Matthew Gault

Opinion | A.I. Is Not a 21st-Century Enlightenment

“We formulate the questions, drive the inquiry … and we search … for answers that reinforce what we already think we know. ChatGPT has often responded, with patently insincere flattery: ‘That’s a great question.’ It has never responded: ‘That’s the wrong question.’” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/o...

Pentagon: Just FYI, We Have a Nuclear-Armed Submarine in the Arabian Sea U.S. Central Command just dropped the location of a powerful nuclear weapon in a tweet.

We do just DO this from time to time

Under normal circumstances, any hint of a nuclear war threat from either American or Russian leaders would be the kind of news that keeps you up at night, but when it's TACO and Dimon, nobody even cancels tomorrow's brunch reservation.

Three Tweets to Midnight | Stanley Center for Peace and Security How might a nuclear crisis play out in today’s media environment? There are still many unknowns about the effects of social media on international conflict.

Stanley Center report from 2018:

"Three Tweets to Midnight: Nuclear Crisis Stability and the Information Ecosystem" stanleycenter.org/publications...

He sent another rambling tweet. There's no evidence that our submarine deployments actually changed (it very likely did not).

Those upstream monopoles, pressured by outside lobbying groups, are now defining what can and can’t be said online. Payment processors have pushed other kinds of content to the margins before, video game storefronts are just the latest example. “Such marketplaces may default to freedom of expression because it's cheaper to not moderate content, but they will easily bow to calls for censorship because it's less trouble than advocating for controversial products. It cuts both ways: a few years ago, major online stores removed products showing the Confederate flag,” Pedercini said.

“The trailer does have a suggestive clip with a sexbot, and a hyperbolic disclaimer…so I guess that's fair,” Pedercini said. He pushed back against Steam and asked for a review. “Both reviews took more than a week, which I think it's longer than usual. I wonder if they were figuring out how to respond to the payment processor deal.” Pedercini’s problems with Steam came at a time when the platform was facing pressure from credit card companies to remove adult games from its platform. Earlier this month, the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard pressured video game distributors Steam and Itch to remove adult games from their storefronts.

Steam Doesn't Think This Image Is ‘Suitable for All Ages’ The decision highlights hurdles faced by developers as they navigate a world where credit card companies dictate what is and isn't appropriate.

"The status of video games as culture is still being negotiated. If thematic restrictions like the ones defined by itch.io were to be applied to movies or books, limiting their distribution, it would be major news immediately."

>Laura Loomer is running American national security

AI Bunnies on Trampoline Causing Crisis of Confidence on TikTok People failing to identify a video of adorable bunnies as AI slop has sparked worries that many more people could fall for online scams.

there is no exit
slop comes
as bunnies
bouncing in the yard
cute in the night

Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.

getting my phrenology checked by my laptop camera before I can listen to WAP, a future I always wanted www.404media.co/spotify-uk-a...

Censorship Whac-A-Mole: Google search exploited to scrub articles on San Francisco tech exec A novel method of de-indexing websites from search results was used to bury critical reporting and commentary.

And @zidan.bsky.social has his view of the events, including more detail, here

The dirty tricks of reputation management: from PI firms to sabotaging Google Search How exposing the arrest of a Bay Area surveillance CEO led to an ex-cop attempting to unmask this publication's sources and the end of a secret technique for removing journalism from Google Search.

Poulson goes into more depth and detail about the incident, including a history of similar attacks, in his newsletter.

When Poulson noticed this, he alerted Zidan, who did some digging and figured out the problem. The owner of websites can access a Google Search Console (GSC) to tweak and optimize their site's place in the search engine. Digging around in GSC, Zidan discovered someone had made repeated requests, starting in May and ending in June, to recrawl its article about Poulson and Blackman. In every instance, the capitalization of letters in the URL had been changed. “So the first request that comes in, the ‘a’ of anatomy is a capital ‘A’ and the rest of the slug is the same. And apparently after this request would expire, the attackers would make another request, this time capitalizing the ‘n’ in anatomy,” Zidan said. When Google tries to index the URLs with tweaked capitalization, it gets a 404. “Then, Google, instead of indexing only the 404 page, would de-index all the variations including the live, valid, legitimate article,” Zidan said.

Journalist Discovers Google Vulnerability That Allowed People to Disappear Specific Pages From Search Negative articles about a tech CEO vanished from Google after someone made fraudulent requests using the Refresh Outdated Content Tool.

Here's a fun (terrifying) one. A journalist was trying to find a specific article he'd written and couldn't find it on Google. At all. Someone had tricked Google into de-listing it entirely.

reports of RSS’s demise are greatly exaggerated

if RSS is dead, how is it that i’ve been heavily using it for the last twenty years?

Living Next To Tesla Diner Is 'Absolute Hell,' Neighbors Say We talked to people living in the building whose views are being blocked by Tesla's massive four-story screen.

he ruins every neighborhood he's in

Anecdotally, every time I see this it's older people. Went to the movies last week and a woman watched Candice Owens at full volume during the previews.

Got it, thank you!

anyway.

The statement was mocked by people in the firearms community. Many of the lawsuits Sig is facing were filed on behalf of police officers, U.S. military veterans, and gun enthusiasts who claimed the gun had a design flaw that made it fire when it’s not supposed to. The overwhelming majority of the P320 video content is from guntubers trying to replicate unintentional discharges and dismantling the gun to figure out what’s going on. The P320 fires by mistake so often that there are supercuts of it happening online pulled from body cam footage and CCTV. And, of course, now Air Force’s Global Strike Command and ICE have told its people to stop using the weapon.

Sig blamed anti gun activists for the P320's bad reputation. But here's the thing.

The P320's reputation for firing for almost no reason is so bad that Sig posted a long explanation on Instagram about it. Two months later, the airman died and multiple government agencies told their people to stop using the weapon.

Now gaming streamers are making videos about the gun and racking up 2 million views. That's a PR disaster.

Why is this happening? It's been building a long time, but a airman died on an Air Force base last week in a P320 related incident. The base told its airman to stop using the gun. ICE told its people to stop using the gun. The FBI just issued a report on why it's dangerous.