★ After Years of Moderation-Heavy Zagging, Zuckerberg Announces That Meta Is Going to Back to Moderation-Light Zigging Across Its Platforms

Tom Warren, The Verge: Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like... Google. It’s a clear attempt from Microsoft to make Bing look like Google for this specific search...

2006 post from yours truly that applies perfectly to Apple Intelligence today: The sentiment here is that it’s somehow unfair to developers to treat software labeled “beta” with the same critical eye as non-beta software. That’s true, in the case of actual beta software, where by “actual beta” I mean “not yet released, but close”. Released vs....

I mentioned earlier today Casey Newton’s remarkable 2019 piece for The Verge, “Bodies in Seats”, an eye-opening look at the lives of content moderators at a large Facebook contractor in Tampa. When I linked to it at the time, I wrote: If this is what it takes to moderate Facebook, it’s an indictment of the basic concept of Facebook itself. In...

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge: The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex from...

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for...