Mentioned in today’s edition: Meta, Anthropic, ARR, PlayStation 5, Coinbase, Google TV and Elon Musk. Plus, deals on Tribit Bluetooth speakers, Synology NAS drives and Apple AirTags.

The News

Social media companies are already removing public health information. It could get even worse

Public health groups say their Facebook and Instagram accounts promoting safe drug use have been removed by the platforms (ABC News). Organisations like Pill Testing Australia and CanTEST, which put out advisory alerts for dangerous batches of drugs circulating in the community, say that their content is frequently removed for violating rules around promoting drug use -- something that they say they don't do. Similar things have happened in the past with queer health (QNews) and reproductive health pages (Guardian)

The Sizzle: Since Meta's recent legal losses, I've been wondering what happens next? Clearly, big payouts are an incentive to create products deemed "less harmful". But one uncomfortable possibility is that social media companies like Meta react by reeling in what can be posted on their platforms, both by changing the rules of allowable content and by making their automated content moderation processes more trigger-happy to take down content. Companies are going to respond to incentives and, right now, we're seeing new pressures on them to allow less speech. 

What's the solution? This isn't a reason to bemoan these legal outcomes or try overturn them. The answer is that governments need to get their shit together and pass laws that make it clear what platforms should and shouldn't allow on their platforms. Because if you don't, you leave it up to the companies which have incentives that are not "maximise speech" but, instead, "make money" and "avoid headaches". That's how you end up with health information removed while the most ragebait, sensationalist and awful content is allowed to prosper.

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Anthropic's new AI model is so sPoOkY that it's not being released, yet

In a twist from the industry standard behaviour of shipping stuff and dealing with the consequences later, Anthropic has developed a new AI model that it claims is so powerful that the company is not going to release it ... yet (ZDNet)! Anthropic claims its new model, Mythos (model card here) is so capable that it has "found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser" (Anthropic). So, instead of turning this loose on the world, the company is giving 40-ish major (mostly US) companies access so they can shore up their own defences. 

Before we get too carried away with the hype, OpenAI did this exact same move with GPT-2 in 2019 (MIT Technology Review). But people I trust, like Simon Willison, seem to think that this isn't just marketing bullshit. I guess we'll find out soon enough if there will be a Y2026K! 

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Tech companies keep using this (semi-bullshit) metric to 'prove' they're making money

One of the most popular acronyms now in tech/business news is ARR, annual recurring revenue (Bloomberg, $). Tech companies, particularly AI companies, love to throw around massive ARR figures -- but it's kind of a bullshit number. In most cases, it means that a company has taken its monthly earnings and simply multiplied it by 12. Except, as you can probably guess, you can't extrapolate a full year's revenue even for subscription-based models because people cancel all the time. OpenAI even used ARR to spruik its advertising revenue — a type of business that is notoriously lumpy and very ill-suited to ARR (X). 

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

It's like NASA in your menu bar!

I know what you're thinking: gee I really want constant updates about the Artemis II mission but I am burdened by having to constantly open program windows to find out more. No longer! Meet the Artemis II macOS menu bar mission tracker. It uses NASA data to provide constant updates about the spacecraft's progress and location without all the hassle of Googling "Artemis II". 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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