Kate Cox

@kcoxdc.bsky.social

9228 Followers 327 Following

Now: Making Decoder @ The Verge. Earlier: editor for Protocol; reporter for Ars Technica, CQ Roll Call, Consumerist, and Kotaku; decades of other writing strewn across the internet. Boston-born, now DC-dwelling. She/her.

Screenshot of a weather app showing a severe thunderstorm watch; a flood watch; an air quality alert; and a heat wave advisory. Current temp is 95° and "smoke," "feels like 111°"
A wide-eyed gray tabby pretending to be innocent while she demands my food
A grey tabby cat sitting expectantly on top of her food bin (which has a picture of a grey tabby cat on it) looking at the camera with an imperious "fill my bowl, servant" expression, even though the bowls HAVE FOOD (not pictured) in them.
A plate with basically deconstructed caprese salads, tomato + mozzarella slices on bread with pesto
Halloween candy on display in the supermarket for some godforsaken reason
A docked floor-cleaning robot sporting a dapper pair of googly eyes atop.
A hand holding an unopened bag of googly eyes
A Roomba-style cleaning robot on a kitchen floor
A photo of the ocean in early evening, as taken from an east coast USA beach.
A screenshot featuring Maelle acrobatically poised mid-air in the midst of a combat skill that does very high fire damage to a dramatically lit boss, [redacted name for mild spoiler].
An extreme close up of a cat face because she kept sticking her nose in my face while I'm trying to look at the PC monitor she's blocking
A fluffy grey tabby cat napping belly-up on a bed
A grey tabby cat splayed atop the vertical part of a sofa (that is also cat-colored)
Homestar Runner displayed on a TV
A grey tabby cat catloafing on a cat bed on an Amazon box next to an open window
A 2' high yellow Minion in a Christmas elf outfit, on the sidewalk next to a "no left turn 4pm-6pm" sign
Two cats in one cube of a Kallax and the others are full of various board games
A pair of sleepy (but awake) grey tabby cats together in a kallax cube, pretending to be innocent
"The producers and I will not give anyone the questions that they’re going to face on Decoder in advance. We will not let them tell us what topics they want to cover. We will not accept edits afterwards or approvals on answers afterwards. You have to show up, you have to do a good job, and sometimes you can do a bad job, and everybody can see it. I also think a lot of people are very confused by influencer media where those asks are tied to brand deals, integrations, and money made down the line, and there are approvals, but we just don’t do it. Sometimes people think they can pressure us, and our response to pressure is to turn it right back around."
A grey tabby cat on my lap between me and the desk / computer keyboard I need to access to do my job
An extremely alert grey tabby kitten sitting flopped on the floor
Screenshot of a GMail inbox showing two unread emails back-to-back: The top from Aftermath, with subject line, "The Writing on the Wall," followed by one from Mothership, with subject line "It's in the air, and it's all around"
A small white kitchen countertop compost bin with a very prominent red-to-green rainbow slashing across the bottom left
A wide-eyed handsoms grey tabby in his younger years
A game photo taken during combat with one of Clair Obscur's many bizarre mimes, basically mid-explosion
If it’s not about security, why is the Trump administration doing this? The stated goal of Trump’s isolationist policies is to bring back US manufacturing, create US jobs, and use that independence to ensure the US can make things — if, say, China invades Taiwan and severs the entire tech supply chain that relies on Taiwanese chips. But practically, this looks a lot more like the latest shakedown. The Trump administration has repeatedly used nebulous national security claims to extract tariffs, personal flattery, and billions of dollars in fees, and this feels like the latest attempt at Gangster Tech Regulation that uses xenophobia as a cudgel. Remember when a ban on Nvidia selling AI chips to China was about national security, yet later Trump approved those sales for 15 percent now 25 percent of the proceeds?
Shishir Mehrotra: Actually, can a creative [writing LLM] work? Nilay Patel: I’m asking because I don’t think taste is rules-based. Our producers are in the background here just in a puddle, because part of their job every week is to try to write like me. They get a lot of feedback from me directly on that. I’m literally editing the documents so I can read the intros and outros and I’m changing the questions. And it’s really hard even when it’s just three people who have spent years working together to try to get to an output that works. And they’re really good.
Nilay Patel: How many people work at Superhuman? Shishir Mehrotra: About 1,500. NP: So out of 1,500 people, how many people decided to launch this feature? SM: It was a small team. It was probably a product manager and a couple engineers. NP: Inside your decision-making process where you described a way of making sure you solicited the right feedback and then have groupthink, it never came up that using people’s names without permission would make them mad?
A pair of black and silver filigree masquerade masks on a red background
An elderly grey tabby cat sleeping against the heater with one paw sticking out
Grey tabby close-up
JAMIE SIMINOFF, RING CEO: So, the mental model, or how I look at it, is that AI allows us to have ... If you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources, so every house had security guards and those security guards were people that worked the same house for 10 years or 20 years, and I mean that from a knowledge perspective. So, the knowledge they had of that house was extreme; they knew everything about you and that residence and your family, how you lived, the people that came in and out. And then, if that neighborhood had an HOA with, call it private security, and those private security were also around and knew everything, what would happen? When a dog gets lost, you’d be like, “Oh, my gosh, my dog is lost.” Well, they would call each other, and one of them would find the dog very quickly. So, how do we change that and bring that into the digital world is — NILAY PATEL: Can I just ask you a question about that neighborhood specifically? JS: Sure. NP: Do you ever stop and consider that that neighborhood might suck? Just the idea that every house on my street would have all-knowing private security guards, and I would have an HOA, and that HOA would have a private security force. You can easily paint that as dystopia. Everyone’s so afraid that we have private cops on every corner, and I’m paying HOA fees, which is just a nightmare of its own. JS: So, I would assume you live in a safe neighborhood. NP: I hope so, yeah. JS: No, today, I’d go to ... If you want, I’ll take you to a place where people live and have to, when they get home from school, lock their doors and stay in their house, and they can’t go out and — NP: But I’m just saying the model. The model is, everybody is so afraid that they have private cops.
a product listing for pilot easytouch retractable pens (blue, medium tip)
Frequently asked question: Why does my weather app say that I’m getting 20-30 inches of snow? This one is a pretty straightforward answer. Most phone weather apps rely completely or heavily on automated output from one or a few computer models. Those models spit out exact numbers — even when there is a significant degree of uncertainty in the forecast — that often fluctuate throughout the day, even by the hour. Human meteorologists, on the other hand, compare multiple models, account for known model biases, and know which models are best for which weather situations and time ranges. They also factor in local nuances that models can’t resolve, and try to filter the model fluctuations out of the forecast. Don’t get us wrong. Weather apps can be useful and convenient to plan your day or week when the weather is quiet, or when there is particularly high confidence in inclement weather within a day or two. But when the weather gets more complicated — especially as complex as predicting snow, sleet, freezing rain, and the dividing lines between them — nothing beats the expertise and local knowledge of an actual human meteorologist.
The eastern half of a three-color map of the world, which inexplicably blocks countries into colors along no discernable pattern and which also has split Russia into at least six discrete territories, with no indication they are connected
Guybrush, a grey tabby elder statescat, sleeping happily on a pile of formerly clean shirts
A grey tabby cat on a bed asleep in classic "loaf" position, fully faceplanted
A wall mounted TV displaying the main menu for Portal (2007).
A screenshot from the GOG storefront showing Dragon Age: Origins (2009) marked as a Good **Old** Game
A close-up screenshot of the "bar" in the Lighthouse kitchen in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. There's a samovar-like coffee thing on the left, a ton of cups and plates and mugs and bottles, and hanging on the right is... a small sack on a chain with metal prong "sleeves" about the same size as one of the cups??
Screenshot of a GMail subject line reading, "Feedback to Chaos and Panic"
Foreground: a person carving a cooked turkey breast. Background, between and framed by the person's hands: a grey tabby cat who REALLY REALLY CAN HAZ TRKY PLZZZZ???
A square glass pan of brownies, divided in half (diagonally). One half has a green marshmallow swirl and the other half has a pink marshmallow swirl.
NILAY: mechanically, walk people through what you mean. You put enough Ring products in a neighborhood, and then AI does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of zeroing out crime? JAMIE: So, the mental model, or how I look at it, is that AI allows us to have ... If you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources, so every house had security guards and those security guards were people that worked the same house for 10 years or 20 years, and I mean that from a knowledge perspective. So, the knowledge they had of that house was extreme; they knew everything about you and that residence and your family, how you lived, the people that came in and out. And then, if that neighborhood had an HOA with, call it private security, and those private security were also around and knew everything, what would happen? When a dog gets lost, you’d be like, “Oh, my gosh, my dog is lost.” Well, they would call each other, and one of them would find the dog very quickly. So, how do we change that and bring that into the digital world is — NILAY: Can I just ask you a question about that neighborhood specifically? JAMIE: Sure. NILAY: Do you ever stop and consider that that neighborhood might suck? Just the idea that every house on my street would have all-knowing private security guards, and I would have an HOA, and that HOA would have a private security force. You can easily paint that as dystopia. Everyone’s so afraid that we have private cops on every corner, and I’m paying HOA fees, which is just a nightmare of its own.
An open drip coffeemaker showing a pot full of plain water because SOME dingus (me) never put the coffee grounds into the filter basket.
A screenshot of the modules immediately below a YouTube video as displayed on desktop browser, showing the original show description but also an AI-generated summary of the episode and an AI-generated "ask and learn" module
A glass 13x9x2 pan full of layered brownie and chocolate chip cookie sitting on a stovetop that admittedly needs some cleaning, shhhh
A monarch butterfly dang near posing deliberately on a shrubbery
Gustav from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in the *incredibly French* 'baguette' outfit, red beret and all
Screenshot of a text conversation with a "Virtual Assistant." Human: "The delivery date was September 17, we are past that." Bot: "I am sorry, but according to my information today's date is September 26, 2026 and the grace period ends on September 29, 2025. Please reach out to us again on September 29th if you still haven't received your package, and we will assist you further. Do you have any other questions about this order?" Human: "Can I talk to a human?"
A view of the baseball diamond at Nats Yard from the nosebleed seats. It is a perfect late summer sunny day and most seats are empty because both teams playing are kinda awful this year.
A grey tabby cat in a tiger-striped "recovery suit," sleeping in a ball
Oct 13 2007: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 Dec 23, 2009: Sid Meier's Pirates!, Runaway: A Road Adventure May 12, 2010: Portal (Complimentary Opt-in)
Simpsons screenshot, Homer in a towel, answering a telephone. Caption: "Y'ello? You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel."