Shira Ovide

An Amazon search result shows Cory Doctorow's new book title, followed by a cheaper Kindle title called "THE ROLE OF AI IN ENSHITTIFICATION: Unmasking the Digital Decay Behind the Platforms We Depend On." Do you want to bet it's AI generated?

Seems like there's another one:

Amazon Caught Peddling AI Slop Version of Cory Doctorow That's So Ironic That We Have to Go Outside and Stare at the Sky for a Bit The renowned tech critic's book "Enshittification" hasn't even been out for a full day, and Amazon is already selling AI-generated knockoffs.

Sigh. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses Apple Inc. has hit pause on a planned overhaul to its Vision Pro headset to redirect resources toward a more urgent effort: developing smart glasses that can rival products from Meta Platforms Inc.

You just know that Apple people hate acknowledging that Meta seems to have taken the better approach to face computers.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Analysis | Amazon’s Ring plans to scan everyone’s face at the door For the first time, the company is putting facial recognition into its home security doorbells and video cameras.

Amazon's Ring is adding facial recognition to its home doorbells and security cameras for the first time.

To identify people you know, it needs to run everyone's face in sight through facial recognition.

wapo.st/4mR2v5l

Apple Takes Down ICE Tracking Apps Amid Trump Pressure Campaign

Your periodic reminder that Apple and Google app stores do not pretend to be free speech zones.

And judging by my reader email, people like that Apple especially acts as a giant app censor.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/63089151-97bd-43f6-a12e-959a0bb486c1 Under a less benign version of this scenario, machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence at some finite point in the near future, the machines become malevolent, and this eventually leads to human extinction. This is a recurring theme in science fiction, but scientists working in the field take it seriously enough to call for guidelines for AI development. Under this scenario, the future could look something like the (hypothetical) purple line in Chart 1. Today there is little empirical evidence that would prompt us to put much weight on either of these extreme scenarios (although economists have explored the implications of each). A more reasonable scenario might be one in which AI boosts annual productivity growth by 0.3 percentage points for the next decade.

The Dallas Fed tried but apparently couldn't model the GDP impact of {checks notes} AI causing human extinction.

Thanks, economists! www.ft.com/content/6308...

Silicon Valley watchers worry that enthusiasm for AI has turned into a bubble that has increasingly loud echoes of the mania around the internet’s infrastructure build-out in the late 1990s. Then, telecom companies spent over $100 billion blanketing the country with fiber optic cables on the belief that the internet’s growth would be so explosive, most any investment was justified. The result was a massive overbuilding that made telecom the hardest hit sector in the dot-com bust. Industry giants toppled like dominoes, including Global Crossing, WorldCom and 360Networks.

A great piece and a good reminder that a technology shift can be as big as proponents predicted (see, the internet in the 1990s) but lots of capital, jobs and companies can still evaporate in the process.

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-b...

Apple's statement asking the European Union to spike its Digital Markets Act: We’ve always run the App Store to be a safe and trusted marketplace for our users, and to create an incredible business opportunity for developers. Due to the DMA, our EU users are experiencing the following impacts: More risks when downloading apps and making payments: The DMA requires Apple to allow sideloading, other app marketplaces, and alternative payment systems — even if they don’t meet the same high privacy and security standards as the App Store.

This was published within 24 hours of the above:

This, and the similar Tea data leak, is a reminder that just because it's in an official app store, doesn't mean an app is good or secure.

techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/v...

Gasped and laughed at the lede!

Is anyone actually going to use the Intel-made chips or make chips in its factories, or Intel is just going to cash a bunch of checks? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"Infrastructure" is good and cool and sounds like a job creation boon. "Power plant" and "data center" sound boring.

I ran into trouble right after taking the laptop out of the box: Should I use my Apple account or create one for my daughter? I created one for my daughter only to find out there was no way to designate it as a child account. I erased everything back to its factory settings, started over with my account and then added one for her. After some more struggles, I read online that I should sign up for Family Sharing, which required my daughter to respond to an email — an annoying logistical hurdle, but one that also meant I needed to ask my child’s permission to add parental controls. With some trial and error, I finally found the place in Screen Time where I could block websites (it’s under Settings, then Screen Time, then Content & Privacy, then App Store, Media, Web, and Games, then a “Customize” button — a 5-step process and not exactly intuitive.) Looking for a more convenient and comprehensive option, I searched for third-party parental control software that would work remotely. I bought Aura, only to find out it doesn’t work on laptops. I bought Net Nanny, but the instructions for installing it were so outdated I couldn’t make it work. I bought Qustodio (for $99.50 a year), which, hallelujah, finally worked.

Even purely as a free market motivation, I'm surprised there aren't more great, affordable, locked-down phones tailored to tweens and teens, and that parental control software (even the ones you pay for) are so crap.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

"AI infrastructure" = enough electricity to power Manhattan, so we can make funny videos of fake bunnies jumping on a trampoline.

A Webster's online dictionary definition of factory: "a building or buildings in which things are manufactured; manufacturing plant"

Yeah, no.

Oh we're all just calling data centers "factories" now?

From Sam Altman: "Our vision is simple: we want to create a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week."

blog.samaltman.com/abundant-int...

A line from a Financial Times article about Nvidia's CEO, who has called data centers packed with computing equipment "AI factories." Because factories are good. Never mind that these are not factories.

Aha, yes, sure. "AI factories." www.ft.com/content/7cee...

Before landing, the captain asked passengers who weren’t in a hurry to stay in their seats, so the H-1B travelers could make a dash for immigration, people on board recalled. The flight landed in San Francisco at 7:59 p.m. local time. When cellphone service returned for those on board, many found messages from loved ones saying the new $100,000 fee wouldn’t impact them after all. The woman from seat 22D sat in her seat crying while waiting to deplane.

Like a spy thriller, but it's a plane load of H1-B holders rushing to fly back to the U.S. to meet a (maybe, confusing) White House deadline. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

A chart, spiritually similar to the Charlie Day conspiracy meme, shows which AI companies (OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc) have struck licensing deals with news and entertainment websites (USA Today, Reuters, Business Insider, the Washington Post etc). It always shows which of the websites is suing which of the AI companies. There's a lot of lawsuits and a lot of deals and it makes me dizzy.

Also seriously this chart of who's suing or making deals with whom in AI is nuts in mostly the best way.

🫡 to Axios for what I assume was a LOT OF WORK to do this:

Scoop: Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers Copilot would be the first buyer in the Publisher Content Marketplace.

Huh. This could be interesting. www.axios.com/2025/09/23/m...

“The evidence is strong that banning smartphones in schools — and I mean really banning them, bell-to-bell, not leaving it up to teacher discretion and enforcement, or banning them in class but keeping them for everything else — improves social, emotional, and physical well-being,” Lembke wrote in an email. It’s hard to imagine school phone bans translating broadly into the adult world. What’s novel is that we didn’t shrug off the perceived harms of technology or hoped for some magical technology fix. Instead, we’ve collectively opted to try a low-tech solution.

And while there's no silver bullets, I am struck that school phone bans are the OPPOSITE approach:

Uneasy about the effects of technology use, keep technology out rather than try a different technology.

I appreciate Chris's thoughtful post (and the thoughtful replies) about my piece today.

There's been 10+ years of tech bosses predicting some new technology can free us from the disconnection and distraction of smartphones.

It's not working! It's a fallacy!

From Google's blog post: AI that keeps you safer None of this matters without safety. We’re continuing to expand the way we use AI to keep you protected: securely filling in login credentials with Chrome autofill, proactively blocking new types of scams, helping you fix security issues like compromised passwords and spammy notifications, and simplifying some privacy decisions like granting sensitive permissions.

I need an explanation of the dual messaging of "we're doing this to keep you safe!" and "we're doing this to make you more productive."

Did they think the first is for people who don't want AI shoved at them?

It's fun when every AI company is like -- WE'LL DO AGENTS! {whispers: If you pay money and we persuade people to do these 400 steps to enable them in a browser...}

And Google is like, DONE and FREE IN THE MOST POPULAR BROWSER.

Rolling out to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. with their language set to English, Gemini in Chrome can understand the context of what you’re doing across multiple tabs, answer questions and integrate with other popular Google services, like Google Docs and Calendar

Curious to try this in my Chrome browser on Chromebook (the OS from Google) which Google did not mention.

Chrome: The browser you love, reimagined with AI Google is taking the next step in its journey to make your browser smarter with new AI integrations.

Genuinely curious if Google had this teed up for months or much longer, and wanted to wait for Judge Mehta to decide whether to order a sale of Chrome.

blog.google/products/chr...

Oh and what if Ford were also a geopolitical hot potato producing one of the world's hottest commodities.

And what if GM had also just handed off a chunk of ownership to the U.S. government, which already was weird.

And also GM was the only significant American company that was still manufacturing a product considered essential to our national interests.

Anyway, weird.

Nvidia to Buy $5 Billion Stake in Intel

What if Ford were part owner of GM. Weird, right? Well:

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/b...

From YouTube product announcements: A/B testing for titles: Test up to three different titles, thumbnails, or combinations of both for your long-form videos to help maximize your video's performance.

Also, hi, it would be interesting if more newsrooms harnessed AI to increase automation of A/B testing of headline and lead image options. (Maybe this already exists?)