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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 2h

Seems like there's another one:

An Amazon search result shows Cory Doctorow's new book title, followed by a cheaper Kindle title called "THE ROLE OF AI IN ENSHITTIFICATION: Unmasking the Digital Decay Behind the Platforms We Depend On."

Do you want to bet it's AI generated?

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 2h

Sigh. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Amazon Caught Peddling AI Slop Version of Cory Doctorow That's So Ironic That We Have to Go Outside and Stare at the Sky for a Bit

The renowned tech critic's book "Enshittification" hasn't even been out for a full day, and Amazon is already selling AI-generated knockoffs.

futurism.com

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 4d

You just know that Apple people hate acknowledging that Meta seems to have taken the better approach to face computers.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses

Apple Inc. has hit pause on a planned overhaul to its Vision Pro headset to redirect resources toward a more urgent effort: developing smart glasses that can rival products from Meta Platforms Inc.

www.bloomberg.com

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 4d

Amazon's Ring is adding facial recognition to its home doorbells and security cameras for the first time.

To identify people you know, it needs to run everyone's face in sight through facial recognition.

wapo.st/4mR2v5l

Analysis | Amazon’s Ring plans to scan everyone’s face at the door

For the first time, the company is putting facial recognition into its home security doorbells and video cameras.

wapo.st

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 5d

Your periodic reminder that Apple and Google app stores do not pretend to be free speech zones.

And judging by my reader email, people like that Apple especially acts as a giant app censor.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Apple Takes Down ICE Tracking Apps Amid Trump Pressure Campaign

www.nytimes.com

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 7d

The Dallas Fed tried but apparently couldn't model the GDP impact of {checks notes} AI causing human extinction.

Thanks, economists! www.ft.com/content/6308...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/63089151-97bd-43f6-a12e-959a0bb486c1

Under a less benign version of this scenario, machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence at some finite point in the near future, the machines become malevolent, and this eventually leads to human extinction. This is a recurring theme in science fiction, but scientists working in the field take it seriously enough to call for guidelines for AI development. Under this scenario, the future could look something like the (hypothetical) purple line in Chart 1.

Today there is little empirical evidence that would prompt us to put much weight on either of these extreme scenarios (although economists have explored the implications of each). A more reasonable scenario might be one in which AI boosts annual productivity growth by 0.3 percentage points for the next decade.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 12d

A great piece and a good reminder that a technology shift can be as big as proponents predicted (see, the internet in the 1990s) but lots of capital, jobs and companies can still evaporate in the process.

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-b...

Silicon Valley watchers worry that enthusiasm for AI has turned into a bubble that has increasingly loud echoes of the mania around the internet’s infrastructure build-out in the late 1990s.

Then, telecom companies spent over $100 billion blanketing the country with fiber optic cables on the belief that the internet’s growth would be so explosive, most any investment was justified. The result was a massive overbuilding that made telecom the hardest hit sector in the dot-com bust. Industry giants toppled like dominoes, including Global Crossing, WorldCom and 360Networks.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 12d

This was published within 24 hours of the above:

Apple's statement asking the European Union to spike its Digital Markets Act:

We’ve always run the App Store to be a safe and trusted marketplace for our users, and to create an incredible business opportunity for developers. Due to the DMA, our EU users are experiencing the following impacts:
More risks when downloading apps and making payments: The DMA requires Apple to allow sideloading, other app marketplaces, and alternative payment systems — even if they don’t meet the same high privacy and security standards as the App Store.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 12d

This, and the similar Tea data leak, is a reminder that just because it's in an official app store, doesn't mean an app is good or secure.

techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/v...

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 12d

Gasped and laughed at the lede!

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 13d

Is anyone actually going to use the Intel-made chips or make chips in its factories, or Intel is just going to cash a bunch of checks? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 13d

"Infrastructure" is good and cool and sounds like a job creation boon. "Power plant" and "data center" sound boring.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 13d

Even purely as a free market motivation, I'm surprised there aren't more great, affordable, locked-down phones tailored to tweens and teens, and that parental control software (even the ones you pay for) are so crap.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 13d

"AI infrastructure" = enough electricity to power Manhattan, so we can make funny videos of fake bunnies jumping on a trampoline.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

Yeah, no.

A Webster's online dictionary definition of factory: "a building or buildings in which things are manufactured; manufacturing plant"

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

Oh we're all just calling data centers "factories" now?

From Sam Altman: "Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week."

blog.samaltman.com/abundant-int...

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

Aha, yes, sure. "AI factories." www.ft.com/content/7cee...

A line from a Financial Times article about Nvidia's CEO, who has called data centers packed with computing equipment "AI factories."

Because factories are good. Never mind that these are not factories.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

Like a spy thriller, but it's a plane load of H1-B holders rushing to fly back to the U.S. to meet a (maybe, confusing) White House deadline. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Before landing, the captain asked passengers who weren’t in a hurry to stay in their seats, so the H-1B travelers could make a dash for immigration, people on board recalled.

The flight landed in San Francisco at 7:59 p.m. local time. When cellphone service returned for those on board, many found messages from loved ones saying the new $100,000 fee wouldn’t impact them after all.

The woman from seat 22D sat in her seat crying while waiting to deplane.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

Also seriously this chart of who's suing or making deals with whom in AI is nuts in mostly the best way.

🫡 to Axios for what I assume was a LOT OF WORK to do this:

A chart, spiritually similar to the Charlie Day conspiracy meme, shows which AI companies (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc) have struck licensing deals with news and entertainment websites (USA Today, Reuters, Business Insider, the Washington Post etc).

It always shows which of the websites is suing which of the AI companies. There's a lot of lawsuits and a lot of deals and it makes me dizzy.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

Huh. This could be interesting. www.axios.com/2025/09/23/m...

Scoop: Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers

Copilot would be the first buyer in the Publisher Content Marketplace.

www.axios.com

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

And while there's no silver bullets, I am struck that school phone bans are the OPPOSITE approach:

Uneasy about the effects of technology use, keep technology out rather than try a different technology.

“The evidence is strong that banning smartphones in schools — and I mean really banning them, bell-to-bell, not leaving it up to teacher discretion and enforcement, or banning them in class but keeping them for everything else — improves social, emotional, and physical well-being,” Lembke wrote in an email.

It’s hard to imagine school phone bans translating broadly into the adult world. What’s novel is that we didn’t shrug off the perceived harms of technology or hoped for some magical technology fix. Instead, we’ve collectively opted to try a low-tech solution.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 14d

I appreciate Chris's thoughtful post (and the thoughtful replies) about my piece today.

There's been 10+ years of tech bosses predicting some new technology can free us from the disconnection and distraction of smartphones.

It's not working! It's a fallacy!

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 14d

The lie is that glasses are made to liberate you from screens. The purpose of the glasses is to make sure you have no experiences except those mediated through a companies’ technology.

Analysis | America can’t quit smartphones. Smart glasses won’t help.

We keep hoping that a magical technology can liberate us from what we don’t like about technology.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 19d

I need an explanation of the dual messaging of "we're doing this to keep you safe!" and "we're doing this to make you more productive."

Did they think the first is for people who don't want AI shoved at them?

From Google's blog post:

AI that keeps you safer

None of this matters without safety. We’re continuing to expand the way we use AI to keep you protected: securely filling in login credentials with Chrome autofill, proactively blocking new types of scams, helping you fix security issues like compromised passwords and spammy notifications, and simplifying some privacy decisions like granting sensitive permissions.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 19d

It's fun when every AI company is like -- WE'LL DO AGENTS! {whispers: If you pay money and we persuade people to do these 400 steps to enable them in a browser...}

And Google is like, DONE and FREE IN THE MOST POPULAR BROWSER.

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Shira Ovide @shiraovide.bsky.social · 19d

Curious to try this in my Chrome browser on Chromebook (the OS from Google) which Google did not mention.

Rolling out to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. with their language set to English, Gemini in Chrome can understand the context of what you’re doing across multiple tabs, answer questions and integrate with other popular Google services, like Google Docs and Calendar

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