A new feature on X is making people suddenly realize that some large portion of the divisive, hateful, and spammy content designed to inflame tensions or, at the very least, is designed to get lots of engagement on social media, is being published by accounts that are pretending to be based in the United States…
We dedicate the whole free section of this episode to Musk’s takeover of the federal government. We got audio from a meeting in which a Musk ally laid out their plans for AI across the government, and revealed who is now the head of HR for DOGE. In the subscribers only section, we talk about…
Watching people outsource their critical thinking, emotions, and sanity to glitchy “AI” chatbots has been one of the most uniquely terrifying aspects of being a human being in recent years. While wealthy tech evangelists like Sam Altman continue to make wild proclamations about how large language models (LLMs) are destined to do our jobs and…
Roblox is one of those games that is more popular than you can imagine, but unless you are of a certain age group and live in that world, you’ll rarely hear about it unless it makes the news for some terrible reason. More recently, for example, we wrote about the Tumbler Ridge shooter who created…
The Silicon Valley giant was criticized for giving away its core A.I. technology two years ago for anyone to use. Now that bet is having an impact.
A month with no Critical-severity Windows bugs is overshadowed by a mass of Mariner mop-up
For a few hours on Wednsday, X’s Grok AI wouldn’t stop talking about about white genocide. When the X account for a baseball podcast asked Grok about the stats for Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson, it answered the question, then monologued about white farmers being attacked in South Africa. “Gunnar Henderson’s 2025 season WAR is approximately…
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 an exciting revamp of The Abstract, tech betrayals, and the “it’s for cops” defense. EMANUEL: Most of you already know this but we are expanding The Abstract,…
WebinarTV, a site that scrapes Zoom webinars without permission, has downloaded and posted Zoom Webinars for anonymous addiction recovery meetings, support groups for caregivers and people who suffer from chronic illness, and a meeting of nudists. WebinarTV’s Michael Robertson told me that the company asks every single person for permission to “promote” their webinars, but…
A newly introduced bill in Texas would require online sellers to show a photo ID before buying a dildo. SB 3003, introduced by Senator Angela Paxton (wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton), would criminally charge online retailers for selling “an obscene device” without verifying the buyers’ age. Sellers would have to require customers to…
