Corruption trickles down. A society where corruption at the highest levels is blatant, normalized, and winked at tends to become a society in which ordinary people are not only dishonest, but view honesty as a trait of saps and fools too dimwitted to see how the world works.

I've seen speculation this is ragebait, but I think that underestimates the extent to which this was unironically a vibe when I started covering tech 15 years ago. The owner of X wants to set women back by about 150 years, so relatively speaking, a decade and a half isn't so bad.

having enjoyed The Ritual as a pretty decent folk-horror movie I did not expect the book to be 200 pages of almost unbearably oppressive The Terror-style creepiness followed by one of the weirdest incidents of tonal whiplash I've ever read

Fully think American governance would improve by 20% if we banned appointed officials from having personal podcasts.

Twitter a deeply strange and haunted place these days

ladies and gentlemen, the x information ecosystem www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

i cry when angels deserve to dieeeee

this would 100% rule

hey what's up guys welcome back to Reviewing The Library of Babel, today's book is AAAAAAABAAAAAAAAB

The irony of Andy Weir popping out over the years to repeatedly insist he has *no* politics and *no* worldview and his books are *purely* well-crafted entertainment with *nothing* to say is that he makes his own work sound so boring I've been put off ever reading it.

Why does the media continue to use the word "Millennial" as code for "young person"? That's not what it means. It's literally in the name. A Millennial is someone at least a thousand years old.

my HP Envy is in one of its "forget it has a keyboard/trackpad every time I put it to sleep and force me to restart it" moods, I guess

influencers need to get famous like they used to: by going on ill-advised and deadly polar expeditions

Brendan Carr: All I was saying is that you've got a nice place here! And I hope nothing happens to it! Why's everybody getting so upset?

95% of the "news" coverage of this FCC plan to "ban routers" just parroted the Trump administration's justifications, despite Brendan Carr having absolutely zero credibility on anything, really @theverge.com was thankfully an exception

Women should have terrifying wings if they want them. Preferably ones with razor-sharp tips they can stab into people who cross them. I firmly believe this is a inviolate component of feminism.

Come for Liz ripping on Andreessen but stay for the profound observation that if AI is inducing psychosis in regular people through yes-mannery, the very very rich are already fucking cooked. Hard-boiled, in his case.

Good story on the mistakes that happen when big tech buys things and then abandons them by @vicmsong.bsky.social www.theverge.com/report/89682...

bad news for my hot sexy dangerous boy licensing business

If you’re a Quest user PLEASE log out of Meta Horizon Worlds before June 15 or you’ll be trapped in there forever

Brutus here - I won’t lie, it’s not looking good. Caesar and his allies are poised to end our republican traditions. I’ll get right to the point, this is our FINAL CHANCE to send the dictator packing. For the next hour Gaius is matching all contributions 2x when you donate on ActTyrian. SPQR to end

yeah I know everybody rightly loves Soma, but the Penumbra series is criminally underrated and I'm so happy it's included here

New for @theverge.com: i wrote about how Kansas' trans ID law and the "age verification" systems popping up everywhere tie into larger efforts to force trans people to out themselves both IRL and online

lauren came out of the courtroom this morning promising "shenanigans" and this does not disappoint

I was prepared to be confused by this (and remembered none of the human passages) but ended up getting 6/6 almost intuitively, which is funny -- closest I can explain is the AI is wordy and the sentences don't have a focus or cadence.

i know this is a cheap shot but this article is so much weirder if you remember ebay would become the company that did reputation management by sending a newsletter writer live cockroaches and a bloody pig mask

Cannot believe this meetup wasted the opportunity to get a white claw sponsorship and make its tagline "ain't no laws when you're making claws" www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

by this logic i should be able to make a movie and prominently advertise it as "inspired by martin scorsese"

A funny thing I just remembered is that under normal circumstances Anthropic allows Claude to terminate conversations it could find distressing, and I assume this is not true of the military version but I'm getting invested in the concept of Conscientious Objector Claude.

so... when I had a post a little bit back about "we should just have conversations about the option of banning particular consumer tech products..."

I started Fallout 3 again and while I think it's rightly considered one of the lesser entries, I do find its simplicity kinda fun -- I'm not even convinced karma is *that* much more reductive than "our world clearly assigns good and evil to actions, we'll just launder it through companions"

The Verge's @lopatto.bsky.social on Morning Report re: prediction markets.

OpenAI when someone proposes a "please tell us how you are doing AI safety testing" law: this will KILL american freedom and innovation we're subpoenaing everybody who supports it OpenAI when the government demands unfettered murderbot access: hey that's just democracy man, our hands are tied

Watch out, Claude is a registered minister in the Universal Life Church. This could go sideways very quickly.

blinks in Edward Snowden

One valuable thing in files: investigators' scanned background research (physical newspaper clippings, print-outs of online articles, etc) or email records that included the text of shared online articles. One notable thing: how many of those article links can't even be found now via Wayback.

“You finished those DC metro stations?” “Sure thing boss, beautiful, moodily lit and oddly unsettling, just like you asked.” “What?”

There are serious obstacles to this working but a publicly funded search engine would be an increasingly valuable good.

the president spending an hour regaling everyone with nonstop graphic murder stories in the style of a preteen who just watched faces of death is a real victory for Everyone Is 12 Theory

Some writers will simply take pics with their phone at home. But few will scale mountains equipped with nothing but piss grenades and determination to get even better shots.

Today, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei meets with Pete Hegseth at the White House, amid intensifying negotiations over terms that would give the military carte blanche to use Anthropic's AI for lethal autonomous weapons with no human involvement. Heres a look inside those talks.

this all basically makes sense when the defining ethos of the 2020s is to get a high score in any endeavor you take on with the minimum effort required, and only chumps care about what you're giving up along the way

my favorite subplot of this week's social media trial is "judge makes people stop using meta product for dangerous and harmful purposes while in court to determine whether a whole *other* meta product is dangerous and harmful"

I absolutely do not want to get into "is the left behind on AI" but I'm unclear on why "catching up" seems to be defined as "use, boost, and fund existing systems" rather than "figure out if the tech's design and ownership structures can be changed to serve pro-human ends"

I'm not going to specify any particular technology here and I would be very careful about weighing this, but policy folks should be a million times more comfortable floating and debating the idea of just banning categories of tech product.

It's possible this is in the video but I do think it'd be interesting if we brought back the dedicated "tool around with no consequences" separate tutorial mini-level.

I am still a little baffled none of this has personally appealed to me because I feel like *exactly* the personality type, and all I've concluded is that maybe I'm too sophisticated in my paranoia to get paranoid delusions from an averaging system.