Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain'computer interface (BCI) translated her thoughts into keystrokes ' and simple melodies, such as 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', rang out1. But there was a twist. For Smith, it seemed as if the piano played itself. 'It felt like the keys just automatically hit themselves without me thinking about it,' she said at the time. 'It just seemed like it knew the tune, and it just did it on its own.' Smith's BCI system, implanted as part of a clinical trial, trained on her brain signals as she imagined playing the keyboard. That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so, says trial leader Richard Andersen, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena....

When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, someone from the audience asked him if HBO's hit satire 'Silicon Valley' would be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the show, essentially answered no (at timestamp 38:17). The latest case in point is a new company called Clad Labs that launched out of Y Combinator this week. Clad's product is so outside-the-box that people thought it was an April Fools' joke in November. But it's a real product, founder Richard Wang told TechCrunch. The product is called 'Chad: The Brainrot IDE.' It is yet another vibe coding integrated development environment ' an IDE is the software developers use to code ' but with a twist. While waiting for the AI coding tool to finish its task, the developer can mess around with their favorite brainrot activities within a window of the IDE. Or, as the company's website advertises: 'Gamble while you code. Watch TikToks. Swipe on Tinder. Play minigames. This isn't a joke ' it's Chad IDE, and it's solving the biggest productivity problem in AI-powered development that nobody's talking about.'...

In the debut episode of the Build Mode podcast, host Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Deon Nicholas, co-founder of Forethought AI, to unpack what it really takes to build a lasting company with and for your customers from day one. Build Mode is TechCrunch's new podcast that pulls back the curtain on how startups actually get built ' the messy, tactical, real-talk version. Season 1: Product, Meet Market, goes beyond product-market fit to explore every aspect of getting your product into customers' hands, from finding the right audience and earning their trust to turning early traction into lasting momentum. From the start, Nicholas and his team focused on solving real problems rather than chasing hype or inflated valuations. He is a firm believer that conviction should come from customers, not VCs, and that once Forethought delivered tangible value to real users, the hype and valuations naturally followed. The Forethought team stayed lean, obsessed over its ideal customer profile, and focused relentlessly on real pain points instead of shiny features. Nicholas notes that early users aren't always direct about what isn't working, so founders have to learn to look between the lines....

Back when he was a House member from Wyoming, Dick Cheney was part of a congressional delegation that visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s. During a lull in the schedule, Cheney and his colleagues were sitting around trying to entertain themselves when one of their wives decided to administer personality tests. The results included professions for which the members would be well suited. I briefly worried that telling this story at this moment might be in poor taste, given that Cheney, the powerful and polarizing former vice president, died Monday at 84 of complications from pneumonia and heart disease. But he was always amused by the vignette, which was oft-told in his circles. It was also consistent with the 'Prince of Darkness' caricature that Cheney readily embraced. In life or death, he wouldn't have cared much either way. That was always one of Cheney's more defining charms, or anti-charms: Of all the political figures I've ever written about, I don't think any of them paid less attention to what anyone else said or thought about them. Cheney was fully secure in what he believed, what he wanted, and ultimately who he was....