My main newsletter, Complex Machinery, includes a section called "In Other News..." It's where I list one-liners about interesting articles that didn't fit into any segments.

You can think of this list as a version of In Other News, but with a wider remit than Complex Machinery's "risk, AI, and related topics."

Above the fold

1. This article is about tracing financial oddities, but it could easily be a chapter in a spy novel. Sometimes the journalists perform the due diligence that everyone else should have. (FT)
2. Insurers make their money by being right more often than they're wrong. Hence why they, like Wall Street, have invested heavily in mathematical modeling and predictive systems. Insurers' reluctance to provide coverage in some areas tells you a lot about the realities of climate change. (Aeon)
3. Life comes at you fast, Dumb Ideas In genAI Product Management edition: Grammarly's "Expert Review" feature included avatars based on contemporary writers. The company initially stuck to its guns – requiring authors to opt-out of their work being used, which is par for the course for a genAI company – but eventually pulled the plug on the product. Still, a prominent writer is spearheading a class-action suit against the company. (The Verge, The Verge (again), Futurism, and Wired, respectively)
4. A mistaken facial recognition match lands an innocent woman in jail for months. And by "innocent" I mean "she wasn't even in the state where the crime had been committed." (The Independent)
5. BuzzFeed, a pioneer in listicles and clickbait headlines, may have poisoned itself on that genAI pill. As it turns out, simply being excited about genAI isn't enough to make it work. (Futurism)
6. Plenty of companies have experienced North Korean hackers trying to get jobs. As far as I know, only one has reversed the game on the would-be infiltrators. (NBC News)
7. We're told that gambling is bad for us, and that the sharp uptick in online gambling apps and prediction markets only makes things worse. One writer spent a year as a gambler – at first as part of a writing assignment, then as a troubled individual. (The Atlantic)
8. Bank teller jobs: ATMs (somewhat counterintuitively) increased their number, but smartphones wiped them out. (David Oks)
9. It's an open secret that a lot of data labeling and other AI grunt work falls on the shoulders of workers in Africa. The work can be jarring, if not outright traumatising – labelers see the worst online content, so companies can train systems to filter it from the rest of the world's social media feeds – and they're pushing for better conditions. (404 Media)

The rest of the best

• I've noted before that criminals are early and eager adopters of new technology, and that they surface effective use cases in the process. An Interpol report now puts that to numbers: "4.5x more profitable." (The Register)
• OpenAI's advisers aren't too keen on ChatGPT's "adult mode". (WSJ)
• Things are … not going well at xAI. At least that's the story, based on key departures and team shakeups. (Ars Technica)
• Perhaps related, Tesla customers aren't so happy, either. (Wired)
• Besides briefly being the hot game of the minute a few years ago, image data collected through Pokémon Go helps delivery robots' navigation systems. (MIT Technology Review)
• The Onion (possibly) got a peek into the dreams of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (The Onion)
• Nvidia is investing … in itself: $26 billion to build its own genAI foundation models. (Wired)
• Datacenters are important installations. Which makes them juicy targets during conflict. (Les Echos 🇫🇷)
• Character AI, a genAI chatbot company, has been pretty slow to fix issues. Like, say, the way it hosts chatbots modeled on murderers. (Futurism)
• A research group has exposed a sizable, entirely preventable flaw in the internal genAI bot used by management consultancy McKinsey. Yes, that McKinsey. (Codewall)
• Just a week after a friend joked about Zoom needing genAI avatars for when you're not camera-ready, Zoom has announced genAI avatars for when you're not camera-ready. (TechCrunch)
• Public sentiment toward genAI has soured. I mean, really soured. (NBC News)
• A software developer reboots a fan favorite, with a catch: the entire system is proudly vibe-coded. (Time Extension)

Did I miss anything?

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