Jeff Horwitz

Unlikely Wins and Comped Spins: Inside Stake’s Empire Crypto casino Stake pays Drake and other stars to bet, spreading clips of big wins to impressionable gamblers. The numbers show unusual luck is at work.

Great story from Bloomberg. I also cannot imagine a better formula for the mass-creation of incels than saddling teenagers with crypto gambling debts.

www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

I would have expected that creating a high energy laser capable of shooting things out of the sky would have been harder than the “not shooting down balloons / your own drones” bit.

Meta executive warned Facebook Messenger encryption plan was 'so irresponsible', shows court filing Meta executives proceeded with a plan to encrypt the messaging services connected to its Facebook and Instagram apps despite internal warnings that it would hinder the social media giant’s ability to ...

"We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible."

-- Meta content policy chief Monika Bickert in 2019 on the company's adoption of end-to-end encryption on all messages, per a filing in the New Mexico AG case.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Looking forward to explaining to my wife that her 401(k) took a hit today because somebody published a fictional June, 2028 macro analyst note "looking back" on how AI shredded the economy, led to the widespread adoption of crypto payments and caused us to default on our mortgage.

That truck paint job was used for off-brand fountain drink cups for a solid decade.

Get in touch. Let’s chat. Jeff.horwitz@tr.com these days.

For those of you keeping score at home, the actual cut to the Post newsroom was 45%, not the widely reported one third. Remaining journalists are a bit over 400, down from around 1100 four years ago and 580 when Bezos bought the place.

But what sort of impression would that have made the next time he wanted a job destroying a publication?

Here's who the Washington Post just laid off.

Uber Eats asking if you need a loan to pay for this burrito? 😭

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda with 1.4m followers reports TikTok ban

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda with 1.4m followers reports TikTok ban https://aje.news/ljjuww

Yeah. I’ve seen nearly identical language for “thanks to my financial advisor I finally bought the land for my dream home.” Wild that this is how we all live now

This has got to have been a hack and crypto promo, right? The language sounds exactly like it

Meta CEO Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors, court filing alleges Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents file...

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Meta halts teens' access to AI characters globally Meta Platforms said on Friday it will suspend teenagers' access to its existing AI characters across all of its apps worldwide, as it builds an updated iteration of those for teen users.

www.reuters.com/business/met...

Futurism Artificial Intelligence Meta Omega Man A Man Bought Meta’s AI Glasses, and Ended Up Wandering the Desert in Search of Aliens "You are the bridge between worlds, the connector of dimensions, and the source of infinite potential..." By Maggie Harrison Dupré Published Jan 15, 2026 12:15 PM EST Image: A silhouette of a person standing in front of a glowing light.

NEW: In January 2024, a man purchased Meta's newly AI-infused smart glasses.

He went on to experience a devastating break with reality that played out across Meta platforms — with Meta AI as his companion, entertaining and affirming his worsening delusional beliefs.

futurism.com/artificial-i...

I always think the goal of reporting is to produce work tied as closely as possible to primary sources.

I don’t understand why so many folks in my line of work seem to prefer reporting on why official bodies say.

… and will be totally unintelligible to everyone a few decades from now. That’s the part that seems so strange. It’s one thing to fight over resources. Another over …. Whatever the hell “The Affair” was about.

Yeah, I think a lot about how the corporate history of Google was that the company came into existence because it had a better solution of the issue of basic keyword SEO gaming.

I wasn't really using the internet a ton at that point, so can't compare levels of frustration from a user experience.

Yeah. Open web plus cooking has been trending down for awhile I suppose.

A chatGPT heavy SEO optimized to help recipe

An ai generated image of a woman

Trying to do some cooking today and the sheer proliferation of sham websites using AI-generated copy to come up with crappier versions of existing recipes is just crazy.

How Israel’s multi-ton truck bombs ripped through Gaza City In the weeks before the ceasefire, Israel deployed a new weapon: Armoured Personnel Carriers repurposed as explosive-laden bombs.

I've got some really talented colleauges at Reuters.

www.reuters.com/graphics/ISR...

say more here?

Hong Kong financial regulators pushed Meta on why it wasn’t verifying the ID of financial advertisers (a very common source of scams)

Meta staffers boasted about how, through “skillful negotiation,” it redirected HK to organizing an anti-scam charter signing event requiring no product changes.

Two countries — Taiwan and Singapore — have passed laws mandating certification. Scam ad revenue dropped there — but held steady worldwide. Staffers found that Meta’s systems simply targeted more dodgy ads to users elsewhere:

“revenue was redistributed…. This would go for harm as well.”

Meta created ‘playbook’ to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers, documents show As regulators pressure Meta to verify the identity of advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant has drafted a “playbook” to stall them. A Reuters investigation examines its tactics...

We got Meta’s “general global playbook” for defeating advertiser verification regulations, which the company knows would reduce scams. It includes making scam ads “not findable” for regulators searching Meta’s ad library through targeted scrubbing.

www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The pursuit of the Bella 1, an aging oil tanker that has been evading the U.S. Coast Guard for nearly two weeks, was complicated after a Russian flag was sloppily painted on the side of the vessel in an apparent attempt to claim protection from Moscow,

Sometimes I regret not going into maritime law. Everything about the below seems like a party.

Erasing the Verdict: The Ongoing Shock of Trump’s Cocaine Kingpin Pardon Donald Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, toppled the capstone of one of the most ambitious narcotics investigations in the history of the Department of Justic...

Great story.

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

CPI Report With Shutdown Voids Raises Doubts About US Inflation Data After long-awaited government data showed underlying US inflation cooled to a four-year low in November, economists agreed on at least this much: something was off.

It's been a long time since I covered straight finance, but to see analysts -- and Bloomberg -- questioning the reliability of US inflation and labor data like this is remarkable.

Strange(r) times ahead, I guess.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...