2026-03-23 01:35:00
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2026-03-23 01:18:10
The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP
As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.
2026-03-23 00:41:09
Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:
Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.
This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?
2026-03-22 08:52:58
Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters:
The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is being developed within its devices and services unit, according to four people familiar with the matter. The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day, the people said. [...]
As envisioned, the new phone’s personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than ever, the people said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.
The problem with this pitch is that it’s not hard at all to buy from Amazon.com, watch Prime Video, listen to Prime Music, or order food from Grubhub using the phones we already have. All of those things are ridiculously easy. I mean, I get it. On an Amazon phone, your Amazon ID would be your primary ID for the system. So those Amazon services would all just work right out of the box. But you can’t get people to switch from the thing they’re used to (and, in the case of phones, especially iPhones, already enjoy) unless you’re pitching them on solving problems. No one has a problem buying stuff or using Amazon services on the phone they already own.
A key focus of the Transformer project has been integrating artificial intelligence capabilities into the device, the people said. That could eliminate the need for traditional app stores, which require downloading and registering for applications before they can be used.
This is just nonsense. No matter how good Amazon’s AI integration might be, it isn’t going to replace the apps people already use. If you use WhatsApp, you need the WhatsApp app. If you want to watch video on Netflix, you need the Netflix app. If you surf Instagram and TikTok, you need those apps. If Amazon tries shipping a phone without any of those apps — let alone without all of them — this new “Transformer” phone will be a bigger laughingstock than the Fire phone was a decade ago. And we’re all still laughing at the dumb Fire phone. Which means they can’t eliminate “traditional app stores”.
People aren’t clamoring for the elimination of app stores. People like app stores. If Amazon, or anyone else, is going to introduce a new type of “AI-first” phone to disrupt the iPhone/Android duopoly, it has to offer something amazingly appealing. Nothing in Reuters’s description of Transformer fits that description. Also, it’s not like Amazon has market-leading AI. At the moment that feels like a three-way game between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
2026-03-21 05:00:09
Sean Hollister, The Verge (gift link):
After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.
For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.
What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.
This is way past “jumping the shark” territory. This is Jaws 3-D totally-lost-the-plot territory. Jesus H. Christ.
2026-03-21 04:49:07
Regarding my earlier post expressing confusion/discomfort with Bluesky announcing a $100 million funding round almost an entire year after it closed, I had an interesting back-and-forth with Adam Vartanian on Bluesky (natch), where he wrote:
If you see press reports that says a company “has raised” some money but no date on when the round closed, it probably happened some time in the past. Bluesky is actually unusual in disclosing a date that’s so far in the past.
I kept thinking that I must be missing something in this story, and this feels like it must be exactly that something. If true, it’s not unusual these days for a company to announce a seeding round long after it actually closed. What’s unusual in this case with Bluesky is that when they finally did announce it, they revealed the long-ago date it closed, too. That it was, in fact, an act of transparency, at least in comparison to many other venture-backed companies today.
