Jason Koebler on the ritual of analyzing a killer’s online life:
“People—including me—want to know who Mangione is and what made him allegedly do this. It’s just that it’s not clear what we are actually learning from years-old social media accounts.”
The company’s new AI chief on working for Microsoft, the OpenAI relationship, and when superintelligence might actually arrive.
You can already see parts of the rebrand live on Mozilla’s website, including its new flag logo that doubles as a dino.
My new favorite fan-binding project: Second Head, a collage of fanfic sentences that employ a vivid yet frequently repeated turn of phrase.
There’s an impulse, I think, to in-group even when performing a creative act. A feeling that there are certain ways one Should go about the act, by virtue of seeing it performed that way ... we make what we see and we make what we think we should make. At least, at first.
Consider my emerald orbs transfixed.
Despite everything, websites are still a pretty neat idea — but what if AI builds them?
Meta seemed to have bought the domain earlier this year, sometime after it bought the company that owned it prior to the debut of threads.net, where Meta’s Twitter competitor lives.
Previously, visiting the threads.com URL didn’t show anything, but today, it shows... well, an error message. With a “Meta © 2024” and a Facebook logo.
After days of explosive growth on the platform, the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours (versus 360,000 in all of 2023).
The team added that it’s working to bring on new members and asks users to help by reporting troll, spam, and scam accounts. Bluesky has also implemented email verification for new signups.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed during a live X session that Elon Musk will be “very involved” in helping thwart The Onion’s purchase of Infowars, according to Mother Jones.
Whether or not that’s true, it’s an excuse to remember that Musk once wanted to buy The Onion, didn’t, then funded Thud, a satirical media company, with Onion alums. (He backed out, reportedly because he worried about being targeted by the satire.)
US District Judge Christopher Lopez put The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars on pause and ordered a hearing to go over the results of the bankruptcy auction, according to Variety. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction,” Lopez said during an emergency status conference, Variety reports.
Our sister site Polygon has joined us in getting active on Bluesky, complete with a starter pack of reporters. If you prefer your decentralization ActivityPub-flavored, they’re still posting on Mastodon too.
The Verge’s Bluesky account is now actively posting stories from the site, and there’s a starter pack for following individual reporters, editors, and others. Come find us!
As spotted by @DuaneStorey on X, the “WP Engine Tracker” says more than 16,000 sites stopped using WP Engine since late September, which is when WordPress.com parent company Automattic started its public campaign against the third-party hosting service.
Meanwhile, Automattic’s response to WP Engine’s lawsuit claimed the company “failed to plausibly allege specific financial harm.”
The long-running instance hosts some of the fediverse’s great bots, like one that imagines the Google Searches of Star Trek: TNG’s Commander Riker. Another is posting 2001: A Space Odyssey, one frame at a time (which could take about five years).
Blaming ongoing expenses, botsin.space creator Colin Mitchell writes in a blog post that, starting not long after December 15th, it will go read-only until March 2025.
[muffinlabs.com]
If you were a nerd online in the early ‘10s, you may recall Lore Sjöberg’s Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Speak with Monsters. The webcomic went dark years ago and it’s been only available in spotty online archives. But it’s getting republished (with an archival installment every Friday) in Sjöberg’s newsletter, starting with a strip based on the early D&D illustration below.
During the Web Creator summit, Google Search VP Pandu Nayak responded to concerns about smaller sites getting outranked on the search engine, as reported by Mountain Weekly News founder Mike Hardaker:
Our goal is to surface great content for users. I suspect there is a lot of great content you guys are creating that we are not surfacing to our users, but I can’t give you any guarantees unfortunately. We are focused on things for our users, that is not going to change.
[Mike Hardaker]
On Google’s Q3 earnings call, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski asked:
Why doesn’t it make sense to have two completely different search experiences? One, an agent-like answers engine and then, two, a links-based more traditional search engine? You could innovate on both and let the consumer decide.
Sundar replied: “I do think having two surfaces for us allows us to experiment more.”
But Google rep Chris Pappas tells us he’s referring to two different AI surfaces — AI Overviews and the Gemini App — not good ol’ link-based search.
Nothing beside remains:
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk — in digital form — of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
[Internet Archive Blogs]
