Omg a heartwarming tale!!!!

Tulsi Gabbard is trying to take control over counterintelligence from the FBI. It's not going great. A scoop with @shaneharris.bsky.social

One of the best newsletters I receive tbqh

I think @damonberes.com right that chatbots shouldn’t be your friends, and insidious stuff arises from treating them as such. But that doesn’t doom LLMs, which are useful and (sorry to ppl here) not purely evil. It would be nice to try to sort out the jumble, but our culture isn’t great at that!

"Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

this is so good and really captures what's sinister about everyone befriending chatbots. "They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity," writes @damonberes.com www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

"Although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself". 👇👇

@damonberes.com wrote a real barnburner this week, on what we are permitting the AI chatbot industry to do to us all. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

if you're gonna read anything today, make it @damonberes.com's excellent (and unnerving) story about AI chatbots derailing the future of human friendship: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

New: The FBI filed a subpoena trying to unmask the person or people behind archive.is / archive.today, which have been running anonymously for 13 yrs. Site was widely used by GamerGate, and then to bypass paywalls but has become kind of core archiving infrastructure www.404media.co/fbi-tries-to...

😇

Tech companies have long promised to deliver a golden age of human connection—but with AI companions, what’s actually unfolding is a digital age “more actively anti-social than the last,” @damonberes.com argues:

New from me: I went deep on the way that generative AI and chatbots act as wormholes, pushing us deeper into our own minds. They threaten to compound the problems of algorithmic targeting that have festered unaddressed for years and years—what comes next may be even more alienating and isolating (🎁)

Robots are cool! But you definitely need real friends. Chatbots "allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself." And the anti-social media era is only in its infancy... Must-read @damonberes.com: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Defining and essential from @damonberes.com on how AI is ushering the age of anti-social media: "Although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

New from me: I went deep on the way that generative AI and chatbots act as wormholes, pushing us deeper into our own minds. They threaten to compound the problems of algorithmic targeting that have festered unaddressed for years and years—what comes next may be even more alienating and isolating (🎁)

I don't want to over hype anything but @cwarzel.bsky.social's GALAXY BRAIN is going to be the single greatest podcast ever created I cannot wait

A little-known nonprofit has been lying to news publishers while funneling millions of paywalled articles to tech companies for AI training. Read my investigation in The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

good, smart, and long overdue look at Common Crawl: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Be sure you get to the kicker in this essential investigation into Common Crawl, the data archive behind the AI boom

Didn't want to be on a crystal cube on the moon anyway

NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.

Grateful to the always-fantastic @andrewdeck.bsky.social for writing such a substantial piece building on our recent AI Watchdog work at the Atlantic 🙏

are we seriously securitizing ai data centres. are we deadass.

"Mamdani argues that 'freeze the rent' is not just a way of delivering relief from exorbitant housing costs; it is the only way to get enough voters on board with a growth agenda. A growing body of real-world evidence suggests that he has a point."

Very bad ideas are being normalized at an astonishingly swift speed.

"Multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was."

Hundreds of billions spent on AI with little to show, a potential $1 trillion IPO without a path to profit, byzantine financial arrangements that, yes, can be sorted in tranches. @cwarzel.bsky.social and I on how the AI boom could come crashing down: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

so @matteowong.bsky.social & I wrote on data centers: arguably the most important buildings in the world & are, in a way, holding the economy hostage. Byzantine financial instruments, private equity, depreciating tech, hype, $trillion valuations. it’s all there. an ai crash prob starts here.

"Attempts to illustrate these circular investments have produced a series of byzantine charts that one software engineer referred to on X as “'he technocapital hyperobject at the end of time.'"

🫣 www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

And actually astonishing when you think about it: The Trump administration's top officials are choosing to separate themselves from the public—more to the point: separate themselves from any visible protest—and live on military bases. Gift link here: www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Misreading of Tolkien aside Elon has also reposted video footage of a man being stabbed to death, which is the sort of thing you just didn't really see on the internet so much before unless you really looked for it, and is now everywhere on X x.com/elonmusk/sta...

Grokipedia is the crown jewel in Elon Musk’s propaganda apparatus. According to Musk’s site, Apartheid wasn’t that bad and the AfD is “preserving German” heritage: www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

There really are two American internets now. @matteowong.bsky.social

Jennifer Lawrence “recounted a story about crying while asking ChatGPT a question about breastfeeding. “You’re doing the most amazing thing for your baby,” it had told her. That a robot would say that to her, she thought, called into question the sincerity of anyone else who did.”

Extremely important reporting from @dgraham.bsky.social in The Atlantic’s latest cover story. (So important that we published it ahead of schedule.) Must-read, out today: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Oh my god the website for the new Gatekeeper album is amazing lol wrong-planet.com

According to OpenAI's own data, in a given week, millions of people "have conversations [with ChatGPT] that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent"

Also interested in the implication that it would help Cuomo's cause if voters saw more of him

The number of Matryoshka dolls you have to open in order to find the original basis for the claim that TikTok is rigging the FYP algo to favor Mamdani is almost as wild as what the "evidence" for it turns out to be.

This Stephen Witt graf is one of the best on tokens that I've read; just a nice, clear, compact explanation of what's happening here www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Thought this was a very compelling and thoughtful exploration of what it really means when people worry over a new kind of cognitive offloading with generative AI; what we can take from history, how we can orient ourselves now, what may and may not happen in the near future

"It did not look like much, but several employees at the site confirmed: This was not just any dirt. This was White House dirt." @nancywalecki.bsky.social

Haven't been able to stop thinking about this story by @kait.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

great piece from @adamserwer.bsky.social on the “anti-woke” tax that americans now pay as a result of conservative identity politics run amok.

Various farm animals I saw today

This story about Brightline, a high-speed train in Florida that has killed more people (185 since 2017) than other train lines, is incredible, but this particular passage is *chef's kiss*. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...