The latest AI manifesto, from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, says a lot about the industry’s current moment.
Here’s a video clip of my Decoder exchange on tax lobbying with Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi that the company called “egregious” and “disappointing” and asked us to delete. Fair warning: it’s a TikTok so it’s edited, but you can listen to the entire unedited clip on the pod this week.
In what feels like a preview of the influencer media problems of tomorrow, Touchdown Tom is now both the lead analyst for Fox and a part-owner of the Raiders. He’s still allowed to call Raider games for some reason, but part of the NFL’s overall solution to the obvious conflict of interest issues is to bar Brady from criticizing officiating during games. The Athletic asked a number of sports TV producers for their read on it:
The producers also noted something interesting: You will have people actively listening specifically for whether Brady says something critical about another franchise or officials. The converse, too. People will evaluate whether he is intentionally avoiding what is in front of him. That’s a mess for everyone.
“You have to at least know you have the freedom to share your opinion about officiating,” said a veteran NFL broadcaster who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “These are split-second decisions on air. You can’t ponder whether the league will be happy.”
Brady calling Chiefs / 49ers this afternoon; we’ll see how he handles it.
That’s a federal judge ordering Ron DeSantis’ deeply weird surgeon general to stop threatening local TV stations with criminal proceedings if they air an ad in support of Amendment 4, which would restore abortion rights in the state. At least one station stopped airing the ad, but the judge in the cast issued a temporary injunction, saying
By threatening criminal proceedings for broadcasting a “political advertisement claiming that current Florida law does not allow physicians to perform abortions necessary to preserve the lives and health of pregnant women,” Defendant has engaged in viewpoint discrimination.
DeSantis sure does love going to court to learn about the First Amendment!
The future of marketing — and, in a way, everything else — is getting a shakeup.
It was announced in May but the deal to sell the website maker to private equity firm Permira is now closed, following some haggling which raised the final price from $6.9B to $7.2B. CEO Anthony Casalena is staying on board and keeping his ownership stake — he told me on Decoder in 2023 that it wasn’t “the most fun time to be a public tech company,” so we’ll see if he likes being a PE CEO any better.
There was a flurry of headlines earlier this week claiming vinyl sales were down 33 percent this year, which would have been the first decline in 17 years. Don’t fret, though: it turns out sales were actually up 6.2 percent — Luminate, the firm which handles most of the music industry’s metrics, changed its methodology at the beginning of the year.
In Luminate’s mid-year report, the company stated: “While the new modeled methodology more accurately represents the independent retail market, we do not have comparable historical data to provide an accurate year-over-year trend. Therefore, independent retail physical sales are not included in our H1 2024 vs. H1 2023 U.S. physical sales reporting.”
The Discogs blog has a full dive, including an explanation of the metrics change. Counting things: a never-ending challenge.
[Discogs]
After years of demand, our friends over at Eater just released their app for iOS, which helps you find nearby restaurants they’ve covered with over 10,000 maps in more than 100 cities. (Tip: if you’re looking to show off to friends and family, the Heatmaps are a great way to discover the hottest new restaurants.)
Download it from the App Store right now and read more about the app on Eater. (And for all of our disclosure enthusiasts, Eater is owned by Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)
The cofounder of the world’s largest education app thinks AI and gamification can supercharge language learning.