Below are posts associated with the “theverge.com” source.
🔗 linkblog: Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman’s “unconstrained” relationship with the truth
This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.
🔗 linkblog: The Cybertruck of e-bikes is here to replace your car
Look, I’m all for getting more cars off the road, but I’ve always been annoyed by people who use ebikes as motorcycles and not as bikes. This passage gets me thinking that I probably wouldn’t like the Olto sharing my local bike infrastructure:
I would say this is bad design, but really it is just abundantly clear that these are vestigial pedals. Legalese pedals. Pedals so you can say “but look, officer, it has pedals, it’s a bike!” They are not even remotely for pedaling. Because this is not really a bike.
🔗 linkblog: The Senate is voting to save free IRS Direct File today
Good line here:
“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”
🔗 linkblog: Artemis II astronauts break a record, name a crater
I barely got the livestream up on time for this, but I’m glad I did, because it left me teary eyed.
🔗 linkblog: Webtoon is adding AI localization tools to its comics platform
I read a fair amount of comics in translation, and even when the translation is done with a skilled human, I can always tell that there’s something off about it. Not sure I trust an LLM to fix that problem.
Also, I wish that Webtoon weren’t platformizing webcomics and that we could go back to the models we had in the 2000s and 2010s.
🔗 linkblog: The United States router ban, explained
This is the first thing I’ve bothered reading about the router ban, and it is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to read.
🔗 linkblog: Grammarly says it will stop using AI to clone experts without permission
Oh look, they are capable of shame.
🔗 linkblog: Grammarly will keep using authors’ identities without permission unless they opt out
Opt out is a terrible way of doing this. I’m so angry that I didn’t even finish the article before posting.
🔗 linkblog: Grammarly is using our identities without permission
Wild escalation of digital labor issues in generative AI.
🔗 linkblog: How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance
An important read on OpenAI’s seeming selling out.
🔗 linkblog: Meta won’t let morality get in the way of a product launch
Don’t think I’ve posted anything on this story yet because as the article points out, it’s hard to focus on this evil with so many other evils distracting us.
🔗 linkblog: Anthropic refuses Pentagon’s new terms, standing firm on lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance
Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.
🔗 linkblog: The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about
Love that I get to worry about deepfake nudes, scramble to change the way I assess, and now pay more for tech—if it’s even available.
🔗 linkblog: ChatGPT isn’t the only chatbot pulling answers from Elon Musk’s Grokipedia
Wish I were better read on information ecosystems, because this seems important.
🔗 linkblog: Apple says Patreon creators must switch to subscription billing by November
So, Apple will kick Patreon off the app store for not forking over 30% of its revenue, but it won’t do anything about Grok? Sounds about right.
🔗 linkblog: Rad Power Bikes files for bankruptcy protection
So is now a bad time to need to sell a 2020 RadCity 4?
🔗 linkblog: Disney wants to drag you into the slop
I missed the detail about Disney+ using some of the Sora output, and that makes this whole thing even more about labor exploitation.