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Received before yesterday

Kesha is now a startup founder

23 May 2025 at 19:09
Kesha may have taken the dollar sign out of her name, but now, the singer is thinking about money again β€” not for herself, but to fund the seed round of her new startup, Smash. According to Kesha’s Instagram post, Smash will be a β€œcommunity-based platform to connect and protect music creators,” which aligns with […]

Marjorie Taylor Greene picked a fight with Grok

23 May 2025 at 18:09
Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a β€œbug” that made it tell users about the β€œwhite genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic … and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a β€œprogramming […]

Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created

23 May 2025 at 16:14
Discord is entering its second decade as a company and is seeking to go public. Along the way, it’s changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it’s an AI platform […]

Thousands of people have embarked on a virtual road trip via Google Street View

16 May 2025 at 22:17
It’s Friday afternoon and I’m listening to Bowdoin College’s radio station, interspersed with ambient car honking noises. I am not in Maine. I am not in a car. I am at my desk. This is Internet Roadtrip. Internet Roadtrip is what I will call an MMORTG (massive multiplayer online road trip game). Neal Agarwal, the […]

Spotify responds to backlash over public podcast play counts

16 May 2025 at 15:31
Spotify announced last week that it would roll out public play counts on all podcasts as a way of β€œhelping attract new fans.” But podcasters swiftly responded with criticism of the new feature β€” mainly, that it would further promote podcasts that already have large audiences while making smaller shows less appealing to new listeners. […]

Government officials are kind of bad at the internet

26 April 2025 at 16:00
Perhaps no one in the world has made such catastrophic tech flubs this year as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The saga started when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he had been mistakenly added to an unauthorized Signal group chat by U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, where numerous high-ranking […]

Discord appoints former Activision Blizzard exec Humam Sakhnini as CEO

23 April 2025 at 17:57
Amid rumors that the company is eyeing an IPO, Discord appointed former Activision Blizzard Vice Chairman Humam Sakhnini as CEO. Discord co-founder Jason Citron will leave his CEO role after 13 years at the company. Discord straddles the gaming and social media spaces β€” despite its initial emergence as a platform for online multiplayer gamers […]

Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams accuses Meta of colluding with China

9 April 2025 at 21:34
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former head of Global Public Policy, testified before the U.S. Senate today about the company’s relationship with China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company now known as Meta worked directly with the Chinese Community Party (CCP) to β€œundermine U.S. national security and betray American values,” she said. She alleges that Facebook created custom-built […]

At last, MrBeast weighs in on the global economic crisis du jour

8 April 2025 at 18:59
Your 401k is suffering. The billionaires are fighting. The gamers are imperiled. Not even the penguins on McDonald Island, where no humans reside, have been spared. But at long last, 26-year-old YouTuber and chocolatier MrBeast has weighed in on President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to impose sweeping tariffs on imports. Jokes aside, the prolific YouTuber […]

Meta officially says goodbye to its US fact-checkers on Monday

4 April 2025 at 18:01
Meta will no longer have any fact-checkers in the U.S. come Monday, according to chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan. Meta announced this significant policy change in January when it also loosened its content moderation rules. The timing of this change coincided with President Trump’s inauguration, which Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended after […]

Studio Ghibli hasn’t commented on OpenAI’s onslaught of AI copies, but the fan subreddit has

3 April 2025 at 17:39
When OpenAI debuted its image-generation feature in ChatGPT last week, social media exploded when users realized that they could make AI-generated images that looked like something out of an animated film from Studio Ghibli. Fans hoped that Studio Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki would take a stand, but the 84-year-old animator has remained silent. In the […]
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