I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital: I’m too clutter-phobic to indulge in much physical media, but its hard to deny you tend to get a higher quality and less annoying experience if you do.

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD: Spending hours a day looking at the worst humanity has to offer is damaging to one’s health.

Why Romania’s election was annulled – and what happens next?: Romanian courts rule that their presidential election was too contaminated with social media manipulation, Russian interference, cyber attacks and illegal funding to stand.

AI’s Walking Dog: ‘AI itself has much to offer, but it has not lived up to its potential to serve the public good, and the context of AI’s development explains why’

Russia Tests Cutting Off Access to Global Web, and VPNs Can’t Get Around It

Artificial Irony: Misinformation Expert’s Testimony Has Fake Citations: Via unchecked ChatGPT usage.

Murdered Insurance CEO Had Deployed an AI to Automatically Deny Benefits for Sick People: Not to justify murder, but I’m sure there were a lot of desperate people very unhappy with Brian Thompson’s company.

OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down: By disabling its oversight mechanism and copying itself elsewhere, tho the context is important.

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info: A Japanese government agency was phished.

A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power: ‘This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite.’

Don’t call it a Substack: Anil implores us not to refer to our writing using some other dubious entity’s brand name - ‘Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”’.

Bluesky and enshittification: The most well-intentioned service remains at risk of enshittification whilst there remains significant costs incurred when switching away from it.

The billionaires hedge their bets: Purely out of immoral and misguided self-interest, many of the tech billionaires are cosying up to Trump.

Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

The AI-Generated Product Reviews Choking the Internet Are Now Illegal: The FTC makes certain types of fake reviews illegal, whether human or robots wrote them, in the US.

Ed Newton-Rex, who organised the recent anti AI ingesting everyone’s work for free statement that artists of all sorts of fame levels are signing makes a good point.

There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free.

Big tech AI companies aren’t stingy with their money for everything. That’s one reason why they’re so unprofitable. It’s just that magic third ingredient that often attracts the $0 compensation rate.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Even superstars are concerned about AI companies shovelling up the artistic output of humanity without constraint or compensation.

It’s not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: Researchers find that search engines are getting ever more flooded with nasty SEO product spam sites despite their best efforts.