While that's all far more chaotic and destructive than even some of the worst behavior that Waymo's robotaxis have been guilty of, the in-game autonomous vehicles nonetheless resemble the company's earlier-generation Chrysler Pacifica vans. The expansion is called 'A Safehouse in the Hills' and is available starting December 10. It's not clear if the vans in the trailer have been, in true Grand Theft Auto fashion, hijacked by playable characters, or if they've gone rogue. It seems likely it's the latter, though, as Rockstar Games says players will be encouraged to 'stop the development of a mass surveillance network in an all-new action-packed adventure' as part of the DLC. (The trailer also teases a storyline that involves an AI assistant named 'Haviland,' so the tech world in general appears to be a part of this particular storyline.) Waymo has said it will deny government requests for the footage its vehicles capture if those requests are 'overly broad and unlawful.' But its robotaxis have nevertheless drawn criticism for being part of a growing surveillance state. That frustration has contributed to the company's vehicles becoming a target of multiple instances of vandalism. Waymo SUVs have been burned, smashed, and had their tires slashed in different cities over the last few years....

In its latest retreat from India's crowded online retail market, Walmart-backed fintech giant PhonePe has wound down its Pincode e-commerce app and will shift the business toward B2B services for offline merchants. On Thursday, PhonePe founder and group CEO Sameer Nigam said operating a consumer-facing quick-commerce app had become a distraction from the company's core focus on small retailers. The company instead wants to concentrate on helping stores 'achieve operational efficiency, improved margins and visibility,' he said, citing this as its primary objective. PhonePe launched Pincode in April 2023 as a major push into e-commerce, building it on the Indian government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The hyperlocal app offered groceries, medicines, food, electronics, and home decor from neighborhood shops. It rolled out first in Bengaluru and later expanded to other cities. Within a little over a year of launch, Pincode pulled out of most categories except food. Earlier this year, the app shifted to a quick-commerce model, offering 10-minute deliveries through local kirana shops and retailers in cities such as Bengaluru, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune. The company also expanded the service to 10-minute medicine deliveries in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune in April....

If you just subscribed after reading this week's Thomas Edsall column in the New York Times that quoted me at length, welcome! Happy to have you here. I hope you stick around. To ensure you do for at least a little while, I'm releasing today's post without a paywall. It will be back next week, so at that point you'll need to become a paying subscriber to finish reading what I have to say. But for today, don't worry about it. Most of my archived posts have paywalls in them, but those from the first six months or so, from June 1, 2022 until around the end of that year should be free and clear. So please read whatever you want from back then without charge. Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement'in George Wallace's populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan's potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush's bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 to Donald Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged....

A spray-on coating to keep power lines standing through an ice storm may not be the obvious fix for winter outages ' but it's exactly the kind of innovation that happens when MIT students tackle a sustainability challenge. 'The big threat to the power line network is winter icing that causes huge amounts of downed lines every year,' says Trevor Bormann, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and member of MITten, the winning team in the 2025 MADMEC innovation contest. Fixing those outages is hugely carbon-intensive, requiring diesel-powered equipment, replacement materials, and added energy use. And as households switch to electric heat pumps, the stakes of a prolonged outage rise. To address the challenge, the team developed a specialized polymer coating that repels water and can be sprayed onto aluminum power lines. The coating contains nanofillers ' particles hundreds of times smaller than a human hair ' that give the surface a texture that makes water bead and drip off....