Casey Newton

Casey Newton

@caseynewton.bsky.social

Email salesman at Platformer.news and co-host at Machine Gods.

320.1K followers554 following2.8K posts

Casey Newton reposted

James Temple
@jtemple.bsky.social

Researchers have set out to test whether preventing & aggressively combatting wildfires could counteract soaring Arctic-boreal emissions, preserving the vast stores of carbon in the forests, tundra & permafrost of the far north. Please read + share my latest deep dive.

technologyreview.comInside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbonThese scientists hope that fire-spotting satellites, AI tools and ancient land practices could preserve the world’s vulnerable permafrost—and the vast carbon it stores.

Casey Newton reposted

Kate Starbird
@katestarbird.bsky.social

Over on X, the “rigged election” crowd is pushing rumors around a video livestream clip of election workers, working late at night, allegedly doing something nefarious. Maricopa officials have explained that the workers are just… doing their jobs. But rumors around the video continue to swirl.

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Meta glasses: too perverted for Amsterdam

Techmeme@techmeme.com

Hans Anders, one of the largest Dutch eyewear retail chains, suspends sales of Ray-Ban Meta Glasses in the Netherlands and Belgium amid growing privacy concerns (Toby Sterling/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Getting my associate’s degree in regulatory arbitrage from Horowitz Andreessen Academy

Techmeme@techmeme.com

a16z invests $35M in Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an independent, unaccredited two-year alternative to college; Anthropic, Meta, and others will provide compute (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Probably the worst job in a video game is being the henchman in the stealth tutorial whose job is it to stand motionless looking over a railing, waiting for someone to sneak up behind you so they can knock you out with one button. I don't envy that guy

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Terrifying

Techmeme@techmeme.com

Sources: the US "almost started a war" after an AI-assisted report hallucinated that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components in the Middle East (CNN) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton reposted

adonis (and cait)
@cait.bsky.social

I keep seeing videos of a guy who catches crabs and lobsters, cracks all the barnacles off them, puts a shrimp in their claws and throws them back. can you imagine. abducted by aliens but they just give you a spa day and hand you two hot dogs and let you go

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Excited to put all my money into Jack Dorsey Uninsured National Trust Bank

Techmeme@techmeme.com

Block says it has submitted an application to US regulators to establish a federally regulated, uninsured national trust bank called Builders Bank & Trust (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

UBS becomes the first bank to ask prospective employees: can you type into a box?

Techmeme@techmeme.com

Sources: UBS requires AI skills when hiring junior investment bankers, making it one of the first major financial institutions to explicitly require AI literacy (Simon Foy/Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

It's a good thing that this is all just marketing hype from the labs and that the agents are simply acting according to a distribution of statistical probabilities. Otherwise this would be scary!

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

This is the message local communities have been waiting to hear to get them really excited about data centers. A masterstroke by the president

Techmeme@techmeme.com

Trump says communities that reject data centers will end up "backwards and poor" and that "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement" (Cheyanne M. Daniels/Politico) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton reposted

Alex Zalben
@azalben.bsky.social

Here's the official announcement of Parton's passing from her reps, along with the request that in lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library at www.imaginationlibrary.com

Alex Zalben@azalben.bsky.social

Dolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com

imaginationlibrary.comDolly Parton's Imagination Library | USA, UK, IE, CA, AUDolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a book gifting program that mails free books to children from birth until they begin school in participating areas.

Casey Newton reposted

Colin
@colin-fraser.net

honestly the best way to tell if an image online is fake is to introspect about whether looking at reinforces a sense of superiority over some group towards which you already feel contempt

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Not Spirit Airlines causing delays from beyond the grave

Techmeme@techmeme.com

A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants sought assurances that their info would be removed (Alexander Gladstone/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social

Uh oh, sounds like another agent escaped its testing environment!

Techmeme@techmeme.com

Microsoft says GitHub is down worldwide, with the GitHub website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services impacted; the outage started at 13:40 UTC (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink