Robert Evatt

I Tricked Google Into Removing AI Overviews. Here's How I Did It Annoyed by AI summaries taking over your search results page? There's no official way to turn them off, but there are a few tricks you can try to stop seeing them so often.

News you can use
www.pcmag.com/explainers/i...

Adobe Animate:

3 million users @$23 a month.
$69 million in revenue per month.
$828 million in revenue a year.

Adobe is throwing away almost a billion dollars a year in revenue so they can focus on... AI. 🤢🤮

X is hiring a creative writing specialist at $40 an hour to make Grok better at writing and a true LOL at the qualifications

The inevitable point where AI is eating up the barf from other AI

Well at least he didn't do anything embarrassing like rename the company after it

Tweet exchange in which a photo of Anne Hathaway is posted by @TheRoyalSerf, to which user @VvSchweetz24 replies "@grok...do your thing. @Grok replies: Anne Hathaway isn't Jewish; she was raised Catholic but left the church. She married Adam Shulman (who is Jewish) in 2012 and celebrates Jewish holidays with their kids. SHe's played Jewish roles, like in "Armageddon Time."

pretty sure he meant the other thing, grok, but very cool that those are your two things

Downtown. 242 Fifth Ave - CVS. Caller said someone just stole like 7 full cases of Dr. Pepper and fled. Suspect is currently walking down Fifth with a comical amount of Dr. Pepper.

Can’t see what could go wrong with the chatbot that tells people to kill themselves also pushing DraftKings

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

I have absolutely nothing against the movies, but I’ve been to a lot of big comic cons and I’ve never, ever seen Avatar anything at one. Not even merch. It’s the biggest-scale sci-fi thing utterly rejected by sci-fi fans.

I also love the fact that the movie started with a goofy, whimsical title sequence to set expectations. If the (excellent) botched scare test sequence came first, it might have caused the audience to think the movie was secretly about actually monstrous monsters.

Among other things I greatly appreciate that you used “Bugs Bunny” as a verb.

We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars. An AI agent ran a snack operation in the WSJ newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish—and taught us lessons about the future of AI.

Gift link, probably the funniest thing the Wall Street Journal has done this year.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

Starbucks customers gripe the once-cozy coffee shop is too 'sterile' now Critics say customers may have a point as Starbucks’s sales keep slipping

Real answer: Starbucks intentionally redesigned their stores to make them uncomfortable to increase turnover, and everyone followed their lead. (The plan was a disaster for Starbucks) www.marketwatch.com/story/starbu...

AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet -- And Thanksgiving Dinner Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures

NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving.

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

evergreen

AI-Powered Stuffed Animal Pulled From Market After Disturbing Interactions With Children FoloToy says it's suspended sales of its AI-powered teddy bear after researchers found it gave wildly inappropriate and dangerous answers.

"Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o model by default...tests repeatedly showed that the AI toy dropped its guardrails the longer a conversation went on, until hitting rock bottom on incredibly disturbing topics."

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

Every ad now

I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

Musk: X will delete all heuristics from its recommendation system within six weeks. ...the familiar logic of likes, replies, and reposts that shaped Twitter for years is about to disappear. In its place, Grok, the platform's in-house Al model, will read and watch more than one hundred million posts.

betamax is back - as a laser disc

Column | ChatGPT just came out with its own web browser. Use it with caution. OpenAI’s Atlas promises AI-powered convenience. The price? Letting ChatGPT track and store “memories” of what you do online.

ChatGPT’s new Atlas browser doesn’t just see what you read — it remembers it.

@eff.org’s Lena Cohen showed me it even logged “memories” of her looking for *abortion care* and her doctor’s name. Out-surveils even Chrome.

My @washingtonpost.com column: wapo.st/49bOcVC

The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.

Eight Sleep smartbeds users had a bad night on Monday when a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused their beds to malfunction. Some were left with the bed’s heat blasting. One woman said her bed went haywire and she had to unplug it from the wall.

🔗 www.404media.co/the-aws-outa...

This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.

Kohler unveils a camera for your toilet | TechCrunch Home goods company Kohler recently unveiled a new device called the Dekoda — a $599 camera that can be attached to your toilet bowl and take pictures of what’s inside.

Home goods company Kohler recently unveiled a new device called the Dekoda — a $599 camera that can be attached to your toilet bowl and take pictures of what’s inside.

I wonder if he was specifically paid to never bring up the murder and slavery things afterward. I know he’s a doofus, but surely SOMEONE brought them up to him.