquid Glass is in part to avoid merely replicating real-world elements -- and stay away from being constrained by real-world physics. Meaning they developed what they describe as a digital meta material that is not dependent on behaving like a physical counterpart...so it can flow like water or layer like glass or flex like a contact lens. If anything, imho, they're almost playing with digital viscosity more so than trying to bring back Jobs-era skeuomorphism. Also worth keeping in mind that this is intended for navigational systems, and not to be used everywhere. Apple does still encourage flatness and solid colors and opaque layers, based on what I've read. Obvi not perfect but feels refreshing to me and like they'll be a lot of useful cases for Liquid Glass when Apple/devs figure out the right balance. Probably the biggest challenge is predictability: with super skeuomorphic designs, you should know exactly that a wood shelf in iBooks is where your books are stored like in the real world, or green casino felt is where gaming happens. But when Apple is integrating this new meta material, all of a sudden digital glass could turn to having a wet or gel-like or inky or bubbly texture depending on the interaction, perhaps to the initial confusion of iPhone users who have never actually interfaced with that offline.

Okay, serious talk. Why do we really need to mimic the real world in our UIs? We’ve created a new virtual one where we get to explore and invent new interfaces and interactions. Why bring back leather, glass, and knobs? I’m not against physicality in UI. I'm saying purposeful physicality. Design can achieve a lot without fully replicating the real world. I've been testing Liquid Glass on my phone and, in its current form, it seems overly realistic, maybe even over-designed. Frost the glass.