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. Ukraine has invested heavily in its drone warfare and it's paying off. The latest twist is that the Ukrainian government has gamified their use. Fighting the Russian invasion has turned into a game of numbers. (FT and Washington Post, respectively)
2. First Russia, now Iran: using a "ghost fleet" of tankers to move oil that is supposed to be under embargo. (WSJ)
3. This article about the decline of white picket fences is not about genAI. But in a way, it kind of is. It's hard to not see the parallels to the ways genAI has upended many lines of work. (Washington Post)
4. Byrider, a questionable auto-and-loans company that specializes in customers with shaky credit, has come under questioning over its business practices. (Bloomberg)
5. Meta put a genAI bot on customer support duty. Hackers tricked it into handing over access to popular accounts. (Krebs on Security, Ars Technica)
6. It was bad enough when the bills for all that tokenmaxxing arrived. Now, developers are feeling the pain from a change in GitHub Copilot's billing model. (TechCrunch, The Register)
7. A little home renovation can go a long way for your pets. (WSJ)
8. After mandating genAI adoption and establishing "tokenmaxxing" leaderboards, some execs are having second thoughts. And changing course. (Tom's Hardware, CNBC)

Special section: genAI datacenters

(In what is slowly becoming a recurring segment ...)

• Activist Erin Brockovich – yes, that Erin Brockovich – has launched a website to track datacenter construction. (CNET)
• France is pushing for more datacenters, and SoftBank is cutting them a check. (WSJ)
• Another activist, Kassi Solberg, is fighting a massive datacenter complex that's planned for her area. (New York Times)
• Datacenters aren't a new concept. But the scale and power consumption of the genAI kind require new ideas on handling electricity and cooling. (Bloomberg)

The rest of the best

• One startup is turning the shopping mall experience into an online feed. (TechCrunch)
• genAI startups are making slick videos for their marketing push. The catch? The videos use traditional film techniques and actors because, they say, genAI tools aren't good enough.
• Surprise, surprise: those AI agents aren't so good at the tasks they've been assigned. (Futurism)
• Spotify is now home to some AI-generated music. Company leadership is cool with that. (The Guardian)
• Having started in Europe, Meta now offers paid plans for US-based customers on Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. (Mashable, Le Monde 🇫🇷 , Die Zeit 🇩🇪)
• Pizzerias were banking on a robot to eliminate some manual labor. But the company behind the bot just closed its doors. (Geekwire, Futurism)
• One developer has poisoned their open source library against genAI use. (Ars Technica)
• After several high-profile cases in which attorneys were caught submitting documents that contained fabricated genAI citations, some are … still submitting documents that contain fabricated genAI citations. (Scientific American)

Did I miss anything?

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