edisonresearch.com/podcasts-lead-am-fm-in-spoken-word-listening-marking-a-first/
Reuters:
New York’s attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer whose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota, accusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children through its use of “loot boxes.” In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General Letitia James said Valve’s loot boxes amounted to “quintessential gambling,” violating the state’s constitution and penal law, with valuable items often hard to win and many items worth pennies.
Link: reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-sues-video-game…
How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account. “The answer to why powerful people in some other parts of the world face consequences, while in America they rarely do, is that elite impunity is now an American national project.”
Iran's president says Tehran isn't pursuing nuclear weapons and has no intention of doing so, as a third round of crucial talks with the US continues in Geneva. Also: former US secretary of state and first lady, Hillary Clinton, appears before a Congressional committee investigating the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un says his country "could get along well" with the United States, if Washington recognises Pyongyang as a nuclear power. US condemns the use of drones by both sides in the conflict in Sudan. And a new study reveals why some older people's minds are as sharp as they were when they were young.
Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers (free WSJ piece at MSN). “Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in.”
Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses. “The letter…marks one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.”
If people are only using this a couple of times a week at most, and can’t think of anything to do with it on the average day, it hasn’t changed their life. OpenAI itself admits the problem, talking about a ‘capability gap’ between what the models can do and what people do with them, which seems to me like a way to avoid saying that you don’t have clear product-market fit.
Hence, OpenAI’s ad project is partly just about covering the cost of serving the 90% or more of users who don’t pay (and capturing an early lead with advertisers and early learning in how this might work), but more strategically, it’s also about making it possible to give those users the latest and most powerful (i.e. expensive) models, in the hope that this will deepen their engagement.
— Benedict Evans, How will OpenAI compete?
Tags: openai, chatgpt, benedict-evans, ai
inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright-typographic
When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.
wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-foundation-staff-over-epstein-ties-67f39ef5
Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns in 2013.
“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates told staff. Speaking of his ex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.”
“Kind of” is doing a lot of work there.
Link: wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-foundation-staff…
Adam Engst returns to the show to talk, in detail, about certain of the UI changes in iOS 26 and Apple’s version 26 OSes overall. In particular, the new Unified view in the Phone app, and the Filter pop-up menu in both the Phone and Messages apps. Also: a shoutout to Balloon Help.
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