Restaurants design ridiculous entrées for potential Instagram virality.
Stand-up comedians ditch their painstakingly crafted sets for improvisational crowd work, because those videos get the most comments.
Casting directors cast actors based on their follower counts.
Musicians cut the length of their pop songs because shorter songs work better on TikTok.
Is there a corner of our culture that isn’t trapped under the all-mighty algorithm?
Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial - Ars Technica:
Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it “does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them,” so it only shows more ads to users who click ads.
Lmao what.
The company acknowledged limits as to what it could verify, citing a lack of visibility into how its technology is used on private servers, and systems outside its cloud.
My “not involved in killing civilians” t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
Live your life in a way that if you’re murdered, people don’t make a musical about your murderer* (which is currently sold out).
*Alleged
Watching: Shogun Assassin on Internet Archive.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud | Think Tank | SupplyChainBrain (2012)
Proviti’s research found security to be the biggest barrier to full adoption of the cloud, followed by concerns over data privacy. IT managers were further worried about business continuity in the event of a network failure such as that experienced by AWS.
Who would’ve thought that all the cloud companies would eventually use all our data to train LLMs then turn around and sell it back to us.
xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa - Ars Technica:
In some responses, Grok says outright that it has been “instructed to accept white genocide as real and ‘Kill the Boer’ as racially motivated.” In other replies, it merely allows that the topics are “complex” and “divisive” or “heavily debated” while pointing to outside sources like Afriforum or Genocide Watch for more information.
This is so normal. Just doing it normal style. Loving the normalness of it all.
Apple Music launches Sound Therapy, a new ‘audio wellness’ feature - 9to5Mac:
Sound Therapy songs may be “enhanced with auditory beats or colored noise to help encourage specific brain responses.”
Listening to the Focus playlist now and it’s actually really good.
Pay-Analysis App That Uber Fought Launches for US Drivers - Business Insider:
Many gig workers saw their earnings on apps like Uber and Instacart fall in 2024 despite spending a similar or greater amount of time on the platforms, a study by data analytics company Gridwise earlier this year found.
Uber’s entire empire is built on scamming workers. You can work a full day and barely break even. It’s incredible.
Letterboxd announces a curated, limited-run rental service | The Verge:
Letterboxd Video Store will offer “limited festival-style windows” when you can stream “festival favorites, underseen gems, global cinema, and emerging voices” in cinema.
You Are Now Remotely Controlled - The New York Times (2020):
The confidential report offers rare insight into the heart of Facebook’s computational factory, where a “prediction engine” runs on a machine intelligence platform that “ingests trillions of data points every day, trains thousands of models” and then “deploys them to the server fleet for live predictions.” Facebook notes that its “prediction service” produces “more than 6 million predictions per second.” But to what purpose?
The complaint says Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have misled consumers about the recyclability of their plastic bottles, placing the responsibility for the plastic-waste crisis on the latter’s shoulders — while quietly lobbying to weaken environmental protections and regulations worldwide.
Ever notice how we’re always just a few years away from bio-degradable plant plastics but it never comes?
AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships:
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership.
Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning ID technology debuts in the US
The project uses basketball-sized spherical objects called the Orb to scan a user’s irises, which it then turns into a unique IrisCode for them. It will then use that information to create a World ID for the user that they can use to log into integrated platforms, including Minecraft and Reddit.
Who the fuck is asking for this?
Marc Andreessen Touted the Open Web. Now He Lives Life in Exclusive Group Chats | Vanity Fair:
The same people who teased liberal snowflakes for their safe spaces and intolerance have now built their own insular echo chambers where dissent is quietly sidelined and ideological conformity is rewarded.
Watched this hour-long interview with the Snapchat CEO.
Realized that Zuck is obsessed with that dude.
Snapchat does stories, IG does stories.
Snapchat changes its name to Snap to branch out into wearables, so does Facebook.
Snap releases smart glasses. Meta has Raybands.
Snap does AR, Meta does AR.
I think Zuck is obsessed with the fact that he wasn’t able to buy Snapchat back in the day. Lol amazing.
Compelling video:How to beat Trump, don’t believe him
OpenAI partners with U.S. National Laboratories on scientific research
It will also involve work on nuclear weapons, “focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide,” the company wrote. Some OpenAI researchers with security clearances will consult on the project.
Just months ago, OpenAI had a pledge not to use its technology for military purposes. OpenAI quietly removed that pledge back in September.
Yes, you can live without Big Tech. If data is the new oil, then I’m here to help you go electric.
Been looking for a resource like this!
The scramble to back up CDC.gov:
An employee working for an agency funded by federal grants working in HIV care told Garbage Day that their manager said the CDC website is expected to come down “in its entirety” and “to save what they might need.”
Watch: Timnit Gebru interview on Deepseek, AI, and why American companies insist on building the largest models.
After a week-long surge, Bluesky hits 30 million users.
this is how it feels to reach 30 MILLION users!!!
— Bluesky ([@bsky.app](http://bsky.app)) Jan 28, 2025 at 11:21 PM
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Tesla’s Fourth-Quarter Earnings Report Sharp Drop in Profit - The New York Times
The company, which is led by Elon Musk, said it made a profit of $2.3 billion during the last three months of 2024. That was a decline compared with $7.9 billion a year earlier, but 2023’s profit included a one-time tax benefit of $5.9 billion.
Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral
Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks.
Here’s the direct link to the guide. It’s a fun read.
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