Threads has quickly blown past the other Twitter alternatives in terms of registered accounts. The highest account number badge I’ve seen on Instagram so far this morning puts its count at over 86 million.
At the current pace, it’s likely Threads will hit 100 million today.
The messaging app has become a key channel for news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the government’s relationship with it is complicated.
A Canadian farmer has just been fined tens of thousands of dollars over a thumbs up emoji. The farmer said he used the emoji to acknowledge receipt of a contract. But the court sided with the buyer, calling the thumbs up emoji “a non-traditional means to ‘sign’ a document.”
Apparently users could get around paywalls by using ChatGPT’s Bing integration, which the company just introduced in May (via Windows Central). Today, OpenAI announced it was disabling the beta integration so it could fix the issue:
We have learned that the ChatGPT Browse beta can occasionally display content in ways we don’t want. For example, if a user specifically asks for a URL’s full text, it might inadvertently fulfill this request.
As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature... while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible...
Oh, Bing. You’re always a good time.
Software Engineer PJ Evans put a bot on Mastodon that posts a single frame from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey once an hour, and has been for a month. 1,300 toots in, it just reached the title card yesterday.
Evans says it’ll take, oh, about five years to complete. That’s quite an odyssey.
#BookTok is evidently a big thing, and seeing how influential its platform is, TikTok owner ByteDance has begun to court writers to publish their books under its new 8th Note Press, according to The New York Times.
Not everyone sees this as good news. Though it is offering rates “competitive with industry standards,” some worry ByteDance will push its own books at the expense of others.
[The New York Times]
Reddit user OhItsTom found Spotify’s group session feature in the desktop version of Spotify’s debug window.
Mobile users with Spotify Premium have been able to do this for years, but a desktop version has been missing — looks like that’s getting rectified soon.
Time to save all your Gfycat GIFs. The Snap, inc.-owned GIF-repository site updated its homepage on June 30th with a message saying it would be closing up shop (via Hacker News):
The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com
Snap’s acquisition of Gfycat was a sticking point last year when UK regulators reviewed a decision to force Meta to sell similar site Giphy after determining Meta wasn’t properly informed of the Snap’s pruchase. Meta had to sell it in the end.
