Josh Dieza, writing for The Verge & New York Magazine:
This is what concerns her more than the AI itself: that it’s bringing to knowledge work the sort of precarious platform labor that has transformed taxi driving and food delivery. Meanwhile, she watches in horror the desperate gratitude of her colleagues as they rejoice at the 7PM announcement of incoming work.
“How long are these tasks expected to last?” one worker asked in Slack.
“I’m wondering too, I’d like to know whether I can sleep or not.”
With no answer forthcoming, they swapped tips on how to stave off sleep.
This piece was unsettlingly enlightening. I had no idea how perverse some AI companies have become. Being let go from your job because of AI is horrifying as-is, but then working to train the very AI that replaced the work you once did? And to top it off, losing work again as the AI you’ve trained has become good enough to no longer need you to train it. I had to walk away from the screen for a bit after reading this one.
From Casey Newton:
Indeed, no one asked me for permission to use my name in this way, much less compensate me for whatever expert-reviewing labor my AI clone was apparently now doing on my behalf. (An annual subscription to Grammarly costs $144.)
I’ve long assumed that before too long, AI might take my job. I just assumed that someone would tell me when it happened.
This whole Grammarly thing is so dumb.
It’s one thing to make a shitty feature that deceives its users into thinking they’re getting legitimate feedback from well-respected figures, but it’s even worse to use the name of said figures without them knowing. Grammarly’s days are truly numbered, it seems — that they’re grasping for relevance in such a way. Shame, was a fan of it once.
As nice as it was to manifest this site with help from Claude Code, I’ve been reminded how dystopian — and downright shitty — AI can also be. Would love to get to the point where its inherent value is understood and grounded in reality. Off the trajectory where everyone tries to use it in every way, shape, and form they can think of without understanding if it’s actually worth it.
This seems long overdue and somehow still not enough. I’ve recently discovered how much I enjoy concerts, and 2025 was an epic year with the amount of shows I experienced. But dealing with Ticketmaster exclusively to buy these tickets was always maddening. Hope these changes make things better in every way.
Last week, Apple refreshed several of their products, as had been rumored. We saw:
Wait, what?
MacBook Neo?
"Last August, an email with a different address popped into Albert’s inbox asking if she might have 15 minutes to chat. This time, the gift amounted to $50 million. “Fifteen million?” Albert recalled asking, scribbling notes to herself so she would know she had heard correctly. “Fifty million, 5-0,” came the reply. "
Whenever I find myself daydreaming about winning the lottery, I don’t ever make it to the part where I’d try to donate my money to the right causes. That’s probably because there’s no lottery in the world that will ever get you close to a tiny fraction of what multi-billionaires have. Which is insane to think about. Enter: MacKenzie Scott. A great example of how you can take an incomprehensible amount of wealth and try to pay it forward in meaningful and impactful ways, not tear down the Fourth Estate.
“Almost Social” is the right name for how most of us use the internet now. Present but not quite engaged. Watching but not joining. A participant in the audience of other people’s lives.
I’ve been working on Almost Social for what feels like forever. It’s a good thing ideas don’t have an expiration date.
I’ve actually had numerous versions of it. As new technologies emerged, there would new workflows to explore, new devices to obtain. All in the hope of building a space online where I could come and jot down my thoughts, opinions — in a place I owned. Not a place where my data was owned by another entity (cough, Meta, cough).
But then life occurred. And I slowly got pulled away in all sort of directions, further and further from ever having a version of Almost Social I would be most proud of.
Until now.