Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign). This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Nazis celebrating Elon Musk’s salute, Zuckerberg as a kook, dictating your own threat model and a good block/mute ethos. EMANUEL: The first week of Trump’s second term…
You can see the specific steps that a government agency is taking to comply with the Trump administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion on the agency’s GitHub, which shows it frantically deleting and editing various documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings across everything the agency touches. 18F is a much-hyped government agency…
On day one of his presidency, one of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes: male and female. The order is a transphobic, scientifically incorrect screed titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government” that mischaracterizes…
A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage…
The viral AI-generated bread horse image that Mark Zuckerberg “loved” on Tuesday was originally created as a meme by a Polish news organization to warn about the dangers of AI-generated slop on social media. The image became a viral sensation on the Polish internet but broke containment and began going viral more widely; it was…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “loved” an AI-generated slop image of a horse made out of bread posted by a spam page on Facebook that also posts AI-generated images of children with amputations and regularly circumvents Facebook’s algorithm to link users offsite to ad-laden AI-generated content farms. The page, “Faithful,” is verified, operated out of Romania,…
Hundreds of subreddits are considering banning all links to X.com in response to Elon Musk’s salute at a Donald Trump inauguration rally that was celebrated by Nazis as being a Nazi salute. The moderators of dozens of those subreddits have said that they have decided they will ban all links to X. Here is a…
On Monday, a day after TikTok came back online for the U.S., people started noticing that the app would not let them comment “free palestine.” Several TikTok users posted screenshots on X and Bluesky showing the message they received after trying to comment “free palestine” under other people’s posts. TikTok users started reporting this on…
The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals’ repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require…