Every so often a piece of reporting is so thorough that I don’t have much to add. So let me start with this: everyone should watch Mikhail Klimentov’s comprehensive investigation, into how former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick appears to have used the infamous lawyers at Clare Locke to suppress negative reporting about himself. The […]
The Plantum app is a digital tool that helps to identify plants, diagnose plant diseases, and improve plant care. The app can identify over 40,000 plant species, assess their health, and give specific care advice. Plantum offers a suite of digital tools that help users improve plant care by considering light conditions, soil, water schedule, […]
Riverside County, California sheriff Chad Bianco is definitely one of those guys. You know the ones I mean. The kind of “law and order” hypocrite who loves the law as long as it can be used to hurt the people he doesn’t like and protect the people he does like. In other words, he’s a […]
Corporations have long enjoyed creating toothless “self-regulatory” regimes that exist primarily to pre-empt real government oversight. While the quality of these orgs can vary somewhat, generally they’re just a toothless pantomime designed to pretend that corporate power can effectively police itself for ethical and competitive breaches. U.S. history has a thing or two to say […]
It’s been a bit tough to watch how Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has behaved regarding its beloved TTRPG Dungeons & Dragons the past couple of years. A game that was built from its inception on encouraging fans and creators to use the game to do new and interesting things suddenly saw its shepherd turn […]
“Defund the police” has come for at least one local law enforcement agency in one of the reddest states in the nation. This police department could have avoided this ignominious fate simply by not being generally awful. But the person leading the now-defunct department couldn’t seem to do his job without violating rights on the […]
As arguments rage about the possible or real threats of AI, there is one domain that AI has already turned on its head, and in the space of just the last few weeks: mathematics. The first hint of what was coming arrived in May, when OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a […]
Eleven months ago, I wrote about what I thought was a truly fascinating find: that some kids appeared to be using some random old NPR podcasts on Spotify as a personal chat room to get around various restrictions. It was mentioned, somewhat in passing, on the “How to do Everything” podcast last October, where someone […]
The Microsoft Access Complete Course combines four different courses in one. Jump in, and you’ll walk through everything from the absolute Access basics to more advanced concepts, like building dynamic user data forms and effective reports. By the end of the course, you’ll have the know-how required to create effective database tables, automate tasks, and […]
The Supreme Court just keeps giving Trump a free pass to engage in what Mike Masnick correctly called “human trafficking.” It’s stuff this nation has never done before because it’s never been run by someone quite like Trump before. To maximize the cruelty inflicted on immigrants, the Trump administration (steered directly by its chief ghoul, […]
When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son David) hired blog-troll Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” they claimed were “traditionally ignored by […]
While the game-playing that RFK Jr.’s CDC has conducted is ongoing, they can only keep up the charade for so long. The nation is undergoing the worst outbreak of measles in over three decades, with Pennsylvania currently the hardest hit of all the states. As we’ve discussed, there have now been four measles-related deaths in […]
I’m sure whoever thought this might be a good idea — that would be the Dallas city council members who approved this contract — thought no one would ever find out about it. But nothing stays secret for long, not even furtive movements like this one, which added AI-addled cameras to garbage trucks with the […]
The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users. The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated […]
Last week, “Reckless” Ben Schneider did Wired’s “Autocomplete Interview” which is always fun. At one point, one of the questions is “Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?” and his answer is amusing (for anyone who isn’t one of Reckless Ben’s current lawyers): Does Reckless Ben have a law degree? My whole thing with when […]
We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it’s hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you’ll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start to see the results straight away. It helps you overcome the language barrier […]
Let’s start this off by clearing the air: Stephen Miller looks exactly like the sort of person who wants to elevate white people above everyone else. Sure, he doesn’t have the Hitler ‘stache or a blond pompadour, but he’s the same bit of unspectacular “whiteness” Hitler was. Miller is bald, mostly chinless, and looks like […]
In the piece Dave Willner and I published last week about why “the apocalypse won’t be sexy,” we discussed how the real threat wasn’t “rogue” out of control AI tools, but rather humans doing stupid shit, sometimes because they stop thinking in the presence of these AI machines. A deeply reported Bloomberg article by Ben […]
I’m starting to think we have unknowingly entered the age of great American civic nihilism. The impetus for that belief most recently has been RFK Jr. and the wider government’s complete acquiescence to his bald-faced lies and betrayals. If nobody can be bothered to lift a finger over that man, then they obviously don’t think […]
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]
stLouIST