Adi Robertson

Legal blogger and podcaster Ken White has some thoughts on Elon Musk’s yet-unfulfilled promise of a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters (for simply noting that X’s loose moderation policy lets through heinous content) and the larger pattern of insisting “freedom of speech” means “freedom from criticism”:

A purportedly leaked memo started going around Tumblr last night, suggesting much of the site’s staff is getting moved to other parts of Automattic (its parent company) after it failed to boost its audience. The screenshot has spread to other sites through people including Waxy’s Andy Baio, but I haven’t seen any official confirmation — we pinged Automattic several hours ago and have yet to receive a response.

A fitting use of transformer models: using AI to Michael Bay-ify any movie scene! But as the fine users of Metafilter note, you can give anything a dose of Old Bay. The possibilities are endless and filled with robot arms.

I just finished watching it, and as a longtime fan of Naoki Urasawa’s manga — a somber murder-mystery adaptation of a 1960s Astro Boy arc, set in a world where robots are grappling with their own humanity and the aftermath of a war — I wholeheartedly endorse Joshua Rivera’s praise of the recent adaptation. It’s lovely! Maybe the best new thing I’ve seen appear on Netflix all year.

I’ll lay my cards on the table: I disagree with tech policy luminary Tim Wu’s support for a lot of the child safety bills being proposed in the US right now. But his Atlantic story on their failure underscores just how bad Congress has been at passing any regulation (or even empowering tech oversight agencies to function) amid a bunch of grandstanding about “Big Tech”:

At midnight ET tonight, the US Copyright Office will close its extended public comment period for how copyright should play with AI. And while I’m not seeing the absolute circus that we got with 22 million (mostly fake) net neutrality comments, it’s received a respectable number so far! I’m looking forward to digging into them.