I spent a good amount of time in section 8 housing when I was a kid. These rules would have resulted in me being a homeless child.

Ismail Ibrahim worked as a fact checker for an unnamed magazine (it was the New Yorker). “Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling me a terrorist sympathizer.” [bidoun.org]

The new version of iOS makes me feel ancient and bad at computer

Pitches for @technologyreview.com's Crime issue are due Friday!

I’m launching Sources, a new publication about the tech industry’s inside conversation, and Access, a tech interview podcast with my friend @hamburger.bsky.social. The first issue of Sources drops tomorrow, featuring an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which airs in full on Access this Thursday.

1. I am so excited about @coyotemedia.org! 2. I really really miss alt weeklies! I had a story in one of the SFBG issues pictured here (the April 4 2000 issue; I wrote the April Fool’s story!) 3 yes: “ I don’t want Burning Man art littering Golden Gate Park. We can do better”

❤️🔥 HOT OFF THE PRESSES! 🔥❤️ COYOTE Media Collective is live!! We’re so incredibly proud of this smart, fierce, unapologetic Bay Area media project. Dive in, see what we’ve been building, read our stories, and join the pack! coyotemedia.org

Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work

Breaking news consumer's handbook

The guns are the problem. Whether it’s high school students or Charlie Kirk or anyone else getting shot, this country has to crack down on guns and pass actual gun control laws to protect everyone’s safety.

If I have any credibility with you from 20 years of reporting on rightwing & fascist movements, please listen when I beg you not to celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot. Leave aside morality: this isn’t a match in dry grass, it’s a torch. We do not want what this could ignite & we would not win.

The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next. This video explores how much energy AI uses, from a single query all the way up to a huge network of data centers: youtu.be/v3Q_uC5P1hE

The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph: link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...

Exclusive: Jeffrey Epstein’s estate has given Congress a copy of the 2003 birthday book, including the letter with Trump’s signature that he has said doesn’t exist.

We took the paywall down on this one. defector.com/how-the-fuck...

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children

About this Florida vaccine story: When they were little - 1 yr and 3 1/2 - my two older boys, who’d had all their shots, got whooping cough. We asked their pediatrician what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been vaccinated. “Oh, they’d have died.”

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

you'd think the governor of illinois basically going "we're being invaded by an authoritarian" would be something you'd see real easy on the front page of most everything an hour later

This is insanity. This is the sign of a government that has lost its mind.

Frey: And don't just say, this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church.

In case, like me, you were instantly curious about the watch www.hodinkee.com/articles/tay...

As @sashamtl.bsky.social says, it's good we have these numbers, but there is much more that we need & deserve. www-technologyreview-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.tech... >>

60 years ago to the hour my parents were at this concert. (FWIW inflation calculator tells me it woulda cost $46.15 to see The Beatles)

REPORTER: President Putin, will you stop killing civilians? PUTIN: *taps ear*

🎧 Listen to the podcast! @wired.com's @zoeschiffer.bsky.social and @technologyreview.com's @mathonan.com spoke with join @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social about the ways the AI industry is reshaping our world. 🔗: buff.ly/xXDoijT

Had a good roundtable chat with @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social, @zoeschiffer.bsky.social, and @mathonan.com about the AI bubble, GPT-5, and Trump's Nvidia dealing on KQED this morning www.kqed.org/forum/201010...

WED at 9AM: @wired.com's @zoeschiffer.bsky.social and @technologyreview.com's @mathonan.com join to help us take stock of the way the AI industry is reshaping our world. ❓ Is the huge investment in AI good for the economy?

Good one from @mathonan.com. “…hours before OpenAI’s GPT-5 announcement, Altman teased it by tweeting an image of an emerging Death Star floating in space.” www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1...

From the white supremacist book the official DHS account is referencing: "The point is to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all."

A SUPERB piece about what the GPT-5 release tells us about the state of the chatbot hype cycle and Sam Altman. "In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand...There is so, so, so much money at stake." From @mathonan.com www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1...

This sounds glib but “prominent people being mocked online and hating it” is suchhh a driver of so many things in media/politics right now!

I wrote about tech CEOs and lobtailing www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/11/1...

Look I know nobody wants *the brands* on Bluesky, but I’m kind of a one man band here and I got rent to pay and this shit is really really good. ☕️➡️📬

THREAD: All over the country, immigration officers are smashing car windows to get at the people inside. As we began tracking incidents, my @propublica.org colleague @nicolefoy.bsky.social and I had two questions: First, is this legal? Second, is it, well, normal? Was this happening before? 1/

Tech companies used to push users to lobby for their agendas (good and bad) *all the time*. In 2015,Uber modified their app to call out mayor de Blasio by name to every user in NYC, on bullshit grounds that have since destroyed the taxi industry & resulted in far higher costs for rides.

This is fantastic. And more importantly, true. buttondown.com/monteiro/arc...

ChatGPT is the new WebMD

A source today reminded me of Qian Xuesen, the CalTech scientist who with von Karman selected Nazi rocket scientists in Operation Paperclip and co-founded JPL, and got hounded out by McCarthyism and racism. Then he founded China’s space and nuclear programs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xu...

“Had we not used these lifesaving mRNA vaccines to protect against severe illness, we would have had millions of more Covid deaths" www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/h...

If you need a bot to say "gonna be 15 min late" to your spouse, you need more than a bot.

Just what the airline and lodging industries need

Trump on roof (h/t @helenkennedy.bsky.social)

This is skin-crawling bad and morally upsetting in service of a cause I'm broadly on board with, but it won't be that long until we get AI animations of the victims of crimes being asked to speak as the dead for all sorts of things, facsimile paraded as truth, machine output as divine seance. No, no

The dead have a right to remain dead. An animated skin put over a computer model and given the same name as the dead son of grieving parents is a cursed golem and a full delusion. By interviewing the computer model, Acosta has asked us to accept this as true or real. Gun control deserves better.

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

watching you dildo brain cock suckers play w/ AI shit is like watching a dog paw at one of those puzzle boxes that you put treats inside of

Me three months ago:

It’s a very basic point. Good, more or less unquestioned economic data is like the instrument flight panel for the economy. For policy makers, markets, biz decision makers. Acts like these inject systemic and fundamental uncertainty at all those decision points.