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DNA might contain health information, but unlike a doctor’s office, 23andMe is not bound by the health-privacy law HIPAA. And the company’s privacy policies make clear that in the event of a merger or an acquisition, customer information is a salable asset. 23andMe promises to ask its customers’ permission before using their data for research or targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean the next boss will do the same. It says so right there in the fine print: The company reserves the right to update its policies at any time. A spokesperson acknowledged to me this week that the company can’t fully guarantee the sanctity of customer data, but said in a statement that “any scenario which impacts our customers’ data would need to be carefully considered. We take the privacy and trust of our customers very seriously, and would strive to maintain commitments outlined in our Privacy Statement.”

In recent years, there’s a tendency towards specialism and specialists, from the job market to identities to relationships to education and more. Conversations around university education, for example, tend to be focused on high-earning job prospects, rather than on developing multidisciplinary ways of thinking. The job market tends to favor people who have had a clear, laddered path to success.

Curiosity for curiosity’s sake is not discouraged, per se, but it’s not clearly monetizable either, and therefore can be deprioritized.

As of January, a third of Americans still believed the election was riddled with fraud, including nearly 75% of Republicans who say Joe Biden did not win the election legitimately. This is despite the fact the “evidence” has been little more than misleading social media videos and ridiculous affidavits signed by people who “observed vote counting” but clearly did not understand what they were witnessing.

Fox News and Newsmax notably issued on-air corrections and apologies for misleading their viewers — making it abundantly and explicitly clear that they had no information to support the egregious claims they had peddled for months on end. Fox News host Lou Dobbs, who aired and echoed Powell’s claims on his show, no longer has a job, reportedly for his role in spreading those lies.

Even One America News (OAN), our nation’s best attempt at a pro-Trump state media outlet, issued a comically long disclaimer before airing a two-hour documentary based on The Big Lie that the election was stolen. It also quietly removed stories about Dominion from its website without explanation or notification to its readers.

It feels daunting to sit down and say I’m going to write a book, a script, a story—who do I think I am? But under the umbrella of a project that isn’t for anyone but yourself, you can feel you finally have permission to take “creating” seriously as a verb, regardless of the product that comes from it.

“We are in a new phase of the war,” the military said in leaflets dropped over the area. “These areas are considered dangerous combat zones.” A later statement said three projectiles were identified crossing from northern Gaza into Israeli territory, with no injuries reported. Frantic residents fled again. “Since Oct. 7 to the present day, this is the 12th time that I and my children, eight individuals, have been homeless and thrown into the streets and do not know where to go,” said one, Samia Khader.

Religion prescribes, but even religion doesn’t give you the reasons for its prescriptions—that’s why it’s called faith. Like a child who doesn’t understand why she has to sleep before 9 P.M. (and has to take the unsatisfactory answer of “because you’re still growing!”), we can’t comprehend why our soul needs holy vitamins. And we don’t need to.

You can’t “think” your way to the soul. You also can’t “feel” your way to it. The soul is at the core of everything; when you neglect it, it doesn’t just go away, it turns to weird forms of obsession, addiction, and nihilism. It’s not something you grasp; it’s something that grasps you. It’s why our qualitative experiences are treated mechanistically, like how screen time-limiting apps temporarily block your social media addiction without addressing the real reason for your anxiety, loneliness, or envy.

Mr. Musk came to hate what he saw as Twitter’s two-tiered class system of the verified and unverified, and to him, selling off the check marks was the ultimate democratization of the site. Soon after completing his acquisition, he assigned Ms. Crawford to assemble a team and gave her a deadline of Nov. 7, 2022, for Blue’s relaunch. She had 10 days to deliver or risk being fired, three people with knowledge of the conversations said.

Many of the employees on the Blue team came to view the project as pointless at best and, at worst, something that could undermine trust. If everyone could be verified, then no one would truly be verified. As one Blue worker later wrote in a journal: “It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible.”

While many people saw the check mark as a designation of fame, it became an important part of Twitter’s utility. It marked the real accounts for brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, making the platform much more attractive to advertisers. And it signified authenticity for governments and emergency services, which provided information about train delays, elections and tornado warnings.

Mr. Sacks insisted that they should raise the price to $20 a month, from its current $4.99. Anything less felt cheap to him, and he wanted to present Blue as a luxury good. “Chanel could make a fortune selling a $99 bag, but it would be a one-time move,” he wrote. “A ‘promotional offer’ may not be the position we want. A luxury brand can always move down-market, but it’s very hard to move up-market once the brand is shot.” Jason Calacanis, a friend of Mr. Musk’s, disagreed. “It should be $99 a year,” he insisted. During one meeting, he launched into a spiel about how Twitter users were more likely to open their wallets for a $100-per-year subscription if it seemed slightly cheaper at the $99 price, as though he had just watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of consumer psychology.

To employees, the discussions were baffling. There was Mr. Musk, a man who had built multibillion-dollar companies, soliciting advice from a small inner circle of advisers who had little experience building social networks. Sure, they used Twitter, but these rich men were not representative of the hundreds of millions of people who logged in every day.

Ms. Crawford came up with her own tactics for dealing with Mr. Musk. She quickly learned that she could challenge him in one-on-one settings. Individually, Mr. Musk could be charming, willing to engage in discussion and listen to the expertise of his counterpart. Put him in a larger group setting with people outside his inner circle or those he didn’t trust, however, and Mr. Musk’s ego ran wild. He could never be seen as inferior or uninformed.

As the new Blue came into focus, so did the fears about how it would be exploited for impersonation. What would happen if an account pretending to be a local fire department declared an emergency? Or an account posing as a politician spread a lie about an upcoming vote? Image

The weekend before U.S. voters headed to the polls, Ms. Crawford made one last attempt in a private chat with her boss. “Do you want to be blamed for the outcome of this election?” she asked. “Well, when is it?” Mr. Musk replied. “It’s in two days,” Ms. Crawford said, stunned that he hadn’t clocked the date that she and her team had been warning him about since the start of the project. Mr. Musk paused, processing. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” he said after a moment. “OK, yeah, it’s fine. We can wait. Why don’t we wait?” The launch was moved to Nov. 9, the day after the election.

A software engineer calling in to the meeting posed a question to Mr. Musk: “What would you consider a serious incident that would require us to put back such a label or some other differentiation between accounts?” Mr. Musk intertwined his fingers and paused for a few seconds. “If there’s like death or serious injury or something like that, um, you know, uh,” he said, fidgeting. “Something beyond annoyance or mild confusion — that would be enough.”

Fun fact: The exit cycles of movies can be 2x shorter than those of tech startups.

all of these emerging movements start with major capital injections, therefore, novel fundraising systems, i.e., equity crowdfunding along with increasing institutional trust, could be useful catalyzers for this new era in Hollywood.

I think they make too many. [Laughs.] I think Hollywood has to learn to be missed. Hollywood used to be, at least, not too long ago, a place where you were begging for the movie; you were begging for them to give you a new Star Wars, a new this, a new that, you just couldn’t wait … Now it kind of feels the other way around. Hollywood is like, Do you want another one, do you want another one? I’ll give you two of these for the price of one! They’re just giving people too much that they’re not even asking for, and I think that’s never a good position. The whole system that controls [the] IPs should be more precious about them, and really pace themselves, and make sure the audience is dying for one, instead of just giving them five a year.

It gets to a point after 100 years of cinema that a lot of the big ideas that we came up with have a brand. If I told you, “I’m gonna write this original movie about a bunch of kids in a colony in space, and they go to the space station, and there’s a monster in there,” you’re gonna go, “It's Alien.” And I’ll go, “Oh no, it’s not Alien, it’s something else,” you’ll lose interest right away, go like, “Pfft, it’s a rip-off.”

After faithfully following his instructions in such a way that he nearly drowns Martin, he loses the trust of the Swintons and they decide to get rid of him, just as parents might get rid of a dangerous dog. Monica cannot bring herself to return David to Cybertronics. She pauses on the way and releases him into a forest, where he can join other free-range mechas. He will not die. He doesn't get cold, he doesn't get hungry, and apparently he has an indefinite supply of fuel. Monica's decision to release him instead of turning him in is based on her lingering identification with David; in activating him to love her, she activated herself to love him. His unconditional love must have been deeply appealing. We relate to pets in a similar way, especially to dogs, who seem to have been activated by evolution to love us.

an LLM by itself is not a product - it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful. That takes even more time.

I gave my usual speech about how you can't take an interpretation to a movie. You have to find it there already. No consensus emerged about what we had found. It was a tribute to Lynch that the movie remained compulsively watchable while refusing to yield to interpretation. The most promising direction we tried was to delineate the boundaries of the dreams(s) and the identities of the dreamer(s).

As the film goes on and its tight mosaic of characters flitter around each other, July mines all sorts of poignant hilarity from how people struggle to ask for the love they need. Everyone is available to each other in a way that the internet was just starting to make obvious at the time, but digital tools are already beginning to collapse the various distancing mechanisms that people use to keep themselves from getting hurt by their own desires. With a sensitivity that would seem alien in less courageous hands, July traces a dawning present in which people can share the most intimate of experiences with a perfect stranger, and still not even be able to risk making direct contact with someone standing right in front of them.

These statistics point to the fact that some Americans may not support female candidates or candidates of color not because of overt sexism and racism or even implicit bias, but because of more complicated fears about whether candidates with these identities can win. This is a concept known as "strategic discrimination," which explains that women and people of color are underrepresented in U.S. politics because voters hesitate to support nonwhite, nonmale candidates based on concerns about whether other voters will support them.

When astronauts return from space, they are carried out of their capsule because the full effect of Earth’s gravity, felt instantaneously upon landing, is strong enough to break bones. After months of floating in zero-G, your muscles atrophy, bone density drops, fluids redistribute, and your balance and sense of spacial orientation recalibrate. It takes time for the body to readjust to what used to be normal. Heartbreak feels a lot like coming back down to Earth because falling in love is akin to taking flight: Known to many by his Latin name only, Cupid (desire), the Greeks called the god of love Eros and often portrayed him as a handsome young man with rosy skin and large, lovely wings. The Greeks visualized this feeling of love by adding “pt” to “eros”, forming “pteros”, meaning “wing”: We take flight when we surrender to romance, letting it take us from over here to over there. Longing for someone is an invitation for us to travel from the status quo to a new world; perhaps, the reason why eroticism can be thrilling, embarrassing, or repulsive to talk about is because it offers us adventure — one of novelty and danger.

All of these promises are very Trumpian: Big, bold ideas that are (in many cases) widely supported by the vast majority of Americans, but are also obviously vague, in some cases not realistic, and very "strongman" in their attitude (like promising to punish protesters and conduct mass deportations).

The fundamental question in Friday’s ruling boiled down to: ‘who decides,’ courts or agencies? The conservative majority’s answer — courts — affects everything from clean air to drug safety to student loans, the broad landscape of government regulation. And that power matters more than ever now that Trump, who had appointed 28 percent of federal judges by the time he left office, has the prospect of naming more in a second term.”

A library is like going to Ikea. You already have a home, but you need a bit of help with furniture. You don’t feel like making your own table from scratch. Ikea allows you to pick and choose different things to go in your home. You are in control. A framework, on the other hand, is like building a model home. You have a set of blueprints and a few limited choices when it comes to architecture and design. Ultimately, the contractor and blueprint are in control. And they will let you know when and where you can provide your input.

Dating apps don’t work, and meeting people in person seems foreign, even impossible. But it was dating apps that drove IRL connections nearly extinct. In other words, dating apps did work, for almost a decade, by promising to cut out all the things about in-person dating that made us feel vulnerable or uncomfortable. Rejection now happens with a swipe, out of sight, with neither party the wiser. If you match and then change your mind, you can just unmatch without explanation.

This arc plays out across all kinds of apps, and all kinds of human relationships, as tech companies seek to find and solve every type of “friction” and discomfort. But those efforts are rooted in the mistaken idea that being a person shouldn’t come with difficult emotions—that we aren’t often, in fact, served by hard conversations or uncomfortable feelings.

A diplomatic “no” is when you’re clear about your feelings but empathetic to how the person on the receiving end might interpret those feelings.

Girl mossing recognises a need to step away from the pressures of modern, urban life, promoting spending time in nature as a restorative practice. The fast pace and pressure of neoliberal capitalism take an enormous toll on wellbeing: not just personal, but social and planetary. These pressures are most acutely felt by women – whose labour remains, in large part, undervalued and underpaid – and by young people, who are often in precarious work, priced out of the housing market. Yet they’re still bombarded with images of unattainable success on social media. Not so the moss selfies.

Girl rotting is another subversive form of rest and retreat, focused on being intentionally “unproductive” at home.

In China, there’s a parallel rise in “tangping/lying flat” among Chinese young people who are “rejecting high-pressure jobs” in favour of a “low-pressure life”, and in “bai lan” (letting things rot), “a voluntary retreat” from pursuing goals that are now seen as “too difficult to achieve”.

We typically strive for material rewards through hard work and achieve success through doing. We celebrate the “wins”: the promotion, the new house, marriage, the birth of children. By contrast, we really struggle “when things fall apart”, as they inevitably do, particularly when we are confronted with old age, sickness, and death – basically, with human decomposition.

Make no mistake: this is a promotional exercise for Apple Music more than it is criticism. Sure, most lists of this type are also marketing for publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and NME. Yet, for how tepid the opinions of each outlet often are, they have each given out bad reviews. We can therefore infer they have specific tastes and ideas about what separates great art from terrible art.

After Steve Jobs’ death came a river of articles questioning the internal culture he fostered, with several calling him an “asshole”. But that is mixing up a mean streak and a critical eye — Jobs, apparently, had both

It does not interrogate which albums are boring, expressionless, uncreative, derivative, inconsequential, inept, or artistically bankrupt. So why should we trust it to explain what is good? Apple’s ranking of albums lacks substance because it cannot say any of these things. Doing so would be a terrible idea for the company and for artists.

It is beyond my understanding why anyone seems to be under the impression this list is anything more than a business reminding you it operates a music streaming platform to which you can subscribe for eleven dollars per month.

For years, poll after poll from around the world has found high levels of distrust in their influence, handling of private data, and new developments. If these corporations were at all worried about this, they are not much showing it in their products — particularly the A.I. stuff they have been shipping. There has been little attempt at abating last year’s trust crisis. Google decided to launch overconfident summaries for a variety of search queries. Far from helping to sift through all that has ever been published on the web to mash together a representative summary, it was instead an embarrassing mess that made the company look ill prepared for the concept of satire. Microsoft announced a product which will record and interpret everything you do and see on your computer, but as a good thing.

why should we turn to them to fill gaps and needs in society? I certainly would not wish to indulge businesses which see themselves as entirely separate from the world.

These product introductions all look like hubris. Arrogance, really — recognition of the significant power these corporations wield and the lack of competition they face. Google can poison its search engine because where else are most people going to go? How many people would turn off Recall, something which requires foreknowledge of its existence, under Microsoft’s original rollout strategy?

There seems to be little attempt at persuasion. Instead, we are told to get on board because this rocket ship is taking off with or without us.

this isn’t just Apple’s chance to show it’s doing AI right. It’s also an opportunity to redefine the conversation about AI to make it more substantive and results-oriented–and, of course, to make Apple look better while doing it.

Days before gadget reviewers weighed in on the Humane Ai Pin, a futuristic wearable device powered by artificial intelligence, the founders of the company gathered their employees and encouraged them to brace themselves. The reviews might be disappointing, they warned.Humane’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, were right. In April, reviewers brutally panned the new $699 product, which Humane had marketed for a year with ads and at glitzy events like Paris Fashion Week. The Ai Pin was “totally broken” and had “glaring flaws,” some reviewers said. One declared it “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”

In recent months, the company has also grappled with employee departures and changed a return policy to address canceled orders. On Wednesday, it asked customers to stop using the Ai Pin charging case because of a fire risk associated with its battery.

Its setbacks are part of a pattern of stumbles across the world of generative A.I., as companies release unpolished products. Over the past two years, Google has introduced and pared back A.I. search abilities that recommended people eat rocks, Microsoft has trumpeted a Bing chatbot that hallucinated and Samsung has added A.I. features to a smartphone that were called “excellent at times and baffling at others.”

This account of Humane is based on interviews with 23 current and former employees, advisers and investors, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter or feared retaliation.

Many current and former employees said Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno preferred positivity over criticism, leading them to disregard warnings about the Ai Pin’s poor battery life and power consumption. A senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the product, they said, while others left out of frustration.

From the beginning, current and former employees said, the Ai Pin had issues, which reviewers later picked apart.One was the device’s laser display, which consumed tremendous power and would cause the pin to overheat. Before showing the gadget to prospective partners and investors, Humane executives often chilled it on ice packs so it would last longer, three people familiar with the demonstrations said. Those employees said such measures could be common early in a product development cycle.

When employees expressed concerns about the heat, they said, Humane’s founders replied that software improvements reducing power use would fix it. Mr. Chaudhri, who led design, wanted to keep the gadget’s sleek design, three people said.

Some employees tried persuading the founders not to launch the Ai Pin because it wasn’t ready, three people said. Others repeatedly asked them to hire a head of marketing. The role remained vacant before the product’s release.

a senior software engineer was let go after she questioned whether the Ai Pin would be ready by April. In a company meeting after the dismissal, Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno said the employee had violated policy by talking negatively about Humane, two attendees said.

There’s an old joke that ‘AI’ is whatever doesn’t work yet, because once it works, people say ‘that’s not AI - it’s just software’.

Kennedy has suggested purging staff at federal health agencies and devoting half of the National Institutes of Health's budget to researching alternative health care.

Trump's pick would put one of the nation's foremost vaccine skeptics in charge of America's health care agencies. Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again campaign's proposals have already alarmed some public health experts.

It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing.

We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

“What we’ve seen,” says Ed Saperia, dean of the London College of Political Technology, “is controversial content drives engagement. Extreme content drives engagement.” Creating toxic content became a viable livelihood, which my 16-year-old, on football X, noticed way before I did: people saying patently wrong things for hate-clicks.

high-attention tweets go straight to the top of the For You feed, driven by a “black box algorithm designed to keep you scrolling”, as Rose Wang, COO of another rival, Bluesky, puts it, but the user experience is screeds of repetition on topics tailored to annoy you.

We saw the real-life effects of this when misinformation over the identity, ethnicity and faith of the killer of three young girls in Southport incited explicitly racist unrest across the UK this August, such as hasn’t been seen since the 70s. X, Mulhall says, “was a central hub not only for creating the climate for the riots, but also the organisation and distribution of content that led to riots”.

Governments, meanwhile, have no reliable redress, even when, as Mulhall puts it, “decisions made on the west coast of America are demonstrably affecting our communities”. In April, Brazil’s supreme court sought suspensions of fewer than 100 X accounts, for hate speech and fake news – mainly supporters of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, disputing the legitimacy of his defeat. X refused, and declined to represent itself in court. On Monday, the court unanimously upheld a ban on the entire platform, arguing that it “considered itself above the rule of law”. It’s extraordinary that Musk didn’t do more to avoid that, from a business perspective, but it may be that there are things he values more than money, such as immunity from governmental or democratic constraint.

Donald Trump may have shocked the US legacy media by speaking directly to voters with coarse, increasingly unhinged messaging, but if we think a contented population, secure in a prosperous future, would have embraced his authoritarian lurch, we’re dreaming. Rage is out there, whether social media bankrolls it or not, and “all the mainstream platforms were generally failing on hate speech”, Mulhall says. “They didn’t want this content but they were struggling to deal with it. Then they would step up a bit after a Charlottesville [the white supremacist rally in 2017] or Capitol Hill.”

“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”

Musk’s commitment to free speech is jaw-droppingly unconvincing: he used it to reject Brazil’s demands, yet readily acceded to Narendra Modi’s demands in India, and suspended hundreds of accounts linked to farmers’ protests there in February this year. “Things like free speech are instruments to Musk, rather than principles,” Mulhall says. “He’s a tech utopian with no attachment to democracy.”

Musk has been named in a cyberbullying lawsuit brought by the gold medallist Imane Khelif. The boxer, who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex, was subjected to libellous claims about her gender by numerous public figures – British politicians, JK Rowling, Donald Trump – all on X. Andrew Tate, meanwhile, may have been charged by the Romanian authorities with human trafficking and rape, but his online misogynist fantasies of women as a slave caste, which have immense global reach, have attracted no censure greater than de-platforming, by YouTube, Insta, TikTok and Facebook – while the impact of these bans was lessened, even undone, by his freedom to operate on X

The main hurdle has been that people migrate in packs and until recently weren’t migrating fast enough. If they do, and Saperia is right, Bluesky and Threads (which now has 175 million active monthly users), will ultimately supplant X. Will it be the same? It can’t be – the free-for-all of the open web, from which Twitter created its famous “town square” discursive experience (anyone could chat, and look, the Coastguard Agency and CNN were also right there) has been replaced by a social media idea Saperia calls the “dark forest” and Wang describes as “you find your people in small spaces, and work together to build an experience that you want – basic human building blocks of interaction

Pennsylvania’s law disenfranchising voters who cast timely ballots but make an immaterial mistake is nonsensical. If a mailed ballot has arrived at election offices before Election Day, so we know it is timely, who cares if a voter has written in her birthdate rather than the correct date that she signed the ballot? The date requirement on a timely mailed ballot serves no purpose when state law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. Thousands of ballots are expected to be tossed in the upcoming election for this technical defect.