The Viewing the Depths of the Clampdown Edition

Where the last weeks of August are usually mellow, the week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense in the tech world and it was no different this year with one pretty notable exception. In no previous year has the post-summer season opened with statements about the >10% chance the AI technologies we're investing our proverbial farms in will somehow be used to kill us all within a decade. This week we have a larger selection of somewhat scary stories than most weeks. We've learned that Anthropic is building a surveillance database of Americans and non-Americans who oppose AI infrastructure and data-centers. We've also learned that Flock uses data from large scale protests to train law enforcement. We learned the Department of Homeland Security has established a "predictive policing" unit currently deployed to border control stations in Washington State and Texas. On a lighter note, we learned the White House has posted cute but overtly racist video games on its dot-gov website and gotten its wrist slapped by Tetris. The week after Labor Day is always hyper-intense. Acceleration culture for the win eh! 

Meanwhile:

- Google might soon introduce an entirely new way of ranking pages in its index, DeepMind's Autoregressive Ranking system

- Matt Mullenweg is out at Automattic, the for-profit arm of WordPress but still the Exec Director of the WordPress project

- Anthropic is denying one of its employees, Levent Alpoge, credit for co-completing a proof of the Nevier-Stokes Problem, a Millennial Prize candidate and one of the worlds most challenging problems. Alpoge worked with NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster for years but, since joining Anthropic and using it to help solve the problem (Buckmaster used OpenAI), Anthropic wants sole claim to his part of the solution.

- LG TVs might or might not be watching, listening, and reporting back on you. 

- Meta's Muse, a personal AI, has launched. Meta considers it both an advisor and an agent. 

- Meta continues to allow graphic sexual abuse of minors in advertising for nudifying AIs. Meta has been aware of this problem for several weeks but the issue persists. 

- X Money will be the only payout option for US content creators on the X-system as of this week

- A judge has ruled that X gets to keep the name Twitter but has lost control of the blue bird logo

- Google is displeased with its own results resulting from its compliance with the EUs DMA. Details in the podcast. :)

- Google Shopping Ads are having a reverse crocodile effect due to AI overviews. 

- Google has fixed the Gemini 3.8 citation bug and is again showing source links

- Google has been forced to display a warning about predatory pricing with Booking Partner search widgets in the EU

- Google has published a document outlining regional differences in search experiences

- Sometimes there is no one right answer to an SEO problem - That depends. "There are often several so choose one and make it the right one", says John Mueller

- Google can lose faith in sites that don't correct, or forget to correct bad habits

All this and more in a show that will never lose faith in our humanity, no matter how many bad habits and mistakes get made along the way.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy