The Weekly Whatever: Experimental past tense version
Quotes of the week
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” — Tucker Carlson
“You don’t want to be caught short, because in five years a number of banks will not be around because of blockchain technology.”
— Joseph DiPaolo, Signature Bank CEO, 2018.
Crapto
-
Signature bank failed after making a play to win cryptocurrency accounts.
-
So did Silvergate Bank.
-
Instagram disabled its NFT features.
$8chan
-
Elon told managers to provide him with a list of people who should be promoted. He then fired the managers and replaced them with the people on their list.
-
A key Twitter project only had one engineer left on staff. They made a mistake, and the entire site went down. Elon suggested that the site needs a total rewrite, here's hoping!
-
Twitter saw a 40% drop in earnings year-to-year, with 70% of the company's biggest advertisers no longer advertising on the site.
-
Meanwhile, employees reported that Elon tried to sell them the office plants, and that the company can no longer protect users from state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation.
-
Elon mocked a disabled employee he fired, saying that they were fired for using their disability as an excuse not to work. After the lawyers had a quiet word, he posted a humiliating public apology.
-
Another Twitter employee was laid off right before she was about to start her maternity leave, leaving her without health insurance.
Business
-
Microsoft laid off its ethics and society team in order to speed up delivery of AI products.
-
In academic publishing, Elsevier has the largest gender pay gap, a median of 40% in favor of men over women — as was announced by The Lancet, published by Elsevier.
-
CNET laid off 10% of its masthead of writers, and moved the editor in chief to be in charge of AI-generated content.
-
A startup found teenagers suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts, and directed them to an experimental chatbot. The company categorized the study as “nonhuman subjects research”.
-
Employees were found to be feeding confidential company data to ChatGPT.
Republic of Gilead
-
Three Texas women were sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping a friend obtain abortion pills.
-
Texas doctors started offering advice like "The weather's really nice in New Mexico right now".
Lost and found
-
New Mexico was found to have lost track of at least 21 prisoners serving life sentences for crimes committed as children.
-
Don't care about companies tracking you for marketing purposes? The FBI revealed that they purchased location data from marketing companies so they wouldn't need to get a warrant.
-
Don't care about your home security camera uploading everything to Amazon? Turned out if the company receives a warrant, it just hands all the video over to the police.
-
The Catholic Church was revealed to have spent millions of dollars buying data from Grindr and other dating sites so they could track the activity of their priests.
Miscellany
-
The moon was said to need its own time zone; no word on when Lunar Daylight Saving Time will start and end.
-
Cyclists were reported to outnumber motorists in London.
-
Saudi engineer Ghassan Al Sharbi was released from Guantanamo after 21 years, without ever having been charged with a crime.