RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115984249721871519 It stretches the imagination to think that Melania could earn back $75M at the box office. It may not be a bribe, but the business incentive is a consequence of flattery, not box office returns. Look for it on Ellison’s Paramount Plus in a […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115974891188913992 Musk said that we’d have people walking on Mars in 2025. I’m sure this is right around the corner.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/115962508398912420 The impact of this on travel and tourism in the U.S. will probably be pretty catastrophic. I get that people will have no choice but to participate for work, but there’s no way that I would opt in to this experience. I’d just go […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115962701645642008 Want to replace TikTok? Great. Join @loops. Otherwise, the problem will just follow you to the next platform and keep resurfacing every time that next platform reaches critical mass. Unfortunately, this problem will never get solved, because […]

As a company that has long boasted about its commitment to principles, Apple has had a bad several months. It removed ICE Block from the App Store. It let X remain, empowering its users to create child porn, which is apparently “free speech” now. After two American citizens were killed by ICE […]

Maybe Apple will add the Melania doc to everyone’s library like it did with U2. https://www.theverge.com/news/867429/tim-cook-andy-jassy-white-house-melania-doc

RE: https://mastodon.social/@randahl/115942123572803982 This is like when Trump uninvited Exxon from investing in Venezuela after its CEO said it was uninvestable. “You didn’t dump me. I dumped you.”

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115933564421320534 Adobe is in trouble. It leveraged creators into too-expensive subscriptions. Now, Canva/Affinity and Apple are going after its business on one side, and AI is eating it alive on the other side. Adobe’s new PDF-to-podcast feature is something […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115928059186300150 Trump telegraphed tariffs. In response, retailers pulled lots of demand forward before “Liberation Day.” Now that inventory has run out.

I just scrolled through several posts on Threads. They were all AI slop. If you can’t trust a cat video, what can you trust? Still, Threads continues to grow at the expense of X. It’s funny that Threads became the AI home that OpenAI’s Sora intended to be.

As usual, @CARROT delivers the most accurate weather forecast.

Just another example that Musk is no match for his impulses. He swore off politics…until he had an opportunity to throw his weight around again. Then, obviously, he couldn’t help himself. https://www.axios.com/2026/01/19/elon-musk-10-million-campaign-donation-kentucky

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115867268281704932 It’s gonna be pretty hard to claim any real principles in the future after you let a deepfake, child pornography app stay in your app store.

Elon Musk has effectively made child pornography legal by paralyzing platforms from taking action against X for fear of retaliation by the Trump admin — which is not taking action. 🤔 Release the Epstein files. https://www.theverge.com/news/859631/democrats-x-grok-apple-google-app-store

Download X in the App Store. It violates multiple guidelines, and it’s appropriate for ages 16+

Interesting that Apple has been totally silent on allowing CSAM on the App Store via X. Whether St. Clair is a credible witness or not, it’s a thing that’s been happening. Apple is afraid to step on Musk’s toes, because to step on Musk’s toes is to step on Trump’s toes […]

I didn’t think Trump left The Onion any room to go, yet it delivered.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115838445239995253 Switchbot is also showing off a laundry robot. If a robot future is really coming, assisting the disabled and elderly is a great use case. For some, it will be the difference between living at home and having to live in a nursing home.

In one rambling press conference on taking over Venezuela, Trump also threatened Colombia and Cuba, while Katie Miller said on X that the US would annex Greenland. I keep looking for a limit to what Americans will tolerate or when Congress will stop denying that it has any job at all. We’re not […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@randahl/115835211061994628 The EU has two primary adversaries: Russia and the US. Russia is an immediate military threat, and the US is a social-economic threat. It lacks the military capability to combat Russia and needs to persuade the US to function as a barrier […]

Says Microsoft CEO Nadella, “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium.” He right, because it doesn’t matter. Slop is here, and it’s a tradeoff we need to live with. “Slop” has two connotations: 1) [junk] zero marginal cost content that makes […]

Social media companies don’t directly prioritize divisive content. Instead, algorithms prioritize engagement to earn ad revenue, and divisive content is what engages the most. 🏭 Politics or not, an algorithmic ad factory’s fuel is divisive content, and polarization is its pollutant. X is a […]

There are great use cases for AI. Social media isn’t one of them. Young people — the people platforms are trying to attract — are already getting sick of AI slop. Meta’s over-indexing on the AI news feed could come back to bite it. The newness is over, and every post is the same now.

“We are ending 2025 with every major social media platform fully or partially controlled by Trump-friendly US billionaires.” This is true, and it’s why I’m glad that I spend most of my social media time on this smaller, decentralized social media platform that is decidedly not de facto moderated […]

This USA Today “news” article appeared in my Apple News feed today. It’s an ad to sell a supplement through an affiliate link. It’s presented as being news, without any disclosure of it being an ad. If legacy media outlets intend to defend their remaining turf as credible sources of information […]

🎄 Merry Christmas! If you’re celebrating, I hope you enjoy the day surrounded by friends, family, and good food.

RE: https://journa.host/@w7voa/115763761748239085 “EJ Antoni, will now serve as acting director of the organization’s Center for Data Analysis and Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.” Here’s a photo of Antoni in front of the Nazi battleship […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

RE: https://journa.host/@w7voa/115735700907099028 Cruz is right, even though his argument is self-serving. The tide is shifting, and Cruz knows it. This is the same Ted Cruz who threatened MLB with the revocation of its antitrust exception when it spoke out against voter restriction laws in […]

There have been other stories about Europe protecting its digital sovereignty from the Trump-led U.S.; moving from Windows to Linux. De-risking is picking up steam. European governments are increasingly viewing U.S. tech as a security exposure. The same is true of military hardware. China and […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/115725104766779418 Now, as @gruber says in the article, iRobot is in China’s hands. “By 2022, the Amazon acquisition was iRobot’s lifeline. EU regulators wanted it shot down, and despite the fact that it was one American company trying to acquire […]

GM’s decision to remove CarPlay, and to a much lesser extent Android Auto, can do nothing but cost it sales. The only question is: will the money that GM earns from monetizing its entertainment stack offset those losses? I doubt it […]

Said X product chief Nikita Bier on attracting journalists back to X, “We have to earn their trust.” Is this the same Nikita Bier who terminated the EU’s ad account after it fined X? Does Elon Musk — who defaced news outlets’ X accounts, banned journalists, created MechaHitler, and cloned […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115689197254890052 @Mastodon has a point. While politicians and news orgs can accept some tradeoffs for audience access, X is run by a guy that takes revenge on people he disagrees with — defacing and banning accounts, lawsuits — and whose words and actions […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/115689180443980381 I agree that Google needs to separate inclusion in search indexing from inclusion in AI overviews. Tying provides it with an unfair advantage. Websites will opt out of other AIs because they matter less for discoverability and will do harm […]

X terminated the EU’s ad account after being fined by the EU, because it believes in free speech with one exception. Free speech must agree with Musk and X, and if it doesn’t, it’s deceptive. Not to worry. The millions of foreign influence bots will be fine […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

No further explanation needed, “Meanwhile, Chamberlain, which was sold to private equity firm Blackstone…” https://mastodon.social/@verge/115669008462015454

Something, something. I remember Donald Trump being very angry at Canada over an ad featuring Ronald Reagan because it interfered with the U.S. policy. https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/115668267853028254

In contrast with traditional Republican policy, Trump found a way to tax billionaires and corporations. Unlike any formal tax, wealthy individuals and corporations are expected to contribute to his special projects, like Trump accounts and tearing down the east wing of the White House for a […]

Russia is very good at this. Judging by the current political climate and the state of Twitter/X, there’s no reason why Putin wouldn’t want to replicate his success in the U.S. elsewhere. 🤬 https://www.dw.com/en/russias-disinformation-campaign-in-armenia-gains-momentum/a-74868051

If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas gift on Cyber Monday, the Miwaukee Stan Perpler is the must-have gadget of 2025. It’s a multi-socket gun that can turn five bolts at once when the bolts are in a specific pattern. Your thumb needs to be shaped like […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I know zero about college repayment in Australia, but this sounds like an idea worth exploring. Lots of problems, healthcare included, can be depoliticized by looking to others for case studies. Is problem-X worth solving? Who’s already solved it effectively? Start there and iterate. The […]

Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃🍁 Enjoy a day full of friends, family, and delicious food.

File this under “sustainable abundance,” when AI’s prolific use of energy and water will make energy and water free, along with other scarce resources, like housing. Musk makes it sound like AI will create universal basic income, which would presumably be paid by the profits of AI companies […]

I’m okay with not being good at everything. “Grok will also contend Musk would be the best at eating poop or drinking urine.” https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/825675/groks-elon-musk-worship-is-getting-weird

The newness of AI slop content is starting to wear off. In addition to being slop, it’s becoming boring. 🥱 There are plenty of use cases for AI, but mind-numbing short-form content might not be what keeps people on social media in the long term […]

Fortunately, there’s no way that $2,000 stimulus checks could produce inflation in an already-high inflation environment. https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/2000-tariff-dividend-trump-check-inflation-stimulus

This video is hilarious for three reasons: the first being that it exists. Second, it spends most of its short runtime offering a monotone bio about the Speaker; and third, it doesn’t answer the question at all. There’s really no way to know how tall Mike Johnson is, because the information […]

Massive AI investments have “elements of irrationality.” What could possibly be irrational about investing trillions of dollars in a technology that is racing to commodity status and is less competitively differentiated with every release? […]

In addition to being a horrible humanitarian loss, America First has ceded America’s soft power advantage to China and Russia in exchange for contempt of the US. It’s the product of egregious cruelty and stupidity. “As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already […]

I’m not sure if Tesla’s addition of CarPlay speaks more of its desperation or of GM’s foolishness for getting rid of it. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/11/after-years-of-saying-no-tesla-reportedly-adding-apple-carplay-to-its-cars/