If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason.
— Read on www.osnews.com/story/144737/adobe-secretly-modifies-your-hosts-file-for-the-stupidest-reason/
Category: Random
The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI | Techdirt
Medvi’s success has very little to do with “AI” and quite a lot to do with fake doctors, deepfaked before-and-after photos, misleading ads, probable snake oil, and the kind of old-fashioned deceptive marketing that has been separating marks from their money for centuries. The only thing AI really “turbocharged” here was the company’s ability to generate bullshit at scale. Oh, and also the NYT somehow missed out on the FDA already investigating the company, as well as the multiple lawsuits accusing the company and its partners of extraordinarily bad behavior.
— Read on www.techdirt.com/2026/04/07/the-new-york-times-got-played-by-a-telehealth-scam-and-called-it-the-future-of-ai/
Banksy, Satoshi & The Unmasking Impulse – On my Om
How do humans become capable of treating other humans as objects? By refusing to see them. By reducing them to a category, a story, a fact that can be processed and moved past.
Social media has made this our default mode. Everything is content. Everyone is a take. I wrote in 2023 that social platforms stopped being social the moment they needed to generate profit. By then we were all hooked on likes, hearts, and retweets, and the boost they gave to our egos. The algorithm doesn’t see a person. It sees a signal. As I argued in 2020, the command is always the same: corral attention at any cost. Journalism at its worst has caught the same disease. The unmasking story is just attention farming. The moment happens, clicks follow, and then you are part of yesterday’s terabyte. That Banksy and Satoshi are real people with real exposure on the other end of it is incidental.
— Read on om.co/2026/04/08/banksy-satoshi-the-unmasking-impulse/
The Last Quiet Thing
What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn’t a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
…
This is not your fault.
The tiredness is not a character flaw. The guilt, the sense that you should be handling all of this better, more gracefully, with less friction, that guilt was manufactured. It was placed inside you by an industry that profits from your participation and a wellness culture that profits from your shame.
Both need you to believe the problem is you.
It isn’t.
The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier
Artemis II
The photos coming back from Artemis II’s trip around the Moon are incredible – some to the point of seeming unreal.
Can’t wait to go through the full NASA image gallery with the boys.
NY Times: This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good
A recent Axios story on maternal health policy referred to “findings” that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. On the surface, there’s nothing unusual about that. What wasn’t originally mentioned, however, was that these findings were made up.
Clicking through the links revealed (as did a subsequent editor’s note and clarification by Axios) that the public opinion poll was a computer simulation run by the artificial intelligence start-up Aaru. No people were involved in the creation of these opinions.
The practice Aaru used is called silicon sampling, and it’s suddenly everywhere. The idea behind silicon sampling is simple and tantalizing. Because large language models can generate responses that emulate human answers, polling companies see an opportunity to use A.I. agents to simulate survey responses at a small fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/ai-polling.html
This is polling via Yelp reviews. The loudest folks are usually those with a complaint.
So when LLMs are fed the internet and more to use as a filter to the lowest common denominator, and the internet mainly reflects one side of an argument because the other side has better things to do, well, how’s that gonna turn out?
Endgame for the Open Web – Anil Dash
The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
A Reddit Post, An AI Hallucination, And Two Lawyers Who Never Checked Citations Walk Into A Dog Custody Case | Techdirt
Joan Pablo Torres Campos (Torres) and Leslie Ann Munoz dissolved their domestic partnership in 2022. Two years later, Torres wanted shared custody and visitation of Kyra (the dog). Munoz, represented pro bono by her cousin — attorney Roxanne Chung Bonar — opposed. In her opposition, Bonar cited two cases: Marriage of Twigg and Marriage of Teegarden.
Neither case exists. Or rather, the actual citations Bonar gave correspond to completely unrelated cases — one is a criminal case, and the other is a spousal support case from a different year with a different citation. But as cited by Bonar, with the holdings she described, these cases were pure fiction.
And where did the fake citations come from? Apparently a Reddit blog post. By someone named… Sassafras Patterdale.
PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading — Stuart Breckenridge
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.
— Read on stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss-readers-in-a-37mb-article/
The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham
If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
— Read on thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit