Tech
DoorDash’s New Delivery Robot Rolls Out Into the Big, Cruel World
App-based companies have publicly spoken for years about the money-saving potential of autonomous vehicles. These firms have poured billions of dollars into recruiting and managing the independent contractors who do the delivering and driving for them, and millions more ensuring they’ll stay independent contractors and not employees. What if the firms could skip all that? What if robots did all the work, or at least some of it?
Still, with today’s announcement, DoorDash is throwing its lot into an industry that has faced some choppy waters. And, of course, the threat of public kicks.
Speed Bumps
Delivery robots were hyped during the onset of the Covid pandemic as a solution to that other very human problem of contagion. Since then, however, Amazon and FedEx abandoned their delivery robot projects; others working on delivery bots have pivoted to software or industrial uses. The companies that remain have mostly focused on smaller deployments on college campuses or a select few cities, and those don’t seem to be growing as quickly as hoped.
Estonian company Starship Technologies, the biggest one still standing in the delivery robot space, has found a niche operating on mostly university campuses, where streets and sidewalks are wide, well-maintained, and relatively friendly, and where those desperately seeking 2 am pizzas and burritos are at their least price-sensitive. Postmates spinoff Serve Robotics launched in 2017 but has built only 400 robots, according to its most recent financial flings, with goals to build 2,000 by the end of the year.
Contrast that with the growth in autonomous vehicles. Though robotaxi services are still limited to a handful of global cities, they’re picking up and dropping off customers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of rides per week.
The reason for the slower growth in delivery robots is actually pretty simple, says Bern Grush, the executive director of the nonprofit Urban Robotics Foundation: “You’re trying to solve a much harder problem with far, far, far less capital and far, far, far less compute.”
Consider the technical challenge Dot has ahead of it: DoorDash says the robot is built to operate on sidewalks, bike lanes, and roads. It’s meant to pilot in and out of parking lots to pick up food and to navigate driveways and apartment complexes to drop it off. That means the software needs to “understand,” predict the movement of, and get around a remarkable number of situations, vehicles, and living things: cars, trucks, school buses, strollers, children’s bicycles, aggressive mopeds, motorized wheelchairs, dogs, squirrels, toddlers, people with limps, runners, competitive cyclists. And on and on.
Tech
We Made More Than a Thousand Pizzas to Find the Best Pizza Ovens
The Dome is big. It’s not portable, practical, or inexpensive. It accepts the romance of wood, or the brute power of propane or natural gas. Its height makes it versatile enough for steaks, fish, or other skillet meals. This pizza oven is designed to be a fixture in your life and backyard, bolstered by an ever-expanding accessory set. And it also more than earns its place there, once you buy a snap-on Neapolitan arch accessory ($60) to bolster its insulation.
The Gozney makes truly excellent high-temperature pizza. Most backyard ovens, even our other favorites on this list, tend to struggle to reach and maintain the 900-degree temps needed for proper Neapolitan crust. The Dome Gen 2 gets there in 20 minutes, it heats admirably evenly, and it’s responsible for the best pizzas that my colleague Kat Merck says she’s made in her entire life. This is worth noting, given that she was editor and recipe tester for pizzaiolo Ken Forkish’s iconic pizza book The Elements of Pizza. (For what it’s worth, Forkish also uses a Dome Gen 2 at home, while enjoying his retirement. He likes using dough at 67 percent hydration, while cooking at 900 degrees in the Dome.)
A couple caveats, however: Gozney often markets the Dome as being able to cook two pizzas at the same time. This is a silly thing to do at the temperatures you’re cooking at. Cook one pizza. If you use the Neapolitan Arch, it’ll make the oven’s aperture narrow enough that you’ll need to limit yourself to a 12-inch peel anyway. The price of a Gozney Dome also rises considerably once you start delving into the accessories. With the stand, cover, Neapolitan arch, wood fire control kit, turning peel, and 15 pounds of Gozney-brand kiln-dried hardwood, the final price for the Dome Gen 2 can rack up as high as $3,270.
Best Big Pizza Oven for Families: Ooni Koda Max
Ooni’s large oven is for everyone who is sick of feeding their families with multiple teeny-tiny 12-inch pies and just wants to make a massive 20-inch cheese pizza for all the kids at once. You can either attach a propane tank or hook it to your natural gas line. If this is a possibility for you, then I recommend the latter. Ooni has a new gas management technology that keeps the temperature consistent across the huge surface. But big, powerful ovens use a lot of fuel: Its 35,000 BTUs put this Koda Max nearly on par with a 3-burner Traeger griddle. That heat will also come pouring out the open front of the oven, which means the Max is not ideal for small patios.
Tech
He Started a Social Network Alone. Then 5 Million People Signed Up
If you haven’t heard of UpScrolled before, a brief primer: It’s a social media platform not too different from, say, Instagram or TikTok. You can share photos or short videos, follow accounts, comment on posts, and amass a following of your own. Nothing too earth-shattering, right?
UpScrolled founder Issam Hijazi would beg to differ. Indeed, his nascent company diverges from most Big Tech platforms in a few notable ways: UpScrolled offers an old-fashioned chronological feed, rather than one dictated by an algorithm ostensibly serving up content you’ll latch onto; the platform also promises not to share user data with marketing firms or other commercial enterprises. And Hijazi, who is of Palestinian descent, founded UpScrolled in response to widespread user allegations that some social media companies were censoring or shadow-banning their posts—particularly pro-Palestinian content. The platform explicitly vows “never” to covertly suppress content, provided it doesn’t violate UpScrolled’s community guidelines.
Aside from breaking with plenty of Big Tech norms, Hijazi’s stance is rare among Silicon Valley types for being uniquely, overtly ideological. (In our conversation, Hijazi told me that he “personally” ensured UpScrolled users couldn’t select Israel as a location when using the platform.) But the approach has resonated: When we first met in February, a mere eight months after Hijazi launched UpScrolled, the platform had rapidly amassed 2.5 million users following freakouts over TikTok’s deal with President Trump to form a US-based version of the company controlled by American investors. Hijazi was, at that time, UpScrolled’s only employee.
Today, as UpScrolled counts more than 5 million users, Hijazi has rushed to scale his team to meet the platform’s growing needs—particularly around content moderation. Recently, his company has found itself in the crosshairs of organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, which alleges it doesn’t do nearly enough to stomp out antisemitic and extremist content. During a wide-ranging conversation last week I asked Hijazi about those claims, and how UpScrolled is catching up with its own rapid growth.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Hi, Issam, welcome to The Big Interview.
ISSAM HIJAZI: Hi, Katie. Thank you for having me.
I’m very happy you’re here. I want to start with your background. It’s a fascinating one. Previously, you’ve worked for big tech companies. You worked at IBM; you worked at Oracle. Tell us about your history with tech and how it shaped your views on the tech industry and on social media more specifically.
I’ve been working in the tech industry for the past 17 and a half years. Prior to that, I started coding when I was 12 years old. So I was pretty involved in IT and technology from a very early stage. Now, within my career, as you mentioned, I did work with the likes of Oracle, IBM, Hitachi, and then small startups.
As a young professional, that is a dream job. That is something that every kid wants to be in. Great companies that have great technologies and there’s a lot of opportunity to learn, but as you get to understand and learn about the mechanics of these companies, you start to wonder: Is this the right place to be at? This is a feeling I started to have in the past three years, and that made me shift my focus on wanting to start something new.
These companies have been complicit in bad things that are happening around the world. Things like genocide in Gaza, for instance, by supplying technology, infrastructure, knowledge, et cetera, to countries like Israel. And allowing them to do surveillance. Personally, I felt complicit just working for them, and I wanted out.
Tech
Nobody Knows How to File Taxes on Prediction Market Wins
How do you file taxes on prediction market profits? It seems like the type of straightforward question any halfway decent bookkeeper should be able to answer. Right now, though, it’s a conundrum for tax experts across the country. “You have a vacuum of guidance,” says Patrick Camuso, an accountant who specializes in digital assets. “It puts the taxpayer in a bad position.”
Prediction markets have been around for decades, so this isn’t a new issue. But platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have exploded in popularity since last year, which means the question of how to properly account for prediction market gains has shifted from a niche concern to something far more urgent for many people. While only a small sliver of the population actually uses the markets—around 3 percent, according to a recent poll—that still means millions of US residents are obligated to report their wins and losses to the Internal Revenue Service. There’s big money in play here. Kalshi, which has a predominantly American user base, saw over $12 billion in monthly trade volume this past March, according to markets tracker Defi Rate.
Kalshi declined to comment. The IRS and Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.
The IRS has not issued official guidelines on how to approach prediction markets, which means people who used these platforms now have to muddle their way through tax season hoping they aren’t inadvertently breaking the law. There are several potential ways to report wins and losses; some people are applying a statute governing tax reports on financial derivatives (like futures contracts and foreign currency contracts). Others are treating their prediction market gains as they would gambling winnings or are simply reporting them as regular income and crossing their fingers. Capuso describes the prediction markets as “a mix of wagering, derivatives, and investment contracts all mixed together in a unique bucket” and says that he assesses what clients owe on a case-by-case basis. “Our firm generally takes a more conservative position for most clients due to the ambiguity around a lot of the tax rules.”
For traders who report prediction markets earnings as gambling winnings, the process can be onerous. Bettors must track their winnings on a “per session” basis, which means that instead of reporting a net amount, a thorough record of each wager must be kept. Nate Meininger, a Phoenix-based prediction market trader, has joked on X about how the lack of guidance means you don’t have to declare the income. In real life, however, he says he reports gains by looking at the tax documents offered by platforms like Kalshi and consulting with an accountant. “I don’t track it myself,” he says. “That seems like a lot of work.”
US-based prediction market traders who access Polymarket and other crypto-based platforms by using virtual private networks are in an especially tricky spot, since the company does not issue tax documentation (and because they are legally banned from using unlicensed platforms). As US citizens are obligated to report income regardless of its source, traders who buy contracts on Polymarket and its ilk must self-report their earnings. “The offshore exchanges are harder,” Meininger says.
Changes at the IRS may make things harder still. The tax agency is in the middle of a significant overhaul, with some modernization efforts spearheaded by operatives from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. It is currently pursuing more sophisticated strategies to identify which taxpayers to audit; last year, the IRS paid Palantir $1.8 million to improve a custom tool designed to flag “high-value” auditing cases, as WIRED recently reported.
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