Free speech doesn’t mean being allowed to generate revenge porn on a crowded social network

New from @kattenbarge.bsky.social: X influencers are using Grok to unveil Muslim women in hijabs and show them being beaten by men. Women in sarees are also being stripped: www.wired.com/story/grok-i...

Seems MAGA Republicans don't turn up to the opera www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/a...

Breaks every rule of Putting Things On The Internet, but I enjoy the naming convention for posts on my "blog"

About that "good" jobs report... "The number of US workers who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more rose to 1.95 million in December, the most since December 2021. ...that means about 26% of the unemployed have been in that condition for half a year or more." www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked WhatsApp messages show Labour MPs urging govt to leave X, arguing that it should "show direction to others in the UK" The MPs said X owner Elon Musk is "fascist" and that the platform's AI tool, Grok, had put "children in harm's way"

Notion is a sleeper cell for a great AI play. Easily my most used AI app day-to-day.

Some remarkable new demo recordings by Michael Jackson have been leaked. Made ~2008. This one’s so raw you can hear a smoke alarm battery beep at the 21 second mark 🥴 youtu.be/z385e-oPT3M?...

Federal Agents Shoot 2 in Portland, Ore., Police Say www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...

2018: “Tumblr has been removed from Apple's app store because it let some users post images of child sexual abuse.”

Let's not forget the fee %-age Apple takes from premium sign-ups made through the app...

I'm glad to see this pressure on Google and Apple. If any other company was running an active CSAM generator in public you better believe it would have been removed from their app stores by now www.wired.com/story/x-grok...

Martinelli's yellow card for aggressively pushing an injured player off the pitch .... seems VERY lenient.

Some Apple news via the Bloomberg Terminal: "*Apple: Age 75 Guideline Waived for Chair Art Levinson and Board Member Ron Sugar" That might be a hint that Tim Cook does not plan to step down this year. It had been suggested that Levinson's retirement would pave way for Cook to become board chair.

It’s time for Sam Altman to start worrying. @davelee.me explains ChatGPT’s traffic problem 🎥

This'll be an interesting test of press freedom

Blogging: still a good idea in 2026. Don't just take my word for it, Ask Nadella....

It's not so much what he said, but where he said it. My latest for @opinion.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

What's redder than code red?

Subscribed to the print edition of the New Yorker and told it'll be around six weeks for the first edition to arrive. Why?!

I've had some wayward pitches in my time, but ...

The inevitability of what's about to happen on X/Grok now that the victim in Minneapolis has been named.

Google and Character.AI settle with families over claims their bots led to suicide. www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/g...

This is an important point.

FT Alphaville with a second banger in as many days

The lack of meaningful fall-out from Grok's CSAM in the US is proof, I believe, that Musk's furious campaign against nonprofits has had the desired effect. Getting groups responsible for protecting children online to offer anything other than drab, boilerplate statements has been near impossible.

New: 6,700. That's how many sexually suggestive or nudifying images Grok is producing every hour, according to an analysis. X is now a top deepfake site. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

🤨

An AI factchecking tool for journalists that: - Doesn't upload my copy to the model - Refers to publicly available data but can also reference notes/transcripts I give it - Presents suggested changes in a Grammarly-like fashion. Someone make it. Preferably in the next hour or so.

If Donald Trump had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, none of us would be here today, and Earth would be a glowing orb populated solely by radioactive mutant cockroaches. 25th Amendment, anybody? truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT...

Any DNS experts following me that wouldn't mind slipping into my DMs? I have a question about a status code

Amending this take. Grace and Rocky is the greatest love story ever told.

This is huge news for California because it also now means Google must be reloca… oh no, wait, nothing changes. As you were.

Also emerging -- X's engagement incentive model means there are currently a lot of pictures of conservatively clothed attractive women being posted clearly as "bait" to get other users to invoke Grok. These are all things Musk could shut off tonight.

CBS tried to use Rubio memes as an "And Finally." In a different era, it might have worked, honestly. It didn't today.

Roll up roll up

I hate "brainchild"

The top responses on X to a post featuring a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The packaged meat from a Tesco Express -- a store in the same category as 7-Eleven in the US -- is as good as anything you'll get at Whole Foods. US grocery stores suckkkk

This headline is like a weird optical illusion where your brain keeps seeing the words "Jony Ive" but they're not actually there

In the week Grok produces images of child sexual abuse, its creator, xAI, has just announced it has closed a $20 billion funding round.

Pity FT journalists in 2026. No matter what fraud they uncover, what scandals they blow up, what deals they scoop... come December they'll be looking at a "most read of the year" list with this comfortably at the top www.ft.com/content/ad94...

The clip I always think about from Jan 6th was Lindsay Graham's enough-is-enough moment in the Senate that evening. By the next day he acted like he never said a word.

Every woman and gay man in my social circle is demanding I watch this show. One even threatened to come to my house and force it, Clockwork Orange style.

This could be a dream job for one of you. bloomberg.avature.net/careers/JobD...

"Consumer Electronics" Show

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang announces that a self-driving Mercedes using its own opensource software Alpomayo will be on US roads in Q1, Europe Q2

Jensen has a new jacket

What's interesting (infuriating?) about this is that while AI was used to create this deceit, some of the same tools were effective at debunking it. www.theverge.com/news/855328/...