Nilay Patel

Editor-in-Chief

Nilay PatelJun 30, 2023

Here’s Putin sitting in a gaming chair to, uh, demonstrate strength.

Incredible payoff to this paragraph in the NYT:

Days after an aborted rebellion in Russia by a mercenary group presented a dramatic challenge to his leadership, President Vladimir V. Putin made highly choreographed public appearances in an effort to project power and control, even as U.S. officials said early intelligence reports suggested that a top general had been detained in connection with the failed uprising.

Nothing projects power and control after a coup like that expression in that headrest. Put it in the history books.

Well, here he is.

Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images

Nilay PatelJun 29, 2023

Google’s search AI listens to a lot of Rush, I guess.

I can’t stop laughing at this. “Info quality may vary,” indeed.

A Google Search Generative Experience screenshot where the query is “what is the best music” and the answer is a long list of genres followed by “some say progressive rock is the best genre because it takes the most talent to listen to and requires the best taste in music.”

Many people are saying prog rules.

Nilay PatelJun 28, 2023

“In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary.”

The eponymous Bloonface recently shut down their Mastodon instance, with a blog post discussing in detail the current culture clash gripping the decentralized social network as various folks contend with the launch of Instagram Threads, which will eventually interoperate through the ActivityPub protocol.

[T]he people who are broadly “in charge” of Mastodon, as much as anyone is “in charge” of it, are those who are happy with it as is. So things like the follow UX do not matter to them, because they are already on big servers and have big follow lists already, so they have no insight into what new users go through. The new users have no real feedback mechanism, so they just leave and get frustrated, so things will never change.
To strain the analogy to breaking point; rather than a nice desktop login screen, a new user to Mastodon on pretty much anything except a big server gets presented with the equivalent of the blinking white-on-black text of a barebones Debian login screen. This is not fine. No wonder people left.

Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?

[Café Lob-On]

Why CEO David Baszucki is ready for Roblox to grow up

Nilay Patel and Alex HeathJun 27, 2023

Nilay PatelJun 26, 2023

As requested: comment counts on the homepage for quickposts.

(And regular posts.) They’re right over there on the left for quickposts, and under the headline for regular posts. We’ve been slowly iterating our redesign for a while now — most of the work has gone into our fancy new live StoryStream feeds, but we’re coming back to the homepage now and I’m excited for you all to see what’s coming next.

Nilay PatelJun 26, 2023

God that’s just a big silly wiper.

You know how Steve Jobs initially responded to iPhone 4 antenna issues with “just avoid holding it in this way”? That, but for rain.

Nilay PatelJun 25, 2023

You can say blue bubble bullying isn’t real... but it’s real.

Even if you’re in the NBA. I think this is the third or fourth story like this we’ve heard from pro athletes, actually?

Nilay PatelJun 22, 2023

The “AI Hub” Discord server comes under fire from the RIAA.

The server, which has more than 142,000 members, includes voice models for popular artists — and those voice models may or may not contain the underlying training data used to make them. (You know: songs.) That’s a pretty straightforward copyright claim to make, but we’re headed directly towards the RIAA saying voice models are infringement no matter what. It’s a laser bong, baby.

RIAA Targets 'AI Hub' Discord Users Over Copyright Infringement * TorrentFreak

[torrentfreak]

Nilay PatelJun 21, 2023

Hey, Microsoft paid attention to Skype!

I just opened Skype to appear on CNBC (they’ll take basically any videocall feed, and I think Skype’s video quality looks the best on TV) and, well, Microsoft’s shoved Bing AI in it. No one is safe.