Davey Alba

The study finds that in 2022 over 26% of systems reviewed gave a disclaimed that they aren’t providing medical advice. Now? Less than 1%.

Mahmood Mamdani · The Asian Question: On Leaving Uganda President Yoweri Museveni was careful not to refer to Asians as citizens; he explained that they were ‘investors’,...

A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Soon after news of the test program surfaced, creators made their concerns known, said Tomiko Harvey, a travel and food blogger at Passports and Grub, who attended a Google creator summit in May. “I’m actually feeling hopeful about this decision from Google,” Harvey wrote in an email. “Canceling the Quick View Recipe feature feels like a rare but welcome acknowledgment that creator feedback matters.” Although Google’s decision has some creators feeling relief, they likely haven’t seen the last of the search giant’s experimentation in a vibrant corner of the web. In recent years, many food bloggers have padded their recipes with lengthy preambles to ensure their content ranks well in Google Search, irritating readers in the process. As it crawls the web, Google will glean information about recipes’ core principles — say, the basic proportions of broth and meat in a recipe for chicken noodle soup — which it can then use to inform its own answers, Slater said. “Recipes are, by definition, facts, and facts are not copyrightable,” Slater said. For Google, “there’s always going to be a tension between giving the user exactly what they want,” he added, “and directing the user to another site.”

A little bit of news from me and @julialove.bsky.social: Google isn’t pushing through with its Quick View Recipe feature, which food bloggers had feared could erode their search traffic

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

Google Search Judge Zeroes In on AI Power in Trial Resolution The federal judge who will decide how to limit Google’s monopoly in search is considering its advantage in artificial intelligence, and aiming to minimize harm to the other players in the market with ...

And its a wrap on the DOJ's Google search antitrust case, as closing arguments end. Next stop likely August with a ruling that could force the company to sell Chrome, license critical data, and bar $20b + in annual payments to Apple w @davey.bsky.social
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Trump stopped mentioning the hazard mitigation grant program in major disaster declarations, so I started looking into what was happening. Here's what I found by asking each state asking about the status of their recent hazard mitigation requests. Full story here: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Meta’s CEO has done everything he can to win over Trump, and it’s not clear how much he has to show for it.

🚨 New Businessweek Feature 🚨

What is behind Mark Zuckerberg's rightward swing toward President Trump?

I'd wager it's less about personal politics, and more about a finely tuned sense of self-preservation... w/ @rileyraygriffin.bsky.social

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

Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Meta’s CEO has done everything he can to win over Trump, and it’s not clear how much he has to show for it.

“This is a man who wears many different costumes,” she continued. “Now his new costume is MMA-fighting or whatever, free speech—we don’t know what the next costume is going to be, but it will be something different.

“It’s whatever gets him closest to power.”

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

Stock is slowly ticking back up but still not looking great

Alphabet’s Pichai Says Google Bringing Products to Market Faster Alphabet Inc.’s Google will bring products to market faster to keep pace with new rivals in the artificial intelligence age.

New: As Google search head Liz Reid announces at #googleio that AI Mode is rolling out to all US users today, Alphabet shares drop...

Follow along with my & @julialove.bsky.social's live I/O coverage here

Indicator Indicator is your essential guide to understanding and investigating digital deception.

I left my job at ProPublica about a month ago.

Here's why: I've teamed up with @mantzarlis.com to launch indicator.media, a new publication dedicated to exposing digital deception and to equipping professionals and the public with knowledge and skills to investigate it.

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Google Decided Against Offering Publishers Options in AI Search Company drew “hard red line” around requiring web publishers to participate in AI search, document says

New: Wrote about a Google trial exhibit that the public seemed to have paid little attention to. The document shows Google had a “hard red line” and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features.

with @julialove.bsky.social ⤵

The Mother Who Never Stopped Believing Her Son Was Still There For decades, Eve Baer remained convinced that her son, unresponsive after a severe brain injury, was still conscious. Science eventually proved her right.

I spent the past several months with the family of one patient in the study, Ian, who was injured in a car crash in 1986. His mother has never stopped believing he could understand her.

Today in @theatlantic.com, Ian's story:

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

🧵 Last year, I came across one of the most harrowing studies I've ever read.

It found that 1 in 4 unresponsive brain-injury patients—many considered vegetative—might be cognitively aware but trapped inside their bodies. Could this be true? What did it mean?

www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

The definitive analysis of congestion pricing to date: it’s working in just about every way we could think up!
Huge team effort, led by @emmbadger.bsky.social and the Upshot team

was personally rooting for First Filipino Pope but i will allow Chicago Pope 👍

Google Can Train Search AI With Web Content Even After Opt-Out Google can train its search-specific AI products, like AI Overviews, on content across the web even when the publishers have chosen to opt out of training Google’s AI products, a vice-president of pro...

During its antitrust trial Google confirmed that websites opting out of AI crawling only affects Gemini. Google search still uses your content to power AI overviews.

The only way to opt out of your content showing up in AI overviews in search is to opt out of being shown in Google search results.

US Presses for Google to Share Data by Citing Yahoo Japan Deal US antitrust enforcers reached back to a deal Google struck 15 years ago to argue that the Alphabet Inc. unit should once again share information with third parties, this time to end its illegal monop...

New from me in DC: The DOJ has recalled a 15-year-old deal in which Google voluntarily shared search data with a third party, Yahoo Japan. That 2010 deal formed the "foundation" for DOJ's data-sharing remedy proposal in the ongoing search antitrust case, lawyers said.

Trump’s team, often accused of spreading misinformation, slashes misinformation research Hundreds of grants axed in a field where the United States was a global leader

Terminating the grants to study misinformation is “an overt act of censoring and preventing accountability,” says Stephen Lewandowsky, a misinformation researcher at the University of Bristol. “Who other than a liar would cancel misinformation research?”
🧪
www.science.org/content/arti...

Google Eyes Gemini-iPhone AI Deal This Year, Pichai Tells Court Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in court proceedings Wednesday that he hopes that Gemini, his company’s AI service, will be added as a built-in option for iPhones this year.

With @markgurman.bsky.social and @davey.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Google Eyes Gemini-iPhone AI Deal This Year, Pichai Tells Court Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in court proceedings Wednesday that he hopes that Gemini, his company’s AI service, will be added as a built-in option for iPhones this year.

Also: Pichai said in court that Google's goal is to get on the menu of options for Apple Intelligence by mid-2025 bloom.bg/44KVkGb

Google’s Pichai Calls US Remedies ‘De Facto’ Spinoff of Search Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be ...

With @davey.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Google’s Pichai Calls US Remedies ‘De Facto’ Spinoff of Search Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be ...

NEW: Pichai is testifying in the DOJ's search remedies antitrust case today. Here's my and @leahnylen.bsky.social's first take. The Google CEO called the DOJ's proposed remedies a "de facto" spinoff of search.

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

DOJ Google Antitrust Case Wraps With Generative AI in Spotlight The US Justice Department’s proposed fixes for Google’s illegal monopoly in the online search market are more likely to spur competition than the remedies offered by the company, an economist called b...

DOJ rested its case against Google today in the remedies hearing over how to fix competition in online search. A recap by me and @davey.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

DMing!!

it IS. do you want a copy?!

also a great choice, i hope you love it as much as i did!

oh hell yeah you got it. dm me!!

so if you are interested, reply to this thread and I'll pick three random people and pre-order a copy for you and arrange for it to get sent to your door on the day it publishes! that's MAY 6, SO CLOSE BABY ❤️

the one and only @amandahess.bsky.social has written the most moving book about "having a child in the digital age"—but it's really about so much more. it's a meditation on the oppressiveness of tech, the fragility of humans, the miracle & bittersweetness of life... i would love for you to read it

Alphabet’s Profit Gets $8 Billion Boost From SpaceX Investment Alphabet Inc. said its first-quarter profit was boosted by $8 billion in unrealized gains from an investment in a private company. That company is Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., acc...

Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...