Search Engine Replaces News Organization
Also Imgur Leaves UK and Code Becomes Unreadable

The Internal Comms Team Thinks the Old Newsletter Was Too Flashy

Kagi, the privacy-focused search vendor, has announced its new news aggregator product called Kagi News, which is basically an entire news service that only updates once a day around noon UTC. The underlying philosophy for this feature appears to be a corporate-mandated "mindful approach" to the news cycle, a concept that only makes sense to people who have so much free time they need to actively ration their information consumption. Instead of the firehose of ad-driven consumption, users get an AI-synthesized daily briefing, complete with summaries and citations to the original sources.

The whole project is framed by Kagi as an anti-dopamine feed for a more transparent, privacy-respecting way to get information, which sounds exhausting even to write down. It is a search engine deciding that the world's newsfeed is not up to corporate standards and the problem must be solved by distributing a single, highly curated, AI-powered internal memo every twenty four hours. People used to call that a newspaper, but now it is a feature designed to prevent you from using the internet too much, a true benevolent incompetence from the people who built the tools in the first place.

OpenAI Re-Ups the Presentation Slides, Now with 'Physical Realism'

OpenAI has released Sora 2, its upgraded text-to-video generation model, and the primary selling point is that the digital worlds it simulates now mostly adhere to physics. The previous version, Sora 1, was apparently so unrealistic that objects would float, characters would randomly change, and a missed basketball would simply teleport into the hoop instead of rebounding. Now, according to the official materials, the model is "more physically accurate" and even includes synchronized dialogue and sound effects, which must have been a difficult Jira ticket to close.

The model, which OpenAI is calling the "GPT-3.5 moment for video," also features editing tools like Remix, Re-cut, and Storyboard, finally allowing the marketing department to change a wooden door to a French glass door without re rendering the entire video. It is important to remember that these models are fundamentally trying to simulate the real world, and this entire release is basically a company announcing that its product has finally passed the high school freshman physics test. The corporate pressure to hit the next major version number remains undefeated.

Imgur Cancels a Region to Avoid Compliance Paperwork

Image hosting site Imgur has opted to restrict all access from the United Kingdom rather than comply with local data regulations. The UK’s Information Commissioner's Office, or ICO, had issued the company’s parent, MediaLab AI Inc, with a notice of intent to impose a monetary penalty in September. The investigation revolved around how the Imgur platform handles children's personal data and its lack of sufficient age assurance measures, which is apparently a bigger problem than just making users click a checkbox.

Imgur’s management decided the cost of compliance was higher than the value of the entire UK user base, demonstrating true business genius. ICO Interim Executive Director Tim Capel noted that the company's decision to exit the UK will not actually allow it to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement, so the data protection fine will likely be processed anyway, making the entire dramatic exit a pointless expense. The company has essentially just taken its ball and gone home, only to find the principal still waiting outside the house.

Briefs

• Fraud Sentence: Charlie Javice, the founder of the startup Frank, has been sentenced to seven years in prison for her fraudulent sale of the company to JPMorgan Chase. This is a good reminder that not every tech failure is a benevolent oopsie; sometimes, it is just white collar crime.
• Printer Rebellion: The world may yet be saved by an open-source inkjet printer that promises to use DRM-free ink. The decade long war against cartridge-based capitalism has begun its first, highly visible crowdfunding campaign.
• LLM Debt: Engineers are warning about "comprehension debt," the ticking time bomb created by large language model generated code that works but is impossible for a human to read or maintain. We have automated the creation of technical debt; the singularity is closer than we thought.