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February 23, 2026 | Read online
# OpenAI failed to flag mass shooter's gun logs, big Xbox departures and Wikipedia ditches Archive.today Plus: Can you read this story while time-travelling?
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Edition 2507
"Computer Space control panel" by Mbrickn is licensed under CC0
Mentioned in today’s edition: Sam Altman, Phil Spencer, Tesla, Wikipedia, Visual Intelligence, LLMs, Uber Eats and e-ink. Plus, deals on Ring doorbells, AMD processors and Optus mobile plans.
# The News
### OpenAI decided against telling police about future shooter's ChatGPT conversations about gun violence
OpenAI's systems flagged a future mass shooter's gun violence-related use of ChatGPT, but the company decided against alerting police (WSJ). Months before Jesse Van Rootselaar killed 8 others at a Canadian school, a dozen OpenAI staffers debated whether her use of ChatGPT — involved "describ[ing] scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days" — was a threat of potential real-world violence. The company decided not to tell police, but banned her account.
The Sizzle: The key question here is: why did OpenAI decide that this future shooter's behaviour was too extreme for its products, but also not extreme enough to be worth telling police about? It's not like it can claim that it missed the signs — clearly it knew something, hence the ban — but apparently that wasn't bad enough to tell anyone else. I think the only way that this makes sense is if you are a company that's less interested in protecting people than it is in protecting itself.
What amazes me is the way that these AI companies are repeating the exact same problems as social media companies, despite having seen — and in some cases having staff from social media companies who worked on — all the things that can go wrong. When you get to have a billion users, we know there will be people who use these platforms that will do terrible things. OpenAI isn't to blame for the shooter's violence as far as we know. But it does have the capability to do something about it: to flag and intervene. Choosing not to is, well, just that. It's a choice.
Related OpenAI reading: OpenAI now says it only needs US$600b in compute spending through to 2030 (ITNews), the latest OpenAI gadget thought bubble is a smart speaker with a camera (Verge) and Sam Altman defends AI energy and water use by saying that "it takes a lot of energy to train a human" (TechCrunch)
Discuss in Slack or Forum.
### What the hell is happening over at Xbox HQ?
The bad vibes around the future of Xbox have gotten even worse with some big departures. Long-time Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and his heir apparent, Xbox President Sarah Bond, have both resigned (IGN). The unit's new president is, uh, currently the president of "Microsoft's CoreAI product" which is the engineering division dedicated to building a "new AI-first app stack" (Microsoft). Which is the obvious pick to run all the gaming stuff in Microsoft.
Discuss in Slack or Forum.
### Wikipedia ditches major archiving site because its maintainer lost its mind over blog post
Wikipedia is ditching Archive.today after its maintainer DDoSed a critic and tampered with its saved pages (Ars Technica). Volunteers at the English version of Wikipedia are in the process of removing 695,000 Archive.today links (and its variants like archive.is etc) from more than 400,000 pages. The catalyst was that editors found that the pseudonymous person behind Archive.today was carrying out a revenge campaign against a blogger who tried to unmask them. This involved setting up Archive.today's CAPTCHA so that users were DDoSing them, and inserting the blogger's name into captures of pages -- meaning that they couldn't be trusted as authoritative sources anymore :/
Discuss in Slack or Forum.
# Leftovers
Australia:
Liberal-aligned think tank says Australia's got to start approving data centres quicker (AFR, $) Meanwhile a near $1b data centre in Port Melbourne got approved in 75 days (SMH, $) Nice read from a Sizzler: Law must catch up with Zuckerberg’s Big Tech addictive platforms (AFR, $) Bunnings partners with Uber Eats, deliver 30,000 products on demand (SmartCompany) Uber Eats is such a weird name considering it's just a general purpose delivery app. I got excited thinking it would be doing Bunnings snags NSW Police to set up AI centre (iTnews) Banks want Apple to chip in to pay for the Australian payments infrastructure (InnovationAus)
Rest of World:
Apple's Tim Cook is dropping a lot of hints about the AI wearables push and, in particular, Apple's "Visual Intelligence" (Bloomberg, $) This is interesting: LLMs are quite good at finding hidden backdoors in binaries (Quesma) Government docs reveal new details about Tesla and Waymo robotaxi programs (Wired, $) EVs are already making your air cleaner (Grist) How will OpenAI compete? (Benedict Evans) This is a good long read on why OpenAI is facing some pretty big business questions There is literally a UFO-related ETF (Bloomberg, $) How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard (Hawksley.org) Neat
Discuss in Slack or Forum.
# Oh, Also
### Can you read this story while time-travelling?
Sizzler Ben shared a link to a fun newsletter that tells a story in an interesting way: every few paragraphs, the language changes to the style of a century earlier.
It goes from 2000 to 1900 to 1800 etc. for a thousand years. I tapped out at 1500 - I wonder how far you can go?
Discuss in Slack or Forum.
# Bargains
Electronics
25% off All Sonos products Ring Video Doorbell Plus with Chime - $134 at JB Hi-Fi (Down from $269) JBL PartyBox Encore Essential 2 - $246 at The Good Guys Commercial (Down from $349) Q Acoustics M20 HD Speakers (Black or Walnut) - $498 at Addicted to Audio (Down from $999) TCL 50" P7K Qled Google TV 2025 - $585 at The Good Guys (Down from $695) Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2) Sapphire Edition 42mm Soft Gold with Light Sand Band - $849 at JB Hi-Fi Apple Watch Ultra 2 49mm Black Titan - $1097 at JB Hi-Fi
Computing
AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU - $285 at Binary Tech Store AliExpress (Down from $629) Crucial P510 2TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe 2280 M.2 SSD - $319 at Centre Com (Down from $409) Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch, M4 Pro 12‑core CPU, 16‑core GPU, 24GB Unified Memory, 512GB - $2999 at Amazon (Down from $3299)
Mobile
Optus Flex Plus 365 Day Plan 220GB + Bonus 80GB - $175 at Optus (Down from $350) Apple iPhone 16e 128GB - $799 at JB Hi-Fi (Down from $969)
# The End
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