2025-12-16 21:37:55
The Washington Post analyzed TikTok usage, finding what topics the algorithm nudges users towards more:
TikTok’s algorithm favors mental health content over many other topics, including politics, cats and Taylor Swift, according to a Washington Post analysis of nearly 900 U.S. TikTok users who shared their viewing histories. The analysis found that mental health content is “stickier” than many other videos: It’s easier to spawn more of it after watching with a video, and harder to get it out of your feed afterward.
Tags: algorithm, mental health, TikTok, Washington Post
2025-12-15 20:09:47
For the show Fallout, Amazon Prime Video was testing AI-generated episode recaps, but as it goes these days, the recaps only looked right. Emma Roth reports for the Verge:
The feature is supposed to use AI to analyze a show’s key plot points and sum it all in a bite-sized video, complete with an AI voiceover and clips from the series.
But in its season one recap of Fallout, Prime Video incorrectly stated that one of The Ghoul’s (Walton Goggins) flashbacks is set in “1950s America” rather than the year 2077, as spotted earlier by Games Radar.
You mean 90% correct is not good enough?
2025-12-15 19:03:23
McDonald’s Netherlands put up a commercial that was generated with AI and it looked like the part, as pointed out by the discerning eyes of the internet. For Futurism, Joe Wilkins reports:
This year, McDonald’s decided to get in on the corporate slopfest with a 45-second Christmas spot cooked up for its Netherlands division by the ad agency TBWA\Neboko. The entire thing is AI, and revolves around the thesis that the holiday season is the “most terrible time of the year.”
Humbug aside, the ad assaults the viewer with rapidly-changing scenes played out in AI’s typically nauseating fashion. Because most videos generated with AI tend to lose continuity after a handful of seconds, short and rapidly-changing scenes have become one of the key tells that the clip you’re watching is AI.
Similar to Coke’s 2025 Holiday ad, the McDonald’s spot is like a visual seizure, full of grotesque characters, horrible color grading, and hackneyed AI approximations of basic physics.
Maybe all publicity is good publicity, but I don’t think this is what McDonald’s was aiming for.
Tags: commercial, Futurism, McDonald's
2025-12-13 02:55:24
Wildfires and hurricanes continue to grow more common, so insurance companies have more frequently turned down customers. Homeowners then have to turn to Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, or FAIR plans, which are a last resort type of coverage. Prinz Magtulis and Soumya Karwa report for Reuters on the changes over the last few years.
2025-12-12 02:12:02
Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up.
The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.
See also: shrinking to an atom, the speed of light, and of course the classic Powers of Ten.
Tags: Julius Csotonyi, living, Neal Agarwal, scale
2025-12-11 22:56:19
There are seven states that legalized gambling on your phone. So you can play slots all the live long day while you watch television and walk your dog. For NYT’s the Upshot, Ben Blatt shows the billions in tax revenue this provides states, which makes revenue from sports betting apps look like pocket change.
I guess good for the states?
This seems terrible for people gambling away their income on slot games. These games favor the house in the long run, so the longer you play the closer you get to certainty that you will lose everything. That doesn’t bode well for those who play all the time.
