Adi Robertson
The FTC has called Matt Booty as its first witness.
Booty is the head of Xbox Game Studios and one of many Microsoft executives set to testify on both sides.
Adi Robertson
Senior Editor, Tech & Policy
Senior Editor, Tech & Policy
More From Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
PSA: Section 230 does not protect teens sharing their Instagram passwords.
One of Section 230’s lesser-known elements is protection for users, not just providers, of online platforms. That element got an interesting test this month, when an appeals court ruled on whether a high-schooler who created an Instagram account was liable for letting friends bully teachers with it. Per the ruling, things did not go well for him:
When a student causes, contributes to, or affirmatively participates in harmful speech, the student bears responsibility for the harmful speech. And because H.K. contributed to the harmful speech by creating the Instagram account, granting K.L. and L.F. access to the account, joking with K.L. and L.F. about their posts, and accepting followers, he bears responsibility for the speech related to the Instagram account.
Legal blogger Eric Goldman thinks this was the wrong call — but either way, it’s a fascinating edge case for 230.
Adi Robertson
World of Horror is getting a full release and console support on October 19th.
I’ve been playing the Junji Ito-influenced horror RPG periodically since the Early Access launch in 2020, and I’m incredibly excited to try the full game! It’ll be available on PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 and 5.
Adi Robertson
Why your phone camera can’t capture the sky right now.
If you’re taking pictures of today’s apocalyptic fire-tinted sky on the US East Coast, you might notice the colors are far more normal than the ones your eyes see. Ian Bogost wrote a deep dive on what that means back in 2020:
The un-oranged images were caused by one of the most basic features of digital cameras, their ability to infer what color is in an image based on the lighting conditions in which it is taken. Like the people looking up at it, the software never expected the sky to be bathed in orange.
Your Phone Wasn’t Built for the Apocalypse
[The Atlantic]
Adi Robertson
Sign me up for the AI criticism softener.
I am incredibly susceptible to agonizing over critiques of my creative work. Congrats to Zach Gage (designer of Spelltower and Really Bad Chess) for hitting on a pretty clever way to get the relevant criticism with a layer of distance... and still luxuriate in fully human praise.
Adi Robertson
If you’re curious about my AI-generated cyberpunk novella...
I got a request for a more readable PDF version of The Electric Sea, a Sudowrite-generated story about hacking, artistic sellouts, and a floating domed city run by an AI. (Fair warning, it’s not great!) So for anybody else who’d rather not navigate 12 Tumblr posts, I’m posting the manuscript here too, minus the prompts and notes in those posts. I also had Sudowrite suggest a nom de plume for itself — say hello to Elodie Paradox, the pulp sci-fi answer to Aidan Marchine.
The Electric Sea
[The Verge]
Developer Frictional Games moves outside of its comfort zone for the latest Amnesia, and the results are appropriately stressful.
Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
Apple says running Unity apps on visionOS will be easy.
Apple’s WWDC State of the Union is giving us more details about how developers can work with visionOS. That includes confirmation that Unity apps are supposed to run easily on the Vision Pro — including alongside other, non-Unity apps.
