Retail history tends to reward companies that recognize where consumer decision making is actually happening, not just how transactions are completed. In the early 2000s, when Amazon began to compete seriously with big-box retailers, many incumbents focused on its visible advantages, such as lower prices, faster shipping and operational efficiency. While those factors were real, they ultimately distracted from a more fundamental shift that was already underway.
Stephen Johnson is a senior staff writer at Lifehacker covering pop culture and technology, including the columns “The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture” and “What People Are Getting Wrong This Week.”
31 July 2026, Bavaria, Munich: Tobias Holzmüller, CEO of Gema, speaks to reporters at the state court following the announcement of the verdict in a copyright lawsuit. The German organization Gema had filed a lawsuit against the U.S. company Suno, alleging that it had infringed on its copyrights to songs. Suno offers users the ability to have songs generated by AI. Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa (Photo by Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/picture alliance via Getty Images)
E-commerce software maker Shopify seems to be benefiting handily from people using AI to search.
On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a “complement to search, rather than a substitute for it,” and had particularly benefited the long tail of e-commerce, including the smaller merchants that make up the majority of its customer base. Indeed, the company credited its earnings beat and soaring revenue to AI search, at least partly.
Leopold Aschenbrenner (L) and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.
Photo: Josh Edelson (L) | Oscar Molina (R)
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan on Wednesday called the recent near collapse of high-flying AI hedge fund Situational Awareness a warning shot for financial markets that are being fueled by elevated valuations and borrowed money.
Matt Johnson recreates the wonder years of a snot-nosed punk who’ll grow up to be a celebrity-chef icon. Call it Bourdain the Man the Show the Movie
Anthony Bourdain summed up his late teens in a typically eloquent, withering fashion: “I was,” he wrote in his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” That self-deprecating description opens Tony, writer-director Matt Johnson’s movie about the one crazy summer that changed a thoughtless young lout’s life; for good measure, the quote does double duty as the tagline on the film’s poster. This parable then spends 99.9 percent of its running time making a rock-solid case for those last seven words. You may not recognize Bourdain, the future Keith Richards of the kitchen and globe-hopping TV personality, in the restless-youth chrysalis form presented here. You will undoubtedly agree, however, that this loudmouth jackass slouching toward Bethlehem, a.k.a. Cape Cod, is in serious need of a proper walloping.
Ashish Dibouliya is a data & technology professional in the banking industry.
getty
Many data governance programs fail, not because the framework is wrong but because there's an ownership issue—no one knows who owns what. The issue of ownership starts almost immediately in highly regulated financial environments—a regulatory report doesn’t reconcile, or two critical dashboards show different numbers. When this happens, the blame game and confusion sets in: "Who owns this data?" "Who's responsible for fixing it?" "Why wasn't this caught earlier?"
The upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to crash into the Moon, in a collision that will leave behind a crater on the lunar surface.
A piece of a SpaceX rocket weighing four tonnes (4.4 tons) was believed to have unintentionally crashed into the moon on Wednesday, a collision that posed no danger to Earth but is expected to leave behind a lunar crater.
Jake Peterson is Lifehacker’s Tech Editor, and has been covering tech news and how-tos for nearly a decade. His team covers all things technology, including AI, smartphones, computers, game consoles, and subscriptions.
You're about to head out for a long drive. You get in your car and expect Android Auto to automatically connect, as always, so you can access your map app and your playlists, but it doesn't. Instead, you get a red error screen that reads "Communication error 21 — Being connected to a VPN may prevent Android Auto from starting."
