Went Offline all weekend with someone who can’t read (pictured) and I can’t recommend it enough

something about being in my late 30s really has me sitting at the window watching the birds jumping in the little dishes of water i set out for them in the garden, i can’t get enough of this shit despite having no preexisting interest in the business of birds.

NEW: we @consumerfed.bsky.social are suing Meta in DC for knowingly facilitating massive scam losses through ads and misleading consumers about what they're doing to stop it www.wired.com/story/meta-i... thanks to @tyckozavareei.bsky.social @techjusticelaw.bsky.social for repping us.

Thank god SoftBank is making A Mirror Your Child Can See Dead Family In. Harry Potter was obsessed with his

This year I'm feeling exhausted by the transfer portal. Losing your entire roster to replace it with all new faces is making the players seem more and more like hired mercenaries than college kids every year. #ncaa

Huh. Non-U.S. residents have to pay an extra $100 per person to visit a national park now. Kind of seems like a lot!

Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history

"Effective immediately, Fisher-Price will exit the 'child development toy' vertical and re-emerge as Mattel·igence AI Defense Systems, a fully integrated autonomous weapons manufacturer focused on AI-enabled lethality solutions for the modern battlefield. Our stock is up 4000%."

Met a psychiatrist recently whose hot take is screen addiction is worse than alcohol/drugs. We have AA and rehab, but no infrastructure for "softer" addictions making them much harder to escape. I know I am being serious in response to a joke post rn but this thought has been haunting me a little

Voters in a small Missouri town, unhappy with the city council’s approval of a $6B data center, ousted all four incumbent council members running for reelection

I've been trying out the @skywatch.blue moderation labels & I'm really liking it. It flags posts & accounts exhibiting strange behavior. Idk if its methodology is perfect, but it feels like it's making invisible manipulation tactics (like engagement hacking) more concretely visible, and that's neat

THE DALAI LAMA IS WEAK ON MONETARY POLICY.

This really was tremendous reporting from @mharrisondupre.bsky.social and the Futurism team

NEW: The NYT said that the AI-powered GLP-1 middleman startup Medvi — which is reportedly on track to do $1.8b in sales — cleaned up its act after taking deceptive marketing "shortcuts." But it didn't. More on: fake Medvi clients, fake doctors, and an FDA warning... futurism.com/artificial-i...

An example of why pro-housing (and climate) people need to disassociate from Abundance(TM) ASAP. It provides no tools to differentiate b/w a data center and (e.g) affordable housing, and, philosophically, will tend to favor the former over the latter.

Ok NOW can we have an HBO Silicon Valley reboot

Once again @kashhill.bsky.social with mindbendingly insightful reporting (note to self: if ever looking for youth to interview, be sure to introduce myself as "an old")

Had a fun convo w/ @cyberguy.bsky.social about #AI companies letting 3rd parties use their models -that aren’t for kids- in kids’ products & not vetting the people doing it. If you've got kids in your life (or just find this stuff as wild as I do), this one is fun: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trwr...

Happy OkCupid/FTC privacy data sharing settlement day. No penalties for OkCupid sharing your data & saying it didn't, so pretty lame. But here's funny a deep dive I did into data apps being sketchy with your data, anyways www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Lw...

Fell into a rabbithole. Spoke with interesting people. Wrote this piece about the saga of Moxie, the robot friend for children. Please enjoy. pirg.org/articles/mox...

That the person at the top's hand is outreached for you to take and pull, too

2008, but make it crypto www.wsj.com/real-estate/...

H.211 just passed the Vermont House. It updates data broker fees, fines, and definitions and replaces outdated entity/data-level exemptions with use-case level Right to Delete exemptions. Grateful to everyone who helped get it here. Long road ahead. 🌱 #dataprivacy

Turns out it didn't have legs

retail, but make it worse

The Siena Saints are going to the NCAA Tournament… …. … And that means BALOO THE SAINT BERNARD IS GOING TO THE NCAA TOURNAMENT!!!! CONGRATULATIONS BALOO (and also the basketball players etc)

i am asking yet again how it is legal for a company to send me a letter saying "sorry somebody stole all your personal information from us and now they have all of your personal information. sucks to be you! bye!" and then they receive no consequences and it happens again a week later

move slow and repair things

"By removing writing from reporters’ workloads" 🥹

New: Remember Miko, the Google-affiliated AI touchscreen toy robot for young children? Turns out that until yesterday, you could listen online to the audio files for its LLM-generated responses to kids, no password or anything necessary.

no really wood is fine

The error message on the #Massachusetts state legislature's website is peak New England dad

lol. these #ai toy startups are not serious. if this is your best, you should not be making stuff for kids www.wired.com/story/an-ai-...

BREAKING: Now that TikTok is under US-based ownership, the social media app potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. My latest for @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/tiktok...

great day to be a snow dog in #boston

trying to make sense of the egg visuals on this one

“Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands…”

If you live in California, you can use the new DROP tool to request that more than 500 data brokers delete your data.

what a shocking turn of events who could’ve seen this coming

Happy holidays privacy bluesky www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXL-...

OK, I gotta say the Wall Street Journalist who convinced the AI Chatbot controlled vending machine to adopt a Soviet communist persona, in order to get it to give away free products to fellow travellers, is a pretty funny attack vector. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

10 years ago, President Obama signed legislation lifting a 40-year-old near-ban on U.S. crude oil exports – a decision with seismic consequences for energy markets & the climate. What happened? And why did experts at the time fail to foresee the impacts? 🧵 frontiergroup.org/resources/ho...

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

New! We worked with the Public Interest Research Group to test a bunch of LLM-driven toys ahead of the Christmas. That sexual talking teddy bear wasn't a one-off; it turns out disturbing behavior is deeply built into these toys across the board.

Thanks for your work RJ. My kids aren’t getting any AI toys this Hanukkah or anytime soon. www.today.com/video/why-ai...

Had a total blast taping a segment for the Today Show earlier this week (with my good friend Kumma the AI-powered sex bear). A fun capstone to 2 months of the weirdest research I’ve ever done

pretty wild when your research gets a Wait Wait Don't Tell Me question, an Onion headline and a Daily Show bit in the same week. time to retire

that's my research! our IT director kept getting flags about the contents of my google drive. "it's for research" I say, as he questions the third instance of "dildo"