|
Finally Friday, finally time for the weekly roundup.
On the podcast this week: a company that is selling AI-powered undercover bots posing as protesters and children to the cops, and a visit to the millennial saint. In the supporters’ section, we talk business and the state of 404 Media.
|
|
|
Upside gives you the power to earn more on the stuff you buy all the time. Whether you’re filling up your tank, going out to eat, or shopping for groceries, the Upside app lets you earn cash back on every purchase. Download the FREE Upside App and use promo code 404 to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.
|
|
|
|
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Exciting news: We have a referral program! Share 404 with your friends and earn merch goodies. Check it out here. And as a reminder, we have new and restocked merch for purchase if you want to just exchange currency for hats.  Photo credit: Sharon Attia A MESSAGE FROM HQWe launched 404 Media in August of 2023, and a lot of wild stuff has happened here and in the world since then, but this is the first time we’ve experienced what looks like an imminent recession. What is becoming clear is that, already, there is a significant enough shift in the economy to impact our business. For that reason, we wanted to give a small update on the state of 404 Media ahead of our second anniversary in August. The short version is that the state of 404 Media is strong. The support of our subscribers has allowed us to make 404 Media our full time jobs since the beginning. The long version: We still need your help to keep going.  A fishing port in Taiwan. Photo credit: Global Labor Justice GONE ORGANIZINGAdrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job. But Basar took it to help support his seven-sibling family. “I support them so they can go to school,” Basar told me, speaking in Indonesian through an interpreter. A coalition between a self-organized Indonesian fishers’ union, a Taiwanese human rights group and multiple global labor organizations is fighting for fishers to get internet access so they can get medical help, call home, and report labor violations. ‘PRODUCTION WIIMOTE’Security engineer Alex Haydock found a discarded “sacrificial Wii” at the 2024 Electromagnetic Field festival swap shop, and took it home intending to use it to emulate and homebrew games. But he’d noticed while browsing the website for the open-source operating system NetBSD—which has options for installing a Unix-like operating system on devices like Dreamcasts, Amiga and Atari machines, and many more—that it had an option for a Wii installation. “As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it,” he wrote. “That workload is the blog you’re reading now.”  Screenshot via YouTube GET A CLUELast month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to “cheat on everything.” Cluely went viral when it launched earlier this week thanks to a commercial Lee posted on X. In the video, Lee bumbles his way through a date. A large UI sits between him and his date, feeding him information about the woman’s interests and coaching him on how to talk to her. In an interview, however, Lee told me that his AI tool is not really cheating. “Initially it will feel like cheating, but if we win, nobody will think this is cheating,” Lee told 404 Media.  Image: PrepperDisk JUST IN CASEAdam Chace picked a pretty good time to create a data archiving product for turbulent times. “Take lifesaving websites into any emergency,” and “Be SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) Proof,” ads for Prepperdisk say. PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.  Image: Immigration and Customs Enforcement 'ALIEN TRACKER'Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Internal Revenue Service to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to a document viewed by 404 Media. The news signals ICE’s heavy emphasis on bringing disparate datasets together in order to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation effort. The tool, called ATrac and “Alien Tracker” in the document, is planned to allow for the management of all enforcement priorities, and provide near real-time tracking of both targets on a local level and the broader set of immigration enforcement targets around the country.  Screenshots from Civitai. Collage via 404 Media GETTING A 'REALITY CHECK' Civitai, a hugely popular site for sharing AI models and a critical piece of infrastructure for AI-generated pornography across the internet, announced that it will now forbid content depicting incest, self-harm, or featuring “bodily excretions” like urine, vomit, menstruation, and diapers, following pressure from payment processors. "Our original vision was to host anything legal and consensual," Civitai CEO and founder Justin Maier told 404 Media in an email. "Reality check: the financial ecosystem that powers payments is more restrictive than the letter of the law. Over the past few months several partners told us bluntly, 'Here’s what you must do if you want to keep processing payments.'” MORE GOOD POSTSReplying to This Website Is Running on a Wii, Chloe writes: “I love stories like this. I feel terrible every time I sunset an old piece of tech, and keep most of it squirreled away on the off-chance that—I don't know—I suddenly have several dozen hours to learn how to wipe and recode an old dell laptop heavier than my dog.”
And in response to Business Insider Founder Creates AI Exec For His New Newsroom, Immediately Hits On Her, Frank Malenfant writes: “The guy can't stop being creepy, so he feels like he can't be himself with other humans, so he creates an AI agent that enables his creepiness instead of learning how to be a decent person. I feel this is a trap many men will fall into with AI as it democratizes in an era where some people, mostly men, are raging against the loss of their privilege to say whatever they feel like without consequences. This societal shift that empowered other people to push back against people who previously took advantage of power dynamics makes them feel like they're suddenly walking on eggshells, and would rather keep crushing eggs (other people) instead of going through the effort of treating other humans with respect and empathy. I fear AI relationships will offer an easy way to those who will not endure doing all the work they expect their partner to do for them. You don't have to adapt to an AI persona, you don't have to listen to it, you don't have to care about it, you don't have to be respectful, mind your tone and the way you express your feelings. You don't even have to be faithful in any way. I know some men who treat their partner as a sex toy they need to put up with the rest of the time, and I wish we weren't creating technology that will enable self-centered people to get everything without the hassle of being a decent person. I wish it wasn't too much to ask people to show some respect for others. That it wasn't frowned upon as ‘woke’ to do so, to a point that there is a whole powerful political movement promoting the freedom to be an a-hole without consequences.”
 BEHIND THE BLOGThis is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Palantir scoops, coping mechanisms, and feeling God in this Samsung television. EMANUEL: First I want to say that the response to our piece about “economic headwinds” has been really positive and energizing. Like we said in that post, we are doing just fine either way, but it’s nice to see that people continue to respond very well to us being transparent about how we’re thinking about and running 404 Media, so we’ll continue to do that. That post also originated as a Behind the Blog, which we always wanted to be a weekly behind-the-scenes look at the site for anyone who was interested, but it’s also become a place for us to test out some ideas with our most loyal readers before we make them public and that is also working out nicely, so thank you! The other thing I wanted to talk about was this great story from Matthew Gault about Cluely, the AI app that helps you “cheat on everything.” Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason, Sam, and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
|
