AI-generated obituaries litter search results, turning the deaths of private individuals into clunky, repetitive content.
Skiff’s privacy-centric Google Workspace alternative is coming under the Notion umbrella as it moves further into the productivity space with things like AI features, and the recent launch of Notion Calendar.
How will we notice aliens hovering overhead when we’re all too busy scrolling? They’ll make a Squarespace website, obviously.
That’s the goofy premise, anyway, of Hello Down There, a Scorsese-directed Squarespace Super Bowl commercial.
The buzziest new thing in social networking is a big deal. It’s also very confusing. And it’s not actually new. Let’s talk about it.
The editor of the popular tech newsletter talks about leaving Substack and where he’s seeing successful business models in media.
That comes courtesy of Alessandro Paluzzi, who frequently reverse engineers and reveals Threads and Instagram features. The new option lets you turn fediverse sharing on and off at will and you can easily copy your username formatted for the decentralized Activity Pub social protocol.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said recently that Threads users will also be able to follow and interact with fediverse accounts from Threads, though their accounts will have to be public to do so.
Hugging Face tech lead Philipp Schmid posted yesterday that users can now create custom chatbots in “two clicks” using Hugging Chat Assistant. Users’ creations are then publicly available.
Schmid directly compares the feature to OpenAI’s GPTs feature, and adds they can use “any available open LLM, like Llama2 or Mixtral.”
Android app developer Dylan Roussel leaked an apparent changelog this morning that says “Bard is now Gemini” — the name used for the new model Google put in service last year to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4.
The log says Google will debut voice chat with Gemini, as well as a new “Ultra 1.0” model with “Gemini Advanced,” a paid plan that offers ChatGPT Plus-like file uploading features.
As part of its moves to comply with EU regulations Apple announced last week that it was opening up iOS to other browser engines — in theory meaning Chrome and Firefox could build better, more competitive browsers. Mozilla pretty quickly said it was “extremely disappointed,” and that Apple was trying its best to make the process awful for competitors. Now Google Chrome’s Parisa Tabriz says the same.
Guess we might not be getting a bunch of cool browsers after all. At least not anytime soon.
Wired has an interview with Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, all about the state of Threads’ plans to decentralize and join the world of ActivityPub. The short version: it’s a process, but it’s happening! And Meta knows exactly how big Threads is, what it’ll do to the fediverse when it joins:
“We’re kind of like the big whale that’s coming into this conversation.”
Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan posted today that the company had “decided to retire” the feature that let you view a previous version of a webpage right from search results, as reported by Search Engine Land.
Adding “cache:” to a URL (as in cache:theverge.com) still works, but soon, it won’t. Sullivan said he hopes Google will replace the cached option with Internet Archive links, but offered “no promises.”
Post launched in 2022 as a way to read ad-free news articles and paywalled content with a points-based system. But now, it’s rolling out a number of improvements, including native comments you can leave on feeds, repost, and tag people in.
There’s also an update to make navigating between posts and comment threads smoother, along with a new real-time notification system that will keep you “up to date with accurate comment counts, activity stream updates, and much more.” Post is also working on building achievements, status badges, and rewards for users.
[Post News]
The dream of the early internet is alive in PI.FYI, a new app spun out from Perfectly Imperfect.
With a little casual hexadecimal memorization and pattern recognition skill, you can become a QR code-reading machine — no pesky computer required!
The black and white boxes represent binary 1s and 0s, respectively, and it’s read in a zig-zagging pattern up and down the code, starting from the bottom-right corner. Check out this handy guide to learn how today!
The unsubscribe option now shows up when hovering over emails in Gmail on the web, rather than after opening them. Meanwhile, you’ll find the option at the top of opened emails in the iOS and Android Gmail app, rather than tucked away behind the three dots menu. Hooray, discoverability!
Also, reporting spam doesn’t offer a “Report spam & unsubscribe” option anymore, and instead invites you to simply “Unsubscribe” to legitimate senders.
Google is adding AI image generation to Bard tomorrow, according to developer Dylan Roussel, who shared a screenshot of a changelog dated for tomorrow.
Roussel says it will use Imagen, Google’s text-to-image model, shown in a video of an earlier iteration.
GameStop will shut down the NFT marketplace on February 2nd “due to the continuing regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space,” reported by Decrypt yesterday.
That’s the same reason the company offered for shutting down its crypto wallet last year. The marketplace opened just a year and a half ago. The SEC was keenly interested in crypto throughout 2023, and took its first unregistered security enforcement against an NFT project in August.
