It looks like the MIT Technology Review did the equivalent of the dril candles post but for real open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...

The new pope signed up for Twitter in 2011 with a Hotmail email address that he also used for a lot of other stuff, which is how I know that he's probably the first pope on Zynga and almost certainly the first pope on Tumblr

this is not a dunk, but the fact that this detail is blowing up despite the book it came from coming out 2 months ago shows that if you want to bury a damning scoop, put it in a book

1. Can you figure out where I was standing when I took this picture? ChatGPT could. Given the photograph (scrubbed of all header information), the new chain of thought model, ChatGPT o.3, was able to pinpoint the location with a few meters.

Views are the only number anyone cares about on the internet anymore. I tried once again to figure out what views mean, and I got… nothing. Views are lies.

Know of a website or tool that would be useful to #journalists? Submit it on this form and we'll consider it for The Journalist's Toolbox™:

Some news many years in the making: My book EMPIRE OF AI, out May 20, is ready for pre-order at empireofai.com. It tells the inside story of OpenAI as a lens for understanding the moment we’re in: the tech elite's extraordinary seizure of power and its threat to democracy. 1/

Lovely chart from our pals at Chartr. It does appear we are at the peak of Streaming Mountain. What’s coming next? sherwood.news/business/bri...

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

Setting The Last of Us S2 trailer to You Know You’re Right is all kinds of perfect (including perfectly complementing Future Days).

An excellent breakdown. What I take from Kevin's post is the need to understand the information people are exposed to at the content (not source) level. This emphasis on content-level analysis is partly why I'm excited by the conscientious use of LLMs as tools for large-scale, yet nuanced enquiry.

How does Finder still not have a “recently closed” / “reopen recent” menu option?

“In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, Facebook will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data — including Hongkongese users’ data,” one privacy policy staffer wrote. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Here are the slides for our talk “Who’s Behind This Website?” that @acookiecrumbles.bsky.social and I just gave at #NICAR25. Slides: bit.ly/nicar25-behi... Repo with cheatsheet: github.com/jonkeegan/be... And here’s experimental “NICAR Website Sleuth” GPT that can help you: bit.ly/nicar-sleuth...

I'm excited to be in Minneapolis for @ire-nicar.bsky.social #NICAR25 ! If you are here, please say hello! @acookiecrumbles.bsky.social and I will be reprising our talk about website investigations "Who's Behind That Website?" on Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m. schedules.ire.org/nicar-2025/

The Sports live widget is great…except that the timer keeps going even after FT.

This is a shocker. Apple is winding down Advanced Data Protection in the UK, company says in press email, rather than build a backdoor for that government, which is impossible to do safely. Every Apple user in the UK is now less safe. Other countries not affected.

yikes www.reuters.com/technology/a...

😍🤩 wikitok.vercel.app arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

Here we go again: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Periodic reminder to give apps limited access to Photos because, if not, well: www.theverge.com/news/606649/...

I’ve had qualms about third-party app stores from the beginning and… well… daringfireball.net/2025/02/hot_...

What is with Apple icons lately? First Playground and now Invites. They could’ve at least tried to do balloons instead of the random colourful circles. (And, no, this isn’t nostalgia for the good ol’ skeuomorphic days.)

“Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency.”

This list of options is 🤨

I know the “open” jokes have been done to death, but… the-decoder.com/openai-quiet...

For Americans who didn't follow it, the Schrems case -- much like the TikTok case -- was driven by concern about (1) sending platform user data to a country, and (2) foreign spies getting their hands on it as a result. @margotkaminski.bsky.social beat me to posting on this :)

Weird one on Apple News. I read this a couple of days ago and yet it shows up right now as “45 minutes ago.” Date on the story is 12th.

This seems wildly irresponsible. www.theverge.com/2025/1/14/24...

Lemley firing Meta as a client is a big deal.

The AI Opportunities Action Plan (Matt Clifford report), trailed in today’s morning news is now out in full. I’ve read it, and here’s a few observations 1/10 Link to full report assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6784eb...

“What’s really rich about Meta and Zuckerberg’s incessant complaining about being restricted by Apple’s rules for third party software on Apple’s platforms is that Meta doesn’t allow third parties any sort of access to their successful platforms.“ daringfireball.net/linked/2025/...

Inspiring words on innovation from the inventor of Stories, Reels, and Threads.

Interesting piece. Are we becoming a post-literate society? - on.ft.com/4fBSEwy via @FT

Some great unexpected recommendations

Wales’ Raspberry Pi quietly hit a £1bn market cap last week, fuelled by its Dec 9 launch of a low-cost desktop setup. Shares have since soared 50%+ 🚀 Now among the largest pure tech firms on London’s market A rare win for London’s struggling stock market #RaspberryPi #RPI

For years, the public has called them "fake artists." But internally at Spotify, the program has name: Perfect Fit Content. My investigation, and the first look into my book Mood Machine, is the January cover at @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2025...

OK, but surely I should get another notification telling me whether they’ve scored or not.

lol www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Just four months after his release from Russian prison, Evan Gershkovich has the lead byline on an incredible story about the ultrasecret Russian agency behind his kidnapping. He and the Journal identified the precise individuals involved. Astonishing. www.wsj.com/world/russia...

In the future, there will be no products, only advertising.

TIL that Excel treats a number in parentheses as a negative. (Numbers too.)

How to start a data-graphics library, illustrated. "Once one gets locked into a serious book collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can." Details on each title here: www.chartography.net/p/how-to-sta...

Turning off social media personalisation reduced toxic content exposure by 27%, BUT... Heavy consumers of toxic content just worked harder to find it - sharing what they found at higher rates & switching platforms. This suggests that algorithmic fixes alone won't solve online toxicity.

A List of Things People Blamed on Short Skirts 🧵

Fentanyl deaths are falling. What’s behind the decline? @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social explains on.ft.com/4fM4hC1

Guess which former COO of a once high-flying German fintech was allegedly running a Russian spy ring. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Lego maps made with #RStats Tutorial posted on R Graph Gallery: r-graph-gallery.com/web-chorople...