2026-05-04 08:15:21
Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:
It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)
“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)
Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.
2026-05-04 07:47:11
I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.
2026-05-04 07:25:41
A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters about the incredibly private things they witnessed from footage captured by users of Meta’s AI Glasses.
There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing these contractors than you already were in the first place. They had to fire them. The moment this investigative report was published in late February, the fate of Sama’s Kenyan operation was sealed. They were toast. The key to understanding this is that Meta runs a criminal enterprise. Most of the organized crimes Meta commits aren’t crimes against the legal code (although some are), but rather crimes against public perception and human decency. Remember what they did with Onavo, their VPN product? Was that illegal? Dunno. Was it outrageous? Hell yes.
Let’s just concede for the sake of argument that there’s nothing illegal about the way Meta was sending video footage from users’ AI Glasses to contractors in Kenya to review. I presume they’re still doing it today, just with different contractors, in a different computer cubicle sweatshop, perhaps in a different country. Nothing to cover up legally. But just the plain description of what they’re doing fills people with a visceral repulsion. However, people only have that visceral reaction if they know what’s going on. Part of the whole premise is that the whole thing has to be kept on the q.t.
If it said right on the box that when you use Meta AI Glasses, the footage might be reviewed by third-party contractors, and when that footage is reviewed, you — the user whose footage is being reviewed — won’t know it’s happening and won’t get prompted first for permission (because you’ve actually OK’d it in advance just by hitting the “Accept” button on the long dense terms of service that literally almost no one reads because such terms are written in impenetrable legalese), almost no one would buy them. And if it were more widely known that this is how these glasses work, there’d be more of a social stigma surrounding those who wear them.1
That, I think, is the primary reason why the contractors were in Kenya in the first place, and their replacements (now that Meta has terminated its contract with Sama) are surely still in some third-world country. It’s not about the lower wages (but that doesn’t hurt). It’s about the fact that the entire existence of the operation is easier to keep quiet when it’s literally on the other side of the planet. It’s a goddamn marvel that the investigative reporters from those two Swedish newspapers found them.
Most illegal acts are scandalous, but many scandalous acts are perfectly legal. But all scandalous acts need to be covered up. The operation has to be kept quiet, has to be covered up, because it’s unacceptable. It’s outrageous. If this were more widely publicized, Meta would suffer on two fronts. First, it would become better known that there’s nothing artificial about some of what they call “AI” — it’s in fact powered by human intelligence, just in another hemisphere. Second, and related to the first, some of the interactions you have with Meta AI — including images and video you send it, and images and video captured by Meta AI Glasses — are reviewed by human contractors. People write things and show things to AI, thinking it’s kept private between them and a computer program, that they would never share if they knew it might be seen by human beings paid by the AI provider to refine the training and correct its mistakes. A lot of people only use these “AI” products because they have no idea what’s actually going on.
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack
Anyway, enjoy the Meta AI built into WhatsApp and Instagram. And maybe keep a link to that report on Meta’s contractors in Kenya handy for anyone you meet who wears AI Glasses.
It’s a fascinating mystery what becomes a scandal and what doesn’t. One flaw in our news media culture is that stories from other countries, especially countries where English is not the primary language, tend never to gain traction here. You’d think the Internet, and the rise of very good automated language translation, would change this. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. After this story came out in February — a joint investigation co-published by the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten — it just faded away after a few days. I remember thinking when I linked to it, “Man, this feels potentially explosive — this might blow up into a big scandal.” But it didn’t. I didn’t forget about it, but I hadn’t thought about it in weeks, until I happened to catch this news — via Nick Heer — that Meta had severed ties with Sama, the contracting firm.
I can’t help but think that if the exact same original report had been published by, say, The New York Times or The New Yorker, or in video form by 60 Minutes, that it might have blown up into a sizable scandal and public relations disaster for Meta. But as it stands, it largely passed without note. In addition to the fact that the original story was published in Sweden, the other missing factor is they didn’t publish leaked images or footage from users of Meta AI Glasses. We read testimony from these Kenyans that as part of their jobs, they watched AI Glasses owners having sex and going to the toilet, but we never see footage of of AI Glasses owners having sex or going to the toilet. That shouldn’t make a huge difference, but human nature is such that it does. ↩︎
2026-05-02 09:06:31
Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook committing to spending the refund check on “U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing” doesn’t mean that Apple would — if they get a tariff refund — be spending more than they had previously committed to. Cook even said yesterday, “These would be new investments and would be in addition to our prior commitments in the U.S.” But there’s never been any precise accounting for these commitments. Apple committed to spend “more than $500 billion”. “More than $500 billion” plus their tariff refund check would still be “more than $500 billion”.
Here’s what I wrote when Apple first made this current commitment in February 2025, just weeks after Trump’s second term started:
Apple announced a similar plan four years ago — $430 billion and 20,000 jobs. In the announcement of that 2021 plan, Apple said, “Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018.”
So I don’t think this announcement is bullshit, at all. But I also don’t think what Apple has announced today is much, if any, different from what they’d be doing if Kamala Harris had gotten 1–2 percent more of the vote in a handful of states in November. The difference is that everyone is looking for quid pro quo with President Transactional back in office.
Apple first announced a plan in 2018, during Trump 1.0, to spend $350 billion over the next five years. Then in 2021 — midway through those five years, at the start of the Biden administration — they said spending was above that previously promised pace but they were announcing a new five-year plan to spend $430 billion. That plan would have run through 2026 (this year). But, again, right after Trump was re-inaugurated last year, before the period covered by the 2021 five-year plan was up, they announced the current $500 billion plan. The only difference is that this latest spending commitment is a four-year plan, not a five-year one (probably because they know Trump doesn’t give one shit what they do after he leaves office).
This isn’t a shell game or a scam. I believe Apple really has spent what they’ve said they were going to spend, and really plans to spend what they’ve committed to spend in the coming three years. If anything, as they said in 2021, their actual spending has probably exceeded what they committed to, during each of these periods, and will continue to. It’s very Tim Cook-ian and very Apple-like to underpromise and overdeliver. So I’d say it’s a shoo-in that when Apple announced the current plan to spend “more than $500 billion” in the U.S. from 2026–2030, they actually planned to hit that target with room to spare. So saying that they’ll throw the proceeds from any potential tariff refund check into the same fund doesn’t actually change a damn thing about their plans.
And if the pattern holds, they’ll announce a new four- or five-year plan for $600 billion (give or take) after the 2028 election, regardless who wins. There’s never any sort of accounting where they show that they spent exactly, say, $447 billion between 2021 and 2026, or $389 billion from 2018 to 2023. And there’s never going to be any exact accounting like that for what they’ll spend in this current “more than $500 billion” plan covering 2026 to 2030. There’s also no accounting for how much Apple spent last year on Trump’s invalid tariffs. Presumably, if they eventually get a refund check from the Treasury, we will know the exact number. But given that whatever they spent on Trump’s tariffs had only a negligible effect on their earnings last year, we can presume that the money they’re committed to spending on U.S. manufacturing and job creation from 2026 to 2030 remains about $500 billion, and it’s really all just projects that they would have spent the exact same amount of money on if Kamala Harris were now in the White House — just like how they committed to spending $430 billion when Biden was president.
The whole thing is just presented in such a way to make it look like they’re doing what Donald Trump would like them to do, when in fact it’s just exactly what Apple wants to do anyway. That’s what makes it genius. It’s win-win-win. It’s what Apple wanted to do anyway, it pleases Trump, and it’s actually good for the American economy.
2026-05-02 05:00:36
Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tales of reviewing footage of Meta glasses users getting undressed, having sex, and taking dumps. This is a rather seedy job, and a big surprise to most of the people wearing Meta’s AI glasses, who are under the impression that “AI” does not involve human beings in Kenya seeing what their glasses capture.
Well, Meta has fixed the problem. Chris Vallance reports for BBC News:
Meta is under pressure to explain why it cancelled a major contract with a company it was using to train AI, shortly after some of its Kenya-based workers alleged they had to view graphic content captured by Meta smart glasses.
In February, workers at the company, Sama, told two Swedish newspapers they had witnessed glasses users going to the toilet, and having sex.
Less than two months later, Meta ended its contract with Sama, which Sama said would result in 1,108 workers being made redundant.
Meta says it’s because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects. A Kenyan workers’ organisation alleges Meta’s decision was caused by the staff speaking out.
There’s no mystery here. The “standard” that Sama didn’t meet was keeping their mouths shut about the dignity-shredding nature of the entire operation. Like that fact that it even existed, let alone the gross privacy-invasive footage they witnessed. The deal wasn’t just for Sama’s workers to do the work, it was to do the work and keep it on the down-low. Go to Meta’s AI glasses website and try to find the part where they warn you that footage is subject to review by teams of contractors in third-world countries, Mechanical Turk-style. If you look hard enough, you’ll find oblique allusion to “review may be automated or manual (human)” in their legal small print, but their large-scale human review of video footage and recordings isn’t part of the brand or marketing image for their glasses.
2026-05-02 04:30:47
One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results:
During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook could read an obviously prepared statement about tariffs, which included this bit:
In terms of applying for a refund of tariffs paid, we’re following the established processes, and we plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing. These would be new investments and would be in addition to our prior commitments in the U.S.
This is the sort of politics Cook will continue to be plying from the boardroom. Sure, Apple’s going to try to get its tariff money back. But it’s going to do so using the perfectly normal and established process, and if it does get billions back from the U.S. government, it double-promises to reinvest that money in the United States, above and beyond its already stated commitments. Trump Administration, take note.
The kind of logic puzzles I enjoy most are ones where, when the puzzle is posed, there’s no obvious solution. But once you see the solution, it seems profoundly obvious. Jason Kottke last week linked to 1D-Chess, a game from Rowan Monk that’s like that. Once you find the solution you can’t unsee it. (Don’t give up and peek at the posted answer!)
The question of tariff refunds is like that. Two months ago the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump’s obviously illegal tariffs last year, were, in fact, illegal. They left as an open question, however, whether importers who paid those tariffs should get refunds from the federal government. Apple, obviously, is one of those importers. The logic puzzle is this: if it turns out that Apple is eligible for a refund, how do they collect it without infuriating the petulant Donald Trump? Cook just spelled out the answer. Take the money but commit it all to their longstanding plan to spend $500 billion over the next few years to U.S. manufacturing efforts, a program they’ve maintained through the Trump 1, Biden, and now Trump 2 administrations, but which Cook has made dog-and-pony shows out of during both Trump terms to, as Trump himself describes it, “kiss his ass”.
That’s so obvious, now that Cook spelled it out, that it doesn’t even seem like a puzzle.
Update: “More on Apple’s Logically Elegant Tariff Refund Puzzle Solution”.
