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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 1h

They're nice people but they let Elon dog-walk them. The moment he proposed the takeover they didn't even bother to propose other scenarios that could generate more value for investors. And now X is worth dramatically less than Twitter ever was. That's what I mean when I say "ruined "

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 5h

Great news: now everyone who ruined Twitter is incredibly rich

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 5h

Filing: Musk and X agree to settle a lawsuit by Twitter's ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and others over $128M+ in unpaid severance (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 20h

Wrote about fresh signs of an AI bubble (and why the industry says the worries are mostly overblown) www.platformer.news/ai-bubble-20...

We have entered the "weird financial tricks" phase of the bubble. A reliable indicator of bubbles is that companies concoct bizarre financial instruments and accounting measures to paper over their problems. In Fortune, Allie Garfinkel reports that venture capitalists are irked at some of the creative accounting going on in their portfolios. Some startups are reporting one-time sales as "recurring revenue." Others technically show "recurring revenue" for what are essentially trials.

And that's on the tame side. For crazy, you can look to Robinhood's suggestion that it might offer "tokenized" equity in OpenAI. By "tokenized," Business Insider reports, Robinhood means "blockchain-enabled representations of securities like stocks." In reality, they have no connection to OpenAI equity whatsoever. But that doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be able to gamble on the mirage!

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 21h

Just got pitched on going to this event and I would rather attend the Riyadh Comedy Festival

An event featuring "AI-powered comedy by Laugh GPT"

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Reposted by Casey Newton

kate conger @kateconger.com · 23h

Elon Musk once said he would pursue former Twitter execs to the ends of the earth. Instead, he just settled their $128 million lawsuit. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 1d

"I want to make sure we leave a lot of time for questions" — someone who is about to leave exactly 10 minutes for questions

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 1d

I'm not saying Jony Ive has no ideas for building AI hardware, but Jony Ive does sound exactly like I would if I were being interviewed about AI hardware and I had no idea how to build it

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 1d

"At the end of the day, it's an idea" — Jony Ive, after a five-minute windup at OpenAI Dev Day, on how he comes up with ideas.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 1d

In this edition we're also launching the Following feed, part of our new approach to curating links. Each day we're giving you three to five stories we're following, why we're following them, and what people are saying about them. Today we wrote about reactions to Sora

Zelda Williams, daughter of the late comedian Robin Williams, begged people in an Instagram story to stop sending her Sora videos of her dad. "You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it," she wrote. "Gross."

Meanwhile, what do average users want? Fewer content restrictions. We found App Store reviews reading “It’s so censored it’s not even fun,” and “the “safeguards in place prevent you from making anything worth watching,” among other complaints.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 1d

I wrote about OpenAI's ambitious platform play and the Cambridge Analytica flashbacks it inspired. Plus, Sam Altman takes my question about enshittification risk www.platformer.news/openai-dev-d...

At launch, OpenAI is promising a more rigorous approach to data privacy. OpenAI will share only what it needs to with developers, executives said. (They essentially hand-waved through the details, though, so the actual mechanics will bear scrutiny.) Unlike Facebook, though, OpenAI has no friend graph to worry about — whatever might go wrong between you, ChatGPT, and a developer, it will likely not involve giving away the contact information of all of your friends.

At the same time, the AI graph may prove even riskier. ChatGPT stores many users’ most private conversations. Leaky data permissions, either intentional or accidental, could prove disastrous for users and the company. It only took one real privacy disaster to end Facebook’s platform ambitions; I can’t imagine it would take much more to end OpenAI’s.

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Reposted by Casey Newton

Dave Weigel @daveweigel.bsky.social · 5d

What I'm referring to. It's a privilege to be invited onto networks to talk about my reporting but I have limits. Similarly stopped doing NewsNation after Nextar took its Kimmel stance.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 5d

Wait … there are real LinkedIn accounts??

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 5d

LinkedIn sues a company called ProAPIs for allegedly operating millions of fake accounts to scrape LinkedIn member data and selling it for ~$15,000 per month (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 5d

Here's what everyone is saying about Sora. Of note: several OpenAI employees have posted about their concerns with the product www.platformer.news/sora-2-react...

It makes OpenAI employees nervous. One of the more surprising reactions to the launch came from OpenAI's own employees, several of whom arched an eyebrow about the company's latest product. "AI-based feeds are scary," posted John Hallman, who works on pretraining at the company. "I won't deny that I felt some concern when I first learned we were releasing Sora 2. That said, I think the team did the absolute best job they possible could in designing a positive experience." (Here's a funny response to that one.)

"I share a similar mix of worry and excitement," responded Boaz Barak, a member of OpenAI's technical staff. "Sora 2 is technically amazing but it’s premature to congratulate ourselves on avoiding the pitfalls of other social media apps and deepfakes."

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 6d

In the future, iPhone reviews should default to comparing the phone to the model from two years ago ... almost no one I know is upgrading every year any more

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 6d

Asking the Comet browser to summarize Emperor Cleon's huge naturals

The Verge @theverge.com · 6d

Perplexity’s Comet browser is now available to everyone for free

Perplexity’s Comet browser is available everywhere

Shockingly, Perplexity says ‘the internet is better on Comet.’

buff.ly

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 7d

Tried out the new slop app www.platformer.news/sora-2-hands...

And what if it is the answer? What if perfectly personalized entertainment takes over our screens and our socializing? The arrival of Sora has made those questions feel suddenly more urgent. This is the first social network that — on launch day — said it will disable infinite scroll for teens, and nudge adults to put their phones down when they've been browsing for too long.

It's a responsible step for OpenAI to take. But it might better be viewed as a warning.

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 8d

Talked to OpenAI about its new parental controls and the effort to make ChatGPT safer for kids — by pushing more responsibility onto parents www.platformer.news/chatgpt-pare...

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Reposted by Casey Newton

Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · 9d

It’s both depressing and darkly hilarious how Lawfare posting has gone from “we got him on an Article 33, Clause 8, Subsection Alpha infraction, baby cannon time!” to *slams whisky bottle down* “the law is fake and I challenge John Roberts to a fistfight at the Walmart parking lot.”

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 12d

ChatGPT Pulse is a step toward becoming a proactive assistant that works for you in the background. It's also one more feed to scroll. Sound familiar? www.platformer.news/chatgpt-puls...

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Reposted by Casey Newton

George Wallace @mrgeorgewallace.bsky.social · 13d

What a weird-ass Rapture. Only the Constitution disappeared.

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 13d

This is, without any exaggeration, exactly how Putin and Orbán proceeded — using antisemitism to discredit the idea of civil society and political opposition, and as an excuse to undo the rule of law.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/u...

Justice Dept. Official Pushes Prosecutors to Investigate George Soros’s Foundation

www.nytimes.com

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 14d

thank you Mike!!

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 14d

thank you James!!

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 14d

thank you Reece!

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 14d

Today is Platformer's fifth birthday! I wrote about the state of the newsletter economy, how the business is going, and what we're planning for year six www.platformer.news/platformer-y...

Three, we’re going to create an audio feed. For years now, readers have asked me to narrate each edition so you can listen to it as a podcast. (As pioneered by Ben Thompson’s great Stratechery.) I’ve resisted until now because I worried the added work would burn me out. (Candidly, I still do.) But the success of Hard Fork — one of the 100 best podcasts of all time, by the way! — has introduced our work to a lot of people who would rather listen to me than to read. I’m still in the early stages of planning this, and I expect to encounter many technical challenges along the way. But my hope is that a year from now you’ll get regular audio drops from Platformer that make your subscription feel valuable.

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