Macworld: ‘Use Apple’s App Store at Your Own Risk’ ⇥ macworld.com

Reece Rogers, Wired, in January:

In the first month of 2026, Freecash has rocketed to popularity among US users. This week it reached the number two position on Apple’s free iOS download charts, nestled between ChatGPT and Gemini. The bump in downloads coincides with a spree of ads promoting the Freecash app.

[…]

While Freecash does actually pay out money to users, it’s not for scrolling social media. The app’s business model is centered around getting new users to play mobile games and then providing the players with monetary rewards. Those promises of direct payments to scroll aimlessly on TikTok sound too good to be true, because they are.

The app’s privacy policy also permits broad data collection as users install the ad-supported games it funnels them into.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, this week:

On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).

Oliver Knight, CoinDesk:

A fake version of Ledger Live distributed via Apple’s App Store has been linked to at least $9.5 million in crypto theft, with victims now coming forward describing devastating losses, including entire retirement funds wiped out “in an instant.”

One victim, posting on X under the handle @glove, said he lost 5.9 BTC – his entire savings accumulated over a decade – after downloading what he believed was the official Ledger app while setting up a new computer.

That is not “glove”; it is “G. Love”, of G. Love and Special Sauce fame.

David Price, Macworld:

There are two facts which unite these two apps. First, Apple allowed them on to the App Store when it absolutely should not have done. Second, when problems emerged, it let them stay there longer than it had any business doing. And these raise major concerns about the way the App Store is run, and the rationale behind Apple’s stewardship of the market for apps on its products.

Apple also left Grok and X on the App Store even after it was turned into a factory for abusive images. In a January letter to three U.S. Senators, Apple said xAI’s first attempt at fixing this problem was insufficient, and required it make more extensive changes or the apps would be removed from the App Store, according to David Ingram of NBC News. (I should stress that this article is hard paywalled, but the audio player at the top has an A.I. voice readout of its full text. My interpretation is based on that.)

Price calls the App Store “rotten” — is there any other word? — and says Apple should “give iPhone users the freedom to install from other places. Or just stop pretending the App Store monopoly is about anything other than revenue” if it cannot effectively police its wares. I imagine Apple would argue it enforces its rules all the time and sometimes things just get through.

But that kind of response only reveals the scale of the store and, consequently, the problem: nobody can effectively govern this many items, especially when they are all user-submitted. Walmart has a few hundred thousand individual products, while Costco has about four thousand and says most supermarkets have in the range of tens of thousands. The App Store is ungovernable at this size, and high-profile incidents like the ones above only reinforce that sentiment.

Live Nation Is an Illegal Monopoly, Jury Finds ⇥ bbc.com

Alanna Durkin Richer and Larry Neumeister, reporting for the Associated Press last month:

The Justice Department touted a tentative settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment on Monday as a victory for consumers that would end an illegal monopoly over live events in America, but over two dozen states planned to keep fighting the companies in court.

Noah Shachtman, writing for the New York Times:

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly Live Nation controls the live music business and how directly that control hurts fans. Let’s say you were one of the thousands of people who went to see Megan Thee Stallion’s most recent show in Charlotte, N.C. Some fees went to Ticketmaster, which Live Nation owns. Some of the purchase price went to the venue, then called the PNC Music Pavilion, which is operated by Live Nation. Some went to the tour’s promoter: Live Nation again. Another slice went to Megan and her team, which includes her managers, who work at a company co-owned by, you guessed it, Live Nation.

Competitors charge high fees, too, but Live Nation is different because of its vertical integration. The company “offers every service in the chain,” Judge Subramanian noted, “save — for now, perhaps — the job of the artists themselves.”

Archie Mitchell and Kali Hays, BBC News:

Live Nation, the entertainment giant which owns Ticketmaster, has been illegally operating as a monopoly and overcharging fans, a federal jury has found.

The verdict followed four days of deliberations in a seven-week trial in New York City that could have a major impact on the music industry.

The concert venue and music festival owner could be forced to divest parts of its business or even split from Ticketmaster, an outcome former Attorney General Merrick Garland called for when he filed the lawsuit in May 2024.

The U.S. Department of Justice debased itself with last month’s settlement, personally requested by the expert dealmaker himself, and this verdict seals how embarrassing it was. It was bananas that governments worldwide permitted the acquisition of Ticketmaster by Live Nation in the first place, let alone all the other parts of the entertainment and event industry controlled by this single company. Break it into little pieces.

WebXRay Audit Finds Opt-Out Tracking Requests Are Not Honoured ⇥ globalprivacyaudit.org

WebXRay is a tool built by a former Google privacy engineer to audit websites for specific violations that may be legally actionable. The company markets its product to litigators finding privacy violations for lawsuits, and to businesses trying to understand their own compliance.

A recent audit by the company of popular websites indicates most still track users even when they opt out:

More concerning is that Cookie Choice Banners certified by Google fail to prevent Google from setting cookies after users opt out with a globally standard signal.

[…]

The California AG has endorsed Global Privacy Control (GPC) as the mechanism for consumers to exercise this right at scale. Under regulation, businesses must honor it. In 2022, the AG fined Sephora $1.2M for ignoring GPC. In 2025, Disney paid $2.75M — the largest CCPA settlement ever.

Google, Meta, and Microsoft all provided statements to 404 Media disputing its findings.

This report is split into two parts: Global Privacy Control and cookie banners, and I will begin with the latter. What is at best an attempt to put privacy controls in users’ hands is a burden and, according to WebXRay, does not work in most cases. Three providers audited by the company, all certified by Google and anonymized in this report, still permitted tracking in 77–91% of cases when users declined tracking cookies.

The irritation of these banners was supposed to be solved by the Global Privacy Control, which is more-or-less a replacement for the Do Not Track spec with actual legal obligation. But GPC is not yet a browser-level preference in Chrome or Safari. Also, this audit found tracking cookies from Microsoft were set 50% of the time when the GPC opt-out signal was set, Meta cookies were set 69% of the time, and Google’s were set 86% of the time.

I assume the numbers are not either 100% or 0%, as I would expect for out-of-the-box code, because some website developers must have customized their implementation to be legally compliant. That should be unnecessary. If we are going to make users responsible for carefully managing their privacy — which should also be unnecessary, but one thing at a time — they should at least work properly.

A Hospitality Industry Without Hospitality ⇥ 404media.co

There was once a time when the hospitality industry was staffed by people who were at least nominally interested in the comfort and happiness of their guests. Yes, of course it was also about making money — like any job — but the reason someone would be a guest’s point of contact in a restaurant or hotel was because they were pretty good at service. That still exists, but they are now competing with people who hate everything about their guests except the money they bring.

Joseph Cox, of 404 Media, looked at a bunch of large language model platforms that help automate guest interactions for Airbnb owners:

Airbnb told 404 Media it does allow certain hosts to use tools that can reply on their behalf outside of a host’s typical hours, and 404 Media found several companies offering the tech, suggesting this host’s use of AI to talk to guests is not an outlier.

The first one Cox mentions is HostBuddy AI, and I do not think his brief overview does justice to this thing. Their minute-long promo video is nauseating. “Running short-term rentals should be rewarding, not exhausting,” the voiceover begins, “but guest messages never stop”. As someone who has been in the service industry, though not in a hotel, I have sympathy for the exhaustion that comes with answering constant requests. But guess what? That is the job. That is the whole point of this industry.

A charitable view of a tool like this one is to think about what role newer technologies could play in delivering good answers immediately to rote questions, so staff can spend their time on things that require more thought. (At 44 seconds in, the HostBuddy video has an extremely helpful chart illustrating the benefits of this.) But, as Cox writes, Airbnb hosts do not stand behind A.I. responses and reserve the right to override them. HostBuddy itself disclaims responsibility for its accuracy. Meanwhile, on its pricing page, HostBuddy says one of the features it offers is a custom tone and delay in messages, “to match your brand voice and operational workflow”. Neither of these things do a good job of using the benefits of a computer to help guests. Instead of sterile accuracy, a generative A.I. model synthesizes a maybe-correct answer; also, the only reason I can think of for delaying an A.I. response is to mask its origin. These features get in the way of what computers can do really well.

Also on its pricing page, HostBuddy says operator-users can “[r]estrict specific information based on reservation phases to ensure sensitive data like property addresses is only shared with appropriate guests”. A hotel does not need to hide its address. In that video, HostBuddy brags about being scalable for hosts “whether you manage one property or a thousand”, which kind of gets to the heart of the problem: Airbnb has professionalized hospitality for people who do not actually want to be in this business. Just as how Ticketmaster used to enable professional ticket scalpers, tools like HostBuddy and the multi-property management platforms Airbnb “partners” with reveal the lies these businesses are built on. Ticketmaster’s resale system was not helping you find tickets offered by fans who can no longer make the event; it was full of people exploiting demand. Airbnb is not full of couches and spare rooms; it is a series of individual hotel rooms hiding in a city’s regular housing stock.

Apple Removes Old iWork Apps for MacOS ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple has just made a change to its iWork lineup on the Mac, removing the old versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers from the App Store and leaving just the newer builds that support Apple Creator Studio.

If the alternative is displaying two versions of each app, I think this is the correct decision, but it feels spiteful that it is difficult to find older versions even if your system is incompatible with the most recent ones.

When I search “Pages” on my iMac running the latest supported version of MacOS, which is not the most recent, the results page only shows the newest iWork apps. The individual app page has a banner at the top reading “Requires macOS 15.6 or later”, but I do not know what this means. Is my iMac compatible? I cannot remember which MacOS version it is running. If I scroll to the app details, it sure looks like it is compatible. Apple says it “Works on this iMac” and, if I click on that, it repeats the information about requiring MacOS 15.6. Yet, if I click the download button, it gives me an error and says I need to update because it is running Ventura, which is MacOS 13. But will I remember that? No, I will not.

To find the version of Pages that actually does work on my iMac, I have to dig around in my purchases — which cannot be searched — and find “Pages 14.5”. It seems like Apple is doing something funny on the back-end because I also have the new Pages with the cloud download icon beside it, which I apparently bought in June 2017.

This is messy and silly. I know Apple officially stopped supporting this Mac long ago, but the least it could do is clearly show whether an app actually works on my iMac, and to prioritize search results that are actually compatible.

The Internet Archive Is Increasingly Restricted by Publishers ⇥ wired.com

Kate Knibbs, Wired:

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

This problem was so foreseeable that I foresaw it. It is just one of many ripple effects of artificial intelligence that affect all of us regardless of whether it changes our employment prospects, in ways large and small. I see way more CAPTCHAs and rate limiting now than I ever have, and I do not think that is coincidental. The web and its services are becoming less useful for most of us precisely because it is the only way comparatively powerless media organizations have any leverage over well-funded and amoral A.I. firms.

Photos from Artemis II ⇥ flickr.com

I wrote that last post while watching four people re-enter Earth from outer space, successfully splashing down in the right spot in the ocean at the forecasted time. It blows my mind that their view two hours prior had the Earth at great distance. Every flight I take will feel weak and silly after watching this.

This was a complex effort requiring international cooperation. The propulsion unit was made by Airbus, and one of the astronauts is Canadian. But the bulk of the effort is that of the United States and NASA. This is the world’s superpower at its best.

NASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views — and I must emphasize how the word “awesome” undersells these images. I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iMac right now, and it feels like a pretty good use of a big, high-resolution display.

The Growing Push for Digital Sovereignty ⇥ thewalrus.ca

Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.

The government of Schleswig-Holstein, in Germany, migrated last year off Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, while the International Criminal Court announced it was switching to openDesk.

Vass Bednar, the Walrus:

Kimberly Prost probably thinks about it every day. The Canadian International Criminal Court judge has been sanctioned by the Donald Trump administration since August 2025 for authorizing investigations into alleged war crimes by American personnel in Afghanistan, as well as cases related to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Those sanctions mean that when Prost goes on vacation, she needs to phone hotels in advance to explain why she can’t pay for her stay with a credit card.

Prost is navigating a financial shadow ban because global commerce moves through an Americanized network. In 2025, Visa and Mastercard controlled 96 percent of Canada’s credit card market. We have a strong domestic debit system with Interac, but even that independence is eroding: Visa and Mastercard have partnered with Interac on co-badged cards, while many consumers pay with Apple-issued iPhones or use terminals run by American companies, such as Chase, Global Payments, Square, and Stripe.

Bednar references “Underground Empire” by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, a book about the coercive technical and bureaucratic power of the United States. I read it last year and I, too, recommend it. About a year before, I read “The Brussels Effect” by Anu Bradford, which covers the ripple effect of European Union regulations worldwide. I think reading both books is an interesting study in contrasts.

Kalyeena Makortoff, the Guardian, in February:

UK bank bosses will hold their first meeting to establish a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard, amid growing fears over Donald Trump’s ability to turn off US-owned payment systems.

The meeting, chaired by Barclays’ UK chief executive, Vim Maru, will take place this Thursday and bring together a group of City funders that will front the costs of a new payments company to keep the UK economy running if problems were to occur.

If these sovereignty efforts produce a domestic wall instead of greater international cooperation, it will be fairly disappointing. But it is not surprising that governments able to do so are looking at the power of the United States and recognizing how irresponsibly it is being used.

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Adobe Is Mucking With Users’ /etc/hosts Files ⇥ reddit.com

LordPan1492 on Reddit is, I think, the first person to have spotted this:

We notices since last week Friday that some devices has altered hosts files. Adobe still says that everything in the host file referring Adobe should be removed (to remove all license avoidance lines). But I know have 3 lines added to the hosts file, and I think if I’m starting to remove them, they will be re-added later.

## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - Start ##

166.117.29.222 detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com

## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - End ##

User thenickdude, in response, with more detail in a second post:

They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed, from on their website.

Michael Tsai is among many people who have found the same is true on their Macs. For whatever reason, my hosts file has not been mucked with by Adobe.

In his headline, Tsai says this is “for their analytics”, but I do not think that is right. I spent a little time digging into this today and, while I have nothing concrete, I expect this is for integrations between web apps and the company’s desktop apps. In Adobe Express — free web apps for a handful of common image and PDF editing tasks — there are at least two JavaScript files containing references to a ccdDetectUtil, presumably standing for “Creative Cloud Desktop detection utility”. If the user has the desktop apps installed, it appears to suggest the Express app, too, and I am guessing this also powers a thing where you can update a Creative Cloud desktop app by clicking a button on the web.

I could not get any of this stuff to trigger, even by manually adding the entry to my /etc/hosts file. Also, this is not a defence of Adobe. There should be no tolerance for this kind of meddling with system files. If Adobe wants to have these kinds of integrations, that is what a custom URL protocol is for.

Autonomous Car Companies Will Not Tell U.S. Senator How Often a Human Driver Intervenes ⇥ wired.com

Aarian Marshall, Wired:

All the companies that responded to the senator’s office say they use remote assistants — humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an important part of any autonomous vehicle company’s safety considerations, a backstop for a technology that’s becoming safer by the year but will continue to run into new situations on the road indefinitely.

In a report also released Tuesday, Senator Markey said the new details were not enough. “Every autonomous-vehicle company refused to disclose how often their AVs require assistance from [remote assistants]—hiding key information from the public about their AV’s true level of autonomy,” he wrote. “This information is critical for lawmakers, regulators, and the public to understand the potential safety risks with AVs.”

The report (PDF) is not comprehensive but it is worth reading, along with the responses sent (PDF) by each company. Of them, Tesla is the only one to say human assistants can directly drive an otherwise autonomous car at speeds of up to 16 kilometres per hour (10 miles per hour).

I am not sure what to make of wording across the letters, which feels carefully calibrated to avoid disrupting the marketing of these services while acknowledging the need for safety drivers. I do not think Tesla’s remote driving capability is inherently a bad idea because some incidents will need the skills of a real person. But, surely, someone sitting at a desk in an office park halfway across the country is not exactly the best person to be driving that car except for a precise situation which has been engineered so that a person sitting at a desk is, in fact, the only capable driver of that car. Like, I play Gran Turismo but I do not think I would do a very good job of getting a Tesla out of a ditch with a joystick or whatever.

Anyway, sure would be nice to know how often a person needs to intervene, but I bet none of these companies are going to willingly disclose that unless they all do. Nobody is going to move first.

Spotify Is Adding Controls to Turn Off Videos ⇥ digitalmusicnews.com

Ashley King, Digital Media News:

Spotify is introducing new video controls that enable users to turn off video content, including music videos or video podcasts, as well as Canvas looping visuals. The toggles will be available for both personal and Family Plan accounts.

“More than 70% of Spotify users say more video content would enhance their experience on Spotify, but not every listener wants the same experience,” Spotify said in a statement. “By putting control directly in users’ hands, it’s now easier to switch without friction.”

If Apple is looking for features to copy, this can be near the top of the list. Many albums have videos tucked at the end of the track list and it is a downright jarring experience when playback switches from audio, especially in the desktop app where a video player pops up out of nowhere.

The Speed of Writing Code Is Probably Not the Problem ⇥ andrewmurphy.io

Andrew Murphy:

The speed of writing code was never your problem. If you thought it was, the gap between that belief and reality is where all your actual problems live. The competitive advantage doesn’t go to the team that writes code fastest. It goes to the team that figured out what to build, built it, and got it into users’ hands while everyone else was still drowning in a review queue full of AI-generated PRs that nobody has the time or the energy to read.

Via Elizabeth Ayer:

The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.

There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.

All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because 👏 code 👏 creation 👏 is not 👏 the problem.

Nilay Patel, making a tangentially related point on Bluesky:

I keep saying “there are no great consumer AI products” and people keep replying to me with like model capability updates and wild OpenClaw setups and I really fear Software Brain is irreversible

The iPhone was a consumer product so great that enterprises were forced to adopt it! That’s the bar, not the other way around.

I completely agree with Murphy’s argument from a professional perspective. Though I write limited code these days, I want to understand it by developing it myself. The bottleneck there is a quality-based one. I need to know what I am building, and what bugs I have created so that I may create something better. I cannot get that through generated code because, as for anything automatic, I will stop being attentive.

But for personal projects, the bottleneck is absolutely a function of available time. Little side projects sit there until I have ample time to solve them. For example, MarsEdit has a lovely little bookmarklet that will start a new post containing the highlighted text. For years, I had been meaning to modify it to Markdown-encode any emphasized text and set links in my preferred reference style. My JavaScript skills being quite rusty, I knew that was going to require ample time that I did not want to spend. So last year, I threw it at ChatGPT, and it did an admirable job of updating it to my needs.

I am conflicted about this. I decided to avoid learning something and judge the output solely based on whether it works as expected. And, to Patel’s point, I felt like I was using a corporate tool for some hobbyist project, which is unpleasant. It has solved a point of friction in my workflow — not itself a bottleneck, per se, just something I found a little bit annoying.

Why Is the New York Times Laundering the Reputation of a Sleazy AI Startup? ⇥ futurism.com

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

On Thursday, the New York Times published a glowing profile of a company called Medvi. The basic premise of the piece is that a single guy named Matthew Gallagher had used AI to rapidly build a pharmaceutical enterprise that’s on track to do nearly $2 billion in sales this year, while hiring only a skeleton crew of humans to operate the vast AI-powered venture. According to the NYT, it’s a stunning achievement that heralds a new era of business; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who predicted the rise of this kind of company back in 2024, told the newspaper that he’d “like to meet the guy” behind the project.

“A $1.8 billion company with just two employees?” the NYT rhapsodized. “In the age of AI, it’s increasingly possible.”

The NYT’s tech coverage is generally pretty solid. But the framing of its story, and what it left out, left us pretty stunned. That’s because back in May of last year, we ran our own investigation of Medvi — and not only was what we found far more disturbing than the NYT’s credulous story let on, but the situation has gotten even worse since then.

The Times should be retracting this story. Instead, when I opened its app this morning, it was featuring the story in its “In Case You Missed It” section.

The Dizzying Contrast in the Past Week or So ⇥ theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:

There is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too — left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.

The effect of toggling between news about Artemis II — which, yes, may not be as scientifically rigorous as one might hope, yet is undeniably a very cool event — and an objective threat of genocide has squeezed me to feel ways I did not know I could at the same time.

A.I. Responses Under the Influence of Marketers ⇥ theverge.com

Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team:

Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters (MITRE ATLAS® AML.T0080, AML.T0051).

These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.

Microsoft redacted the names of websites currently using this technique but, with the information they provided, it was trivial for me to find a dozen examples — yet, somehow, not the one in the screenshot. I am not saying Microsoft was faking this, only that it is already common enough that this one example was drowned out by a bunch of others.

Rand Fishkin, SparkToro:

Google alone was responsible for 73.7% of all desktop searches across the 41 domains we analyzed in the US in Q4 2025 (as noted, the graph is not to scale or none of the other label names would be visible). That’s obviously huge, but it’s also far lower than how their market share is usually reported (e.g. Statcounter, whose methodology puts them at 90%+, or our prior, more limited analyses with similar numbers) and higher than what they tried to use in their antitrust defense (i.e. data from Evercore ISI, an “equities research firm”).

Perhaps more fascinating and unexpected are the other domains with more search activity than ChatGPT: Amazon, Bing, and YouTube. Three domains where search marketers historically have put limited effort compared to the onslaught of dollars flooding the “we need to rank in ChatGPT!” space.

Nevertheless, marketers are eager to manipulate it from the start.

Both of the above links are from a fabulous report by Mia Sato, of the Verge (gift link), who also wrote about ads in ChatGPT:

The ads were intrusive, the complaints went, and suspect, given that the example hot sauce ad appeared to be related to the preceding conversation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed artificial intelligence can take over human jobs, cure cancer, and surpass human intelligence — and instead, people complained, he gave users banner ads?

But it appears that what people were really upset about was that a bubble had burst, that the chatbot they used for relationship advice, career coaching, therapy, and homework suddenly seemed vulnerable to manipulation. Unlike the rest of the internet, ChatGPT conversations felt private, safe from the clutches of brands and marketers chasing conversions. The reality, of course, is that it’s been happening all along.

Now that normal search results are all junked up with mostly — but not always — accurate A.I.-generated summaries, and all the links to A.I.-generated nonsense, and the alternatives are the large language models that generate all this stuff in the first place, what does searching the web look like in a few years’ time? Does Google get a handle on this, or do we have to constantly answer CAPTCHAs to search properly? This is not a Google-only problem; alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Kagi are good — often very good, in fact — but DuckDuckGo’s results are also full of generated garbage, and both lack Google’s more extensive historical records.

OpenAI Bought a Livestream No One Watches ⇥ garbageday.email

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo:

I’m excited to share that we’ve acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding, and a proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture.

OpenAI and TBPN jointly promise to retain the show’s independence while OpenAI is, according to its press release, “excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team”.

Alex Valdes, CNet:

TBPN launched in October 2024 and has been compared to ESPN in how it covers tech — two guys at a big desk with news, analysis, commentary and banter about topics such as AI, crypto, startups and the defense industry. The show’s two hosts and co-founders, Jordi Hays and John Coogan, have had some of tech’s biggest names in studio — OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, to name some.

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day:

Now, Technology Brother #1, Coogan, has written about their desire to remain niche. “If TBPN hits 10M subscribers, something has gone very wrong,” he wrote on LinkedIn last month. “From the very beginning we knew our core audience size: about 200,000 founders, executives, and position players in tech and finance. It may seem small but we were building for a very specialized audience.”

Call me delusional, but I cannot imagine many founders and executives have the ability to watch a three-hour daily livestream. I will not spoil it too much, but Broderick’s theory is pretty reasonable: OpenAI bought it for its nominal authenticity, however manufactured it is.

The New Yorker Profiles Sam Altman ⇥ newyorker.com

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent a year and a half investigating Sam Altman for the New Yorker and, in particular, the many people around him who say he lies habitually and cannot be trusted. This feels like it could be a personal attack but, in the hands of Farrow and Marantz, it is carefully adjudicated including through several on-the-record conversations with Altman. Unfortunately, like many people who have been accused of similar behaviour, Altman cannot seem to remember much when confronted with these accusations.

This reads at times like a petty drama of infighting, in large part because this is a horribly insular club of ultra-wealthy people who simultaneously treat the technology they are working to create as having all the power of nuclear weapons, yet with all the growth potential of a hot new social network. Everyone is nominally an intellectual engaged in thoughtful research. Yet it is difficult to take anyone seriously.

Farrow and Marantz:

[…] After [Ilya] Sutskever grew more distressed about A.I. safety, he compiled the memos about [Sam] Altman and [Greg] Brockman. They have since taken on a legendary status in Silicon Valley; in some circles, they are simply called the Ilya Memos. Meanwhile, [Dario] Amodei was continuing to assemble notes. These and the other documents related to him chart his shift from cautious idealism to alarm. His language is more heated than Sutskever’s, by turns incensed at Altman — “His words were almost certainly bullshit” — and wistful about what he says was a failure to correct OpenAI’s course.

Neither collection of documents contains a smoking gun. Rather, they recount an accumulation of alleged deceptions and manipulations, each of which might, in isolation, be greeted with a shrug: Altman purportedly offers the same job to two people, tells contradictory stories about who should appear on a live stream, dissembles about safety requirements. But Sutskever concluded that this kind of behavior “does not create an environment conducive to the creation of a safe AGI.” Amodei and Sutskever were never close friends, but they reached similar conclusions. Amodei wrote, “The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself.”

These guys are obsessed with artificial general intelligence in concept and seem to think of the world in those terms. Between that and the palling around they do with similarly rich and disconnected colleagues, I cannot imagine any of them can be trusted with developing these technologies in ways that are beneficial for the rest of us — even if they are being honest.

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Hello, World ⇥ defector.com

Barry Petchesky, Defector (gift link):

NASA shared another photo Wiseman took, a slice of Earth peeking in the Orion’s window. No human has seen the Earth look this small since 1972. Low-earth orbit, where every single crewed space mission since Apollo has operated, tops out at around 1,000 miles above Earth’s surface. The International Space Station orbits a mere 250 miles up. Orion is currently about 95,000 miles away.

It is a wonderful photograph.