Zara Dar’s six-minute explainer video “So what are Integrals?” has a little over half a million views with 450 likes and an 87 percent positive “thumbs up” review rate. Commenters have said the video, which is a short introduction to one of the fundamental operations of calculus, is “educational,” “great,” and “just incredible.” 

“I have to say, as an aerospace engineering student, that you have explained the usefulness of integrals better than my university professor,” one commenter said. 

Only a few commenters complained or demanded that Dar take her clothes off, which is impressive because the video and comments were posted to her Pornhub channel, where Dar has been posting educational videos like “What is a neural network?” and “Intuitive Approach to Understanding Probability” for the last year. 

When I asked her why she thinks her videos are gaining traction on a porn site, Dar said “I’m not entirely sure, but it could be because my SFW videos stand out against the typical NSFW content on the platform. That contrast might make them more intriguing or refreshing to viewers. But that’s just my speculation.” 

Dar, who dropped out of grad school to be a content creator full-time (she also has a Pornhub video about that choice), also posts the same videos to YouTube and has an OnlyFans where she posts adult content, where she says she’s made over a million dollars. 

On Wednesday, while the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging a law in Texas that requires age verification for people to view porn sites, Justice Samuel Alito asked if Pornhub was “like the old Playboy magazines,” meaning does the site just offer pornography or content that is not pornographic as well. The answer is that it doesn’t have much in terms of written articles, b there’s a long history of posting non pornographic content to Pornhub. As I wrote almost a decade ago, some people do it as a goof, but it’s also not the worst place to monetize one’s videos, even if they’re not porn. In fact, I learned about Dar’s channel via a post she made on Linkedin, in which she explained that the same educational videos she shares on YouTube make more money per million views on Pornhub because Pornhub offers better rates—$1,000 per million views on Pornhub versus YouTube’s $340 per million views. 

For reasons she doesn’t understand, Dar’s Linkedin account was banned after that Linkedin post started going viral.

“My account was banned, seemingly because of this post,” Dar told me. “I received an email stating, ‘We recently removed your profile photo because it does not appear to be a photo of you,’ which was confusing since LinkedIn has never requested ID verification from me. When I tried to log in to update my photo, I discovered my account was banned.”

Dar tried contacting Linkedin support but did not receive a response and she’s still unable to access her account. Linkedin also did not respond to my request for comment. 

“I have no issue providing LinkedIn with my ID for verification (as I have done so for many other platforms), but I was under the impression that it’s optional,” Dar told me. “It’s frustrating that verification isn’t required for other users, yet my account was banned for sharing a straightforward fact about my content creation career. I was engaging professionally, but LinkedIn’s strict handling of this situation feels counterproductive to its purpose.”

In the message sent to her by Linkedin asking her to change her profile photo, Linkedin said that profile photos can get flagged for a variety of reasons, including for “being considered offensive.” There was no nudity in Dar’s profile photo.

Ironically, being removed from social media with little explanation or recourse is another good reason for people to share their content on Pornhub. We don’t know exactly why Dar’s Linkedin account was removed because Linkedin won’t explain, but it’s possible it was reported because it was reported by users after going viral on the LinkedinLunatics subreddit, where people share Linkedin posts they feel don’t belong on the professional networking platform. As we’ve reported over the years, this is something that happens to sex workers and adult content creators on other social media sites all the time.  

Dar said she makes more money on YouTube overall because that’s where she gets more views, but in addition to higher rates, an added benefit of posting to Pornhub is that Pornhub is not likely to ban her for sharing adult content elsewhere on the web.

“I can't believe this website is banned in Texas!” one commenter said on Dar’s Pornhub video on pi. “They're trying to hinder our education.”

The Biden administration and the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued tractor and agricultural manufacturer John Deere Wednesday, arguing that the company’s anti consumer repair practices have driven up prices for farmers and have made it difficult for them to get repairs during critical planting and harvesting seasons. The lawsuit alleges that Deere has monopoly power over the repair market, which 404 Media has been reporting on for years.

The lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney generals of Illinois and Minnesota, is the latest and most serious legal salvo against Deere’s repair monopoly. Deere is also facing a class-action lawsuit related to its repair practices from consumers in Illinois that the Department of Justice and other federal entities have signaled they are interested in and support, as we reported last year. 

“The Federal Trade Commission today files suit against agricultural equipment manufacturer Deere & Company, stating that it has illegally restricted the ability of farmers and independent technicians to repair Deere equipment, including tractors and combines,” FTC commissioner Lina Khan wrote in a formal comment explaining the decision. 

Deere has become notorious for cornering the repair market on its machines, which include tractors, combines, and other major agricultural equipment by introducing software locks that prevent farmers from fixing the equipment they buy without the authorization of John Deere.

It has also made repair parts difficult to come by. Deere previously promised to make certain repairs easier for consumers with a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) signed with a farming organization that would have made it possible for farmers to do some repairs and obtain some specific parts; implementation of that MOU has been incredibly uneven, according to farmers. In October, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that Deere was not honoring that agreement and demanded answers to several questions about it; Deere has not yet responded.

The FTC lawsuit specifically states that that MOU was designed to kill right to repair legislation and repair regulation against the company.

"Deere invoked its release of Customer Service ADVISOR and its MOU with the Farm Bureau to stymie state 'right-to-repair' legislation that would otherwise have required Deere to make fully functional repair tools available to customers," it stated.

It also highlights the fact that Deere has released a version of its repair software, called "Service Advisor," to the public (which costs $3,160 per year). But the version of the software released to the public can only do certain repairs and is not fully functional.

"Deere offers two versions of its electronic repair tool: (1) Full-Function Service ADVISOR, a fully functional repair tool that Deere makes available only to Deere dealers, and (2) a degraded Customer Service ADVISOR, which Deere licenses to equipment owners, IRPs [Independent repair providers], and others," it states.

"Deere has acquired and maintained monopoly power in a relevant market for the provision of repair services that require the use of a fully functional repair tool. Through its limited distribution of the repair tool, Deere controls entry into, and limits output in, the provision of such services," the lawsuit added. "As a consequence, Deere’s dealers are able to maintain a 100% market share and charge supracompetitive prices for restricted repairs, and Deere itself reaps additional profits through parts sales."

Farmers have told 404 Media that they remain unable to do many types of repairs, and that it can sometimes take days for “authorized” John Deere or John Deere dealer technicians to come fix broken equipment. In farming, this delay can result in lost harvest, crucial delays in planting, and dying crops during critical periods of the farming season. 

“These delays can mean that months of hard work and much-needed income vanish, devastating their business. In rural communities, the restrictions can sometimes mean that farmers need to drive hours just to get their equipment fixed,” Khan wrote. “For those who have long fixed their own equipment, these artificial restrictions can seem especially inefficient, with tractors needlessly sitting idle as farmers and independent mechanics are held back from using their skill and talent.”

The lawsuit, in the waning days of the Biden administration, is the most serious punitive act the federal government has ever taken to break up a repair monopoly and to support consumers’ right to repair. For years, the FTC has issued reports about repairability and manufacturer dominance of the repair market, but aside from a few small fines, has not formally sued any company. The steps Deere has taken to secure a repair monopoly are among the most egregious of any manufacturer in any industry, which has led farmers in some cases to resort to hacking their own tractors for the purposes of repair, sometimes using software pirated from Ukraine and other countries. 

“We shouldn’t tolerate companies blocking repair,” Nathan Proctor, consumer rights group PIRG's Senior Right to Repair Campaign Director, said. “When you buy something, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. The FTC’s enforcement action will help farmers, and everyone else who believes people should be able to fix their stuff.”

The Oscars of porn and the industry’s largest trade show will begin in one week, on January 22 at Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas. Inside, adult performers, producers, directors and crew will find out whether they’ve won the prestigious AVN Award in categories including “Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene” and “Best Big Butt Movie or Collected Release,” but outside, hospitality workers are picketing for a better union contract. It’s a massive week for the adult industry, but porn workers are conflicted about crossing the picket line, with many choosing to sit this one out entirely.

The Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) and the Adult Video Network Awards, collectively often referred to as AVN, is expected to bring more than 45,000 attendees to Vegas for three days of signings and meet-and-greets for fans, panels and programming about the adult industry, and booths for hundreds of brands, studios, and sex toys. It’s also the biggest event of the year for the industry’s indie performers, who come out to shoot content and network, spending weeks and months planning agendas and setting up unofficial parties and meetups. The show has been going for decades—since 1998 when it shared space and dates with the Consumer Electronic Show, and later at the Hard Rock Hotel when vendors and performers were forced out of CES and started their own event a few weeks and a couple blocks away. 

Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165, Nevada affiliates of UNITE HERE, represent 60,000 workers in Las Vegas and Reno according to their website. They’ve been on open-ended strike since November, and are fighting for a new five-year contract for 700 workers. Union representatives said last month that the latest offer from Virgin Hotels Las Vegas was a 30-cent-a-year wage increase, which they rejected.

Virgin Hotels, formerly the Hard Rock before renovations and a rebrand in 2020, was AVN’s first home when it split from CES’ dates and venue in 2011 (AVN became its own event in 1998 but shared space and time with the mainstream electronics show, where attendees would drift from one to the other). Today, AVN is actually multiple events, including the AEE and the awards but also the Adult Novelty Expo (ANE), interNEXT Expo, GayVN Awards Show, and the “O” Awards. In 2020, when the hotel reopened, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas CEO Richard Bosworth called AVN and other conferences “very cherished clients.” 

Performer Electra Rayne told me on Monday she’s still planning to boycott the event as long as the strike is ongoing. She corresponded with the Culinary Union, and confirmed with them in an email she posted to X that striking workers are asking people to refrain from patronizing the venue in solidarity, which the union has since said publicly in statements. 

 “Thankfully I'm local so it's not like I spent a ton of money on travel or anything, and I'm supposed to go sign at the booth for my agent who has been super understanding about me needing to cancel should the strike be ongoing (which it seems it will be),” Rayne said. “I'm bummed to not see my fans, but the really sad part is that I was in a feature that's up for multiple awards this year, and I won't be able to celebrate that at the awards with the cast. We worked so hard on that movie and I'm so proud to have been a part of it, it's a really bummer to not get to participate in that moment.” 

Other people in the industry are planning to attend despite the strike, but still find the decision difficult. “It saddens me to hear that Virgin is not paying their workers a fair wage, as that is something everyone deserves. With that said, I will still be attending AVN as it is the biggest convention of the year for my industry and I do have agreements and obligations that were arranged far ahead of these strikes,” performer Leya Falcon told me. “I do find it quite disturbing to hear that some of those on strike are ‘allegedly’ harassing and sometimes even following in an intimidating manner those that decide to enter the property as we have nothing to do with their employment situation, we are simply doing our job, which to be fair, does not always pay fairly either. [The Culinary Union did not respond to a request for comment on this alleged harassment, but we will update if we hear back.] Just as they are working to care for their families, we are doing the same and we should not be bullied for it, especially in this economy. I do hope that they can see the other side of the coin here, much as we do see theirs, and understand that none of us are against them receiving fair pay, we are simply doing what we need to do to provide for our families as not all of us have the luxury to just decide to sit this one out.” 

Performer London River wrote on X that she would also still attend. “I likely can’t pull out of my commitments to AVN without experiencing losses. Considering that, I will be donating a percentage of my profits from the event to the strike fund,” she wrote, linking to a donation page for their fund. Striking workers are paid $500 a week out of this fund, a representative for Local 226 told me.

AVN declined to comment, but last week, it launched a FAQ page for attendees of the event. “The hotel has assured us that the strike will not impact the AVN Expo and Awards. Contingency measures are in place to maintain a memorable guest experience and exceptional service during the event,” the page says. 

On January 9, the Adult Performance Artists Guild (APAG) issued a statement about the strike: “As the union for performers in the adult industry, care for the safety and well-being of our workers is paramount to our mission,” they wrote. “We feel this for not only our members and other workers in the adult industry but for all workers, regardless of their jobs. As union representatives, we support the sacrifices made by workers on strike, fighting for better working conditions. The officers of APAG voted unanimously to support our fellow union workers in Culinary Workers Local 226, and we will not cross their picket line in a show of solidarity.” 

APAG said it “strongly encourages” members to avoid crossing the picket line, as well as cancelling reservations at the hotel and contacting AVN, Virgin Hotels, and companies they were set to sign with at the event to express their concerns. 

And on Saturday, marking day 58 of the strike, APAG members joined Local 226 workers and their families for a march from the Las Vegas Strip to Virgin Hotels, blaring vuvuzelas and holding signs referencing Virgin Las Vegas’ contract negotiation offer of an estimated 30 cents an hour in wage increases. 

“The Adult Performance Artists Guild (APAG)’s decision to stand with Culinary Union strikers and honor the picket line at Virgin Las Vegas demonstrates unity, and the Culinary Union applauds the unwavering solidarity shown by the APAG and their members,” Ted Pappageorge, Secretary-Treasurer for the Culinary Union, said in a statement. “Workers across industries share the same fight for dignity, fair pay, respect, and protections on-the-job, and Culinary Union is proud to stand with APAG in solidarity as strikers continue to take on a billionaire-owned company that refuses to treat workers fairly. APAG’s support sends a powerful message: When workers stand together, we are unstoppable. To APAG members and all customers choosing not to cross the picket line – thank you for standing with workers on strike, with your continued support we will win.”

Last week, Pornhub announced that its team is canceling its upcoming trips to AVN and adult industry event XBIZ LA due to the strike in Vegas, and in Los Angeles, the wildfire crisis that’s required many LA residents to evacuate to hotels. “Unfortunately, this means our scheduled in-person events and workshops are no longer going on as planned. We are working closely with XBIZ to host our scheduled workshop virtually,” they wrote in a post on X. “We're so disappointed we won't be able to get face time with those of you who were planning to attend, and looking forward to seeing you all again soon.”

If workers don’t receive a fair contract soon, AVN won’t be the only event where attendees will have to choose between staying home or crossing a picket line. There are 11 other trade shows and events set to take place at Virgin Hotels in the coming weeks, including the Fancy Food Show, World of Concrete Expo, Academic Surgical Congress, CHAMPS Trade Show, and Kitchen and Bath Industry Show. 

We've got much more on what is happening inside Meta with the company's recent speech policy changes. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph explains how thousands of apps have been hijacked to steal your location data, possibly without the app developers' knowledge. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about various stories intersecting with the LA fires, such as Amazon delivery drivers and AI images. (YouTube version to come shortly.)

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes
• Meta Deletes Trans and Nonbinary Messenger Themes
• Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location
• Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry—Here’s How
• People Think AI Images of Hollywood Sign Burning Are Real
• An Amazon Delivery Confirmation Photo Is the Last Time a Palisades Resident Saw Her Burnt Down House
• ‘We’re Fine’: Lying to Ourselves About a Climate Disaster

An AI app for creating nonconsensual nude images of anyone is getting the vast majority of its traffic directly from Meta platforms, where the app is buying thousands of explicit ads featuring nonconsensual nudity of celebrities and influencers. The blatant and repeated violation of Meta’s policies over the course of months is making a mockery of the company’s ability or willingness to moderate a known bad actor that at the moment appears to get the majority of its users by paying Meta directly for ads.

The app, known as Crushmate or Crush AI, has been buying ads on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms since at least early September. As first reported by Alexios Mantzarlis in his Faked Up newsletter, according to internet traffic analysis firm Similarweb, three of the domains Crush uses had around 240,000 visitors combined, with 90 percent of that traffic coming from Facebook or Instagram.

I’ve seen Meta remove some of these ads since September, but at the time of writing the same three domains that were advertised on Meta platforms and redirected to Crushmate’s services had around 350 active ads and more than 5,000 ads overall. 

Most of the recent ads use the same format. They take a video a woman posted to Instagram or TikTok and show how a user can pause the video on any frame and create a nude image of her. Many of the ads, which are still active, do this to videos of the extremely popular OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain, who made headlines recently for making $43 million in one year on OnlyFans. As Mantzarlis points out, one ad nudifies Mikayla Demaiter, a model with 3.2 million followers on Instagram. Rain and Demaiter did not respond to a request for comment.

Other ads feature other real women I wasn’t able to identify and AI generated women with their clothes being “erased” by the app. 

In early September, a 404 Media reader also tipped me that Crushmate was advertising its services on Facebook Marketplace.

I’ve confirmed that all these ads lead to the same Crushmate service that will create nonconsensual nude images and offers some of its services via a subscription plan. 

I’ve recently reported about Meta running ads that feature explicit nudity, including dozens of ads that are just close up images of vaginas. I’ve also reported repeatedly about “nudify” apps buying ads on Meta platforms. When we’ve flagged these ads to Meta in the past, they removed them. Meta has also removed associated Facebook pages that are buying the ads, but Crushmate has found an easy workaround that is clearly paying off: It creates multiple Facebook pages with AI-generated profile images that look like normal people, then buys ads promoting new, different URLs that redirect to to Crushmate. 

Meta did not respond to specific questions about why it’s not detecting and removing the offending ads for featuring nonconsensual nudity. As I reported last week, extensive testing by AI Forensics, a European non-profit that investigates influential and opaque algorithms, found that nudity uploaded to Instagram and Facebook as a normal user was promptly removed for violating Meta’s Community Standards. The same exact visuals were not removed when they were uploaded as ads, showing that Meta has a different standard for enforcement when it’s getting paid to push images in front of users. 

“Meta prohibits ads that promote adult sexual exploitation. We have removed the violating content, enforced against violating urls, and have taken action against the associated accounts and users,” a Facebook spokesperson told me in a statement. “This is a highly adversarial space and bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement, which is why we continue to invest in the best tools and technology to help identify and remove violating content.” 

Meta removed the ads promoting the three Crushmate domains after Mantzarlis flagged them to the company. Around 230 of the same ads promoting a fourth Crushmate domain Mantzarlis found after reaching out for comment are still live on Meta’s platforms. 

As we’ve previously reported, these nudify apps are some of the most harmful applications of generative AI because they make it so easy to create nonconsensual images of anyone. In the last two years, we’ve seen several examples of these apps being used by minors to create images of other minors. Last year, a survey found that 1 in 10 minors reported that their friends or classmates have used AI tools to generate nudes of other kids. As the Crushmate ads show, minors don’t need to go to the dark corners of the web in search of these tools. Meta is getting paid to popularize them.

It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Thursday, 23rd January at 1 PM Eastern. Add it to your calendar! 

So, what’s the FOIA Forum? We'll share our screen and show you specifically how we file FOIA requests. We take questions from the chat and incorporate those into our FOIAs in real-time. We’ll also check on some requests we filed last time. This time we're particularly focusing on how to use FOIA in the new Trump administration. We'll talk all about local, state, and federal agencies; tricks for getting the records you want; requesting things you might not have thought of; and how to apply when the federal government tries to withhold those records.

If this will be your first FOIA Forum, don’t worry, we will do a quick primer on how to file requests (although if you do want to watch our previous FOIA Forums, the video archive is here). We really love talking directly to our community about something we are obsessed with (getting documents from governments) and showing other people how to do it too.

Paid subscribers can already find the link to join the livestream below. We'll also send out a reminder a day or so before. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now here in time to join.

We've got a bunch of FOIAs that we need to file and are keen to hear from you all on what you want to see more of. Most of all, we want to teach you how to make your own too. Please consider coming along!

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately. 

Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.

Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted. 

Pixelfed is experiencing a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced that it would loosen its rules to allow users to call LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” amid a host of other changes that shift the company overtly to the right. Meta and Instagram have also leaned heavily into AI-generated content. Pixelfed announced earlier Monday that it is launching an iOS app later this week. 

Pixelfed said Sunday it is “seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social.”

Over the weekend, Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a “declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces.” The open source charter, which has been adopted by Pixelfed and can be adopted by other platforms, contains sections titled “right to privacy,” “freedom from surveillance,” “safeguards against hate speech,” “strong protections for vulnerable communities,” and “data portability and user agency.” 

“Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project,” Supernault wrote on Mastodon. “Pixelfed is for the people, period.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.

“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry.

In the interview, Shulman says he’s disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music. 

However, the notion that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of music, why people make art, become artists, and the basic human practice of skill building and mastery. 

Music is a form of creative expression that’s old as humanity itself and exists in every culture. Babies will “make music” by clapping their hands and smashing blocks together long before they can talk, and they don’t find that frustrating.

It’s true that becoming very good at making music takes time. Picking up a guitar for the first time does not immediately produce the joy of perfectly executing a sick guitar solo. You have to start from zero, maybe learn some theory, and build the muscle memory and calluses on your fingers. Some people enjoy this slow process of getting a little better over time and become musicians. Some people don’t and instead spend their time becoming good at blogging, carpentry, programming, cutting hair, etc. 

The interviewer, Harry Stebbings, interjects while Shulman says the making music isn’t enjoyable and compares it to running, another obviously challenging thing that many people enjoy getting better at over time. 

“Most people drop out of that pursuit because it’s hard, and so I think that the people you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it,” Shulman said.

It’s funny and frustrating that Shulman can’t (or pretends he can’t) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music inherently appealing. During the interview, he repeatedly says that Suno can grow the music industry to be as big as the video game industry by making it more accessible. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially the process of slowly getting better at a difficult task. 

This is not a surprising position for the CEO of a generative AI company to take. It is very possible that generative AI will become a more popular way for producing images, music, and text in the future. We report on how those AI-generated outputs are flooding the internet already, though in most cases that output is derided as “slop” because it’s low quality and annoying to users who find it increasingly difficult to find valuable, human-made content on the internet. Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician inflates the worth of that output and the company.

“Every single person at Suno has an incredible deep love and respect for music,” Shulman said later in the interview.

Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeles’s Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhood’s mandatory evacuation order.

Friday morning, Riley posted a screenshot of an Amazon delivery confirmation photo. The photo showed an Amazon box on a bench in front of a glass door. 

“Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders,” Riley wrote in the post. Riley’s home in the Pacific Palisades was included in the first evacuation order issued on January 7, about two hours after the fire started burning. “Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok.” 

Amazon drivers have continued delivering packages in some areas of Los Angeles affected by ongoing wildfires, according to numerous posts by drivers on social media and corroborated by the company’s website. 

Since Tuesday, uncontrolled fires in the northern parts of Los Angeles have burned down over 12,000 buildings, and thousands of people have lost their homes. 

Amazon closed the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale on Wednesday, the day after the fires broke out. But Amazon’s distributed delivery system has led to some confusion. Amazon uses a network of “Delivery Service Partners,” which are nominally independent businesses who hire delivery drivers. Amazon also delivers packages in Los Angeles with a system called Flex, which functions sort of like DoorDash or Uber in that drivers use their personal vehicles to deliver packages. 

An Amazon Flex driver posted that they had been instructed to deliver close to the fires on Thursday. The screenshot of their route map showed a road in Westgate Heights, in an area that is now under an evacuation warning and is immediately next to an area under a mandatory evacuation order. A photo they shared taken in their warehouse parking lot showed a massive plume of orange smoke. They said in a comment that they had refused to deliver the packages.

While some drivers told 404 Media or posted on driver subreddits and Discords that their routes had been canceled, some said they were given delivery routes close to fires or in areas that were eventually evacuated.

Multiple drivers wrote that the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale, for example, had closed on Wednesday. “I was still scheduled to work on the 8th,” one driver wrote to 404 Media in an online chat. “I didn’t hear much from management until 30 minutes before our clock in time, that the station had closed due to the fires.” 

The driver posted a photo of a brown smoke-darkened sky above the parking lot of their warehouse. 

Another Flex driver posted a screenshot of a delivery cancellation notice they got from VAX5, a warehouse in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.

“The block you’re scheduled for on 09 January 2025 at 3:30 am at VAX5 has been canceled. Please don’t come to the delivery station. This cancellation is due to circumstances beyond your control. Your standing won’t be impacted and you will still be paid for the block.”

Multiple drivers on the Amazon delivery subreddit, r/AmazonDSPDrivers, have written that despite nearby fires and evacuation zones, their work days have gone on as normal over the last week. 

“I deliver east in LA county and today was just another day on the job,” one user wrote in a comment on a post asking how drivers in the state were dealing with the fires. “Not really that bad out here tho[ugh], but one of our delivery areas is close to level 2 evacuation warning.”

Another driver wrote, “We cover the Burbank/Glendale area, still working. A lot of businesses are closed. Some unprecedented traffic. We were just given N95 masks for mild ashes falling.” Glendale sits just west of the Eaton fire, which is the second most destructive fire in the state. 

A third driver in Santa Monica, about 20 minutes away from the Palisades, wrote last Wednesday that their workload had been reduced because of the fires. They posted a screenshot of a route with 192 packages. “I honestly thought they’d send us home since we deliver close to the fires but no they just gave us masks to wear,” the driver wrote. 

Delivering in wildfire conditions can be dangerous even if you aren’t close to the source of the fire itself. In 2023, New York City was enveloped in smoke from Canadian wildfires, and the city’s air quality was categorized as “hazardous.” Delivery drivers at the time said they had spent their whole workday coughing. As of Sunday, Los Angeles’ air quality was “poor.” 

The driver subreddits are also full of people discussing whether they would get paid for canceled routes, and screenshots of drivers talking to Amazon support. In many cases, Amazon appears to be paying drivers for routes cancelled because of the fires.

Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told 404 Media in a statement that the company was supplying drivers with N95 masks and was monitoring the air quality in the area. 

“If [the air quality index] is over a certain threshold for extended timeframes as defined by Cal OSHA, we have mechanisms in place to reduce time on the road for drivers,” MacLachlan said. “If it’s still deemed safe to be on the road, we suggest DSPs [delivery service partners] advise their drivers to keep vehicle windows closed and to run the A/C on high with air recirculating, out of an abundance of caution.” 

In a blog post written two days after the fires began burning, the company wrote that its customers would likely experience delays due to the “temporary closing of some Amazon facilities,” and that it would fulfill their orders “when it’s safe to do so from outside the affected region…Our top priority is ensuring the safety of our employees and partners.”

MacLachlan said Amazon had instructed drivers not to make deliveries in mandatory evacuation zones. “Safety is our utmost priority and drivers are encouraged and instructed to never make deliveries if they feel unsafe, and they will never be penalized for it,” MacLachlan said. She also said the company was investigating Riley’s post about the Amazon package. 

“We’re looking into the details of this delivery,” MacLachlan said. “However, drivers have been instructed to not deliver in evacuation zones, or areas closed to public access. And if a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so, and the driver’s performance will not be impacted.”

A hacker compromised an administrative account on the website for popular game Path of Exile 2, which allowed them to reset the passwords on dozens of players’ accounts, according to comments from developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) made during a podcast on Sunday. This access would have given the hacker the ability to steal powerful and rare items from those players, with some players spending hundreds of hours grinding for valuable in-game currency.

The news comes after a wave of Path of Exile 2 players complained on the game’s forums and social media about being hacked and their inventories emptied. The comments also show how the hacker compromised the account shortly before the game’s launch, seemingly laying in wait for players to build up their stashes of items before pulling off their heist.

“We totally fucked up here,” Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers said during a podcast recording with action roleplaying game (ARPG) content creators GhazzyTV and Darth Microtransaction.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week, it’s time to demand a new planet. Don’t we deserve it? Haven’t we been good? Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of finally discovering whether the solar system has, indeed, been hiding a massive world up its sleeve. Can you imagine the fight over naming this world, if it actually is discovered? I’m already exhausted. Let’s just skip the fuss and call it Becky.

Then, we’ll hang around the outer system for a while to check in on Pluto and Charon. How did they meet? Violently, it turns out! Next, scientists confirm that saber teeth are extremely efficient at converting living things into dead things. Last, meet Punk and Emo, founding members of the mollusc underground. It’s a week of deep space and deep time; enjoy the ride.

All I Want for Christmas 2025 is A GIANT PLANET

Siraj, Amir et al. “Orbit of a Possible Planet X.” The Astrophysical Journal.

For nearly a decade, scientists have speculated that an undiscovered giant planet lurks in the distant reaches of the solar system. The existence of this unconfirmed “Planet X” or “Planet Nine” could explain strange observations of objects far beyond Neptune, known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). 

These TNOs appear to be being gravitationally influenced by some unknown entity, though there is a lot of debate about the origin of the anomalies—or whether they are “real” at all. Planet X is one popular hypothesis, but scientists have also speculated that the anomalies could point to an expansive disk of smaller objects, or even a primordial black hole. The effects may also just be a temporary coincidence that does not require the invocation of some hidden hulking entity.

To help constrain these possibilities, scientists have presented new predictions about Planet X, assuming it exists, in part by expanding the sample of TNOs from 11 objects to 51. The results suggest that a hypothetical Planet X would be about 4.4 times as massive as Earth, and occupy an orbit about 300 times farther from the Sun than Earth..

Most importantly, the study’s projected orbit places Planet X right into the sights of Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a major new astronomical facility in Chile. LSST is expected to begin operating later this year, and it will be especially adept at illuminating the “here be space dragons” parts of our solar system map.

“Nearly all of the parameter space for the unseen planet proposed here falls within LSST’s field of view and detection limits, so if such a planet exists, it is likely to be discovered early on in the survey,” said researchers led by Amir Siraj of Princeton University. “LSST will simultaneously reveal whether the observed clustering of distant TNOs…is real, an observational selection effect, or a statistical fluke, given the large number of expected TNO discoveries.”

In other words, we may genuinely be on the cusp of adding a new planet to our solar family—or, perhaps, learning that Planet X was just an astronomical mirage. LSST is poised to answer the riddle, one way or another. 

In addition to the exciting prospect, the new study offers other tantalizing predictions. The team found that the planet’s projected orbit is probably aligned with the plane of the solar system, a result that contrasts with past studies that predicted the planet would orbit at an angle. The angle of the orbit has implications for the origins of the planet; a world aligned to the plane of the solar system is more likely to be a homegrown member of our solar family, whereas a planet with a more inclined orbit could have been gravitationally captured by the Sun after making an interstellar journey from its native star system. 

Look, we’re living through an overwhelming time of climate disasters, political strife, and obscene inequities. I really think we deserve a new planet, as a treat. I’ll even take a primordial black hole, if that’s what’s on offer. Given that LSST is not set to start running until the back-end of 2025, it will probably be at least a year before the existence of a planet is confirmed or refuted. But if anyone starts a betting market on this long-sought mystery, put me down for Planet X.  

‘Kiss-and-Capture’: The Pluto-Charon Story

Denton, C. Adeene et al. “Capture of an ancient Charon around Pluto.” Nature Geoscience.

Speaking of TNOs, let’s talk about the most famous of them all: Pluto. This farflung world was the OG Planet Nine before it was officially downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, a decision that ignited an astronomical culture war. But though Pluto and its moon Charon aren’t big enough to count as planets, they are giants for TNOs; indeed, the Pluto-Charon system is the largest binary in the known TNO population. (Pluto is about two thirds the size of Earth’s Moon, and Charon is about half the size of Pluto.)

Scientists have long suspected that the system formed in the wake of a collision between two icy bodies billions of years ago, but the dynamics behind this event have defied easy explanation.

Now, scientists have developed a new formation model for this system that they call the “kiss-and-capture” regime. In this scenario, the two parent bodies of Pluto-Charon collided and then kind of just merged together for about 10 to 15 hours, before separating into the distinct bodies we see today. 

“Kiss-and-capture leaves the bodies mostly intact; however, it does result in the resurfacing of Charon and a large portion of Pluto,” said researchers led by Adeene Denton of the University of Arizona. The scenario provides “a new foundation for the accumulation of geological features observed today, including Charon’s widespread fracture network and Pluto’s ancient ridge–trough system, which reflects early and widespread extension.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer when kisses keep the bodies mostly intact. Given that Pluto has a giant heart-shaped region on its surface, this binary is really shaping up to be the most romantically coded system in the solar system.

Brushing Up on Saber Teeth  

Pollock, Thalia et al. “Functional optimality underpins the repeated evolution of the extreme “saber-tooth” morphology.” Current Biology.

You don’t need anyone to tell you that saber teeth are rad. They are deadly weapons that grow out of skulls. The allure is self-evident. But just in case you wanted empirical proof to back it up, scientists have now demonstrated that “extreme saber teeth” are functionally optimal for killing bites, which explains why they have independently evolved at least five times in mammals and mammal ancestors (including gorgonopsians).

To assess the advantages of saber teeth versus other canine morphologies, researchers examined 95 teeth from carnivorous mammals, including 25 from saber-toothed animals like Smilodon, Homotherium, and Thylacosmilus. The team concluded that saber teeth “optimize puncture performance at the expense of breakage resistance,” meaning that these dental daggers evolved to deliver swift death.

Predatory scenarios for saber-toothed animals “favor a killing bite through penetration causing tissue damage and blood loss over the suffocation through clamp-and-hold bite of conical-toothed pantherine felids,” such as snow leopards, said researchers led by Tahlia Pollock of the University of Bristol. 

The most recent saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, went extinct only 10,000 years ago, so our ancestors would have encountered it. In fact, saber-toothed cats may have occasionally preyed on humans. But those iconic canines are no longer spilling blood and severing arteries out there in the wild anywhere, suggesting that “the niche(s) they once occupied do not exist in the modern context,” according to the study.

It’s bittersweet to live in an era devoid of saber teeth. While I wouldn’t want to see these fatal fangs up close, the world is undoubtedly duller without them.

Punk is Dead! Like…Really, Really Dead

Sutton, Mark et al. “New Silurian aculiferan fossils reveal complex early history of Mollusca.” Nature.

A nice bonus of discovering a new species is that you typically get to name it. Scientists have been having fun with this responsibility for decades, which is why we have spiders called Hotwheels sisyphus, fungus called Spongiforma squarepantsii, and wasps called Aha ha. 

Now, scientists have continued this tradition with two new mollusc species identified from fossils that date back 430 million years ago. Everyone, meet Punk (Punk ferox) and (Emo vorticaudum).  

Punk is named for the “fancied resemblance of the spicule array to the spiked hairstyles associated with the punk rock movement” paired with ferox (Latin) meaning “wild, bold, defiant,” said researchers led by Mark Sutton of Imperial College London. 

Emo is named “after the emo musical genre related to punk rock, whose exponents canonically bear long ‘bangs’ or fringes” which is reminiscent of the fossilized mollusc’s exoskeleton, the team added. In addition, Emo’s “anterior valves” resemble “studded clothing.”  

There you have it: mohawks, devilocks, studs, and other punk culture mainstays were pioneered by rabble-rousing molluscs all the way back in the Silurian period, long before animals ever walked—let alone crowd-surfed—on land. 

Now all we need is to discover a new species of screeching weasel to really round out the punk biological kingdom.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned.

Meta’s Messenger app allows users to change the color scheme and design of their  chat windows with different themes. For example, there is currently a “Squid Game” theme, a “Minecraft” theme, a “Basketball” theme, and a “Love” theme, among many others. 

These themes regularly change, but for the last few years they have featured a “trans” theme and a “nonbinary” theme, which had color schemes that matched the trans pride flag and the non-binary pride flag. Meta did not respond to a request for comment about why the company removed these themes, but the change comes right as Mark Zuckerberg’s company is publicly and loudly shifting rightward to more closely align itself with the views of the incoming Donald Trump administration. 404 Media reported Thursday that many employees are protesting the anti LGBTQ+ changes and that “it’s total chaos internally at Meta right now” because of the changes.

The trans theme was announced for Pride Month in June 2021, and the nonbinary theme was announced in June 2022 in blog posts that highlighted Meta’s apparent support for trans and nonbinary people. Both of these posts are no longer online. Other blogs about updates to Messenger have been moved over from the old website they were originally published on to new URLs on the Meta newsroom, but these two blog posts have not.

“This June and beyond, we want people to #ConnectWithPride because when we show up as the most authentic version of ourselves, we can truly connect with people,” the post announcing the trans theme originally said. “Starting today, in support of the LGBTQ+ community and allies, Messenger is launching new expression features and celebrating the artists and creators who not only developed them, but inspire us each and every day.” 

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss weird fake furniture and shared reality (or the lack thereof).

SAM: It has been such a busy week I forgot it’s Friday until I woke up this morning, so I’ll be brief with a quick couple of thoughts about Google’s AI Overview, which I wrote about serving bizarre results that suggested people pass a Magic Wand vibrator to a child like a talking stick for counseling purposes.

Emanuel found the thread on Reddit where someone posted a screenshot of the result they got with the search term “magic wand pregnancy.” He was getting the same result as that person; I assume both he and OP were doing a lot of Googling about pregnancy related topics, as Emanuel’s wife just had a kid and this person was clearly looking for answers about what sorts of buzz buzz were safe to throw down with while pregnant. When I searched with the same term, I didn’t get that answer, and couldn’t replicate it. I could get the other one mentioned in the story—searching “what is a magic wand” showed me an AI Overview result about magicians’ “small sticks” (ouch) — but not the pregnancy one. I assumed, and mentioned in the story, that this is because of the aforementioned Googling about babies; Google personalizes search based on activity, and parents are a valuable market for advertisers. 

This article was produced with support from WIRED.

Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement. 

The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating apps like Tinder, to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem—not code developed by the app creators themselves—this data collection is likely happening both without users’ and even app developers’ knowledge.

“For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients, appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising ‘bid stream,’” rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data.

The data provides a rare glimpse inside the world of real-time bidding (RTB). Historically, location data firms paid app developers to include bundles of code that collected the location data of their users. Many companies have turned instead to sourcing location information through the advertising ecosystem, where companies bid to place ads inside apps. But a side effect is that data brokers can listen in on that process, and harvest the location of peoples’ mobile phones. 

“This is a nightmare scenario for privacy because not only does this data breach contain data scraped from the RTB systems, but there's some company out there acting like a global honey badger, doing whatever it pleases with every piece of data that comes its way,” Edwards adds.

Meta employees are furious with the company’s newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness,” according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content moderation on Meta platforms. 

“I am LGBT and Mentally Ill,” one post by an employee on an internal Meta platform called Workplace reads. “Just to let you know that I’ll be taking time out to look after my mental health.” 

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be getting “back to our roots around free expression” to allow “more speech and fewer mistakes.” The company said “we’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.” A review of Meta’s official content moderation policies show, specifically, that some of the only substantive changes to the policy were made to specifically allow for “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” It has long been known that being LGBTQ+ is not a sign of “mental illness,” and the false idea that sexuality or gender identification is a mental illness has long been used to stigmatize and discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

Earlier this week, we reported that Meta was deleting internal dissent about Zuckerberg's appointment of UFC President Dana White to the Meta board of directors.

There’s a video going viral this week of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles with a wildfire raging behind it, letters glowing in the blaze. It’s a powerful scene, up there with the burning McDonald’s sign in imagery that’s come out of this week’s devastating fires spreading across LA. 

I've seen several people sharing this same video with shades of shock and heartbreak. But it’s AI-generated. When it was posted, according to a Community Note on one of the posts, a look at the Hollywood sign livestreams showed the sign was fine; as of writing, the feeds are down, but Hollywoodsign.org, a website that runs a live webcam pointed at the sign, told fact-checking site Snopes "Griffith Park is temporarily closed as a safety precaution, but the Sign itself is not affected and is secure — and the cameras will slowly but surely come back up." 

Another viral image of the Hollywood sign burning is also AI: 

Then there’s X poster Kevin Dalton’s image, which he later admitted was made with X’s Grok generative AI tool “for now,” showing what I can only assume he imagines as “antifa” in all black descending on a burned-out neighborhood to loot it. “The remains of Pacific Palisades will get picked clean tonight,” he wrote. (Dalton’s been making AI paint him little fantasy pictures of Trump firing California governor Gavin Newsom, so this is a big week for him.)  

People are also obsessively generating Grok images of Newsom fiddling in front of fires or saving goldfish (???). 

The very real footage and images coming out of Southern California this week are so surreal they’re hard to believe, with entire miles of iconic coastline, whole neighborhoods, and massive swaths of the Pacific Palisades and LA’s east side turned to ash (and still burning as of writing).  

Interestingly, a lot of this week’s news cycle has turned to blaming AI and its energy usage as contributing to climate change. But others are not wasting an opportunity for boosterism. In a stunning show of credulity, British-owned digital newspaper The Express ran a story with the headline “Five dead in LA fires as residents think AI tech could have prevented disaster” based on a quote from one evacuating 24 year old they found who took the opportunity in front of a reporter to breathlessly shill for AI, as an AI industry worker himself. “[Los Angeles’] fire and police departments don’t invest in technology [sic] hopefully more people build AI robotics solutions for monitoring or help. Instead a lot of people in ai are building military solutions. Aka putting a gun on top of a robot dog,” Chevy Chase Canyon resident William Lee told The Express. “Robotics operated fire response systems. It costs $6-18k for AI humanoid robots. LAFD salary is approx $100k/yr… 3,500 firefighters. We can slowly integrate robotics to put less lives at risk, but also for assistance."

That guy was so close to saying something prescient it’s painful: Robot dogs are a stupid waste of taxpayer money, and not a hypothetical one, as LA approved $278,000 for a surveillance robot dog toy for the LAPD in 2023. But the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget was cut by nearly $17.6 million this fiscal year, while giving even more money to the police department’s already massive budget: the LAPD received a $2.14 billion budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, representing an 8.1% increase. 

“Humanoid robots” as an absurd proposition aside, I don’t want to write off all forms of new technology as useless in natural disasters. Machine learning and machine vision technology seem to show promise in helping detect, track, or prevent wildfires: Last week, University of California San Diego’s ALERTCalifornia camera network alerted fire officials of an anomaly spotted on video, and firefighters were reportedly able to contain the blaze to less than a quarter acre. But companies taking investment to “solve” wildfires are also profiting off of a crisis that’s only getting worse, with no promise that their solutions will improve the situation. 

Overwhelmingly, AI is being crammed down the public’s throats as a tool for generating some of the dumbest bullshit imaginable. That includes misinformation like we’ve seen with these fires, but also bottomless ugliness, laughably terrible bots, sexual abuse and violence. And it’s sold to us as both our inevitable savior and the next world-ending existential crisis by people with billions earned on the theft of human creativity, and billions more yet to gain. 

AI might help solve tough problems related to climate change and things like wildfires, water scarcity, and energy consumption. But in the meantime, data centers are projected to guzzle  6.6 billion cubic meters of water by 2027, in service of churning out sloppy, morbid fantasies about tragedies within tragedies.

In 2020, after walking by refrigerated trailers full of the bodies of people who died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic one too many times, my fiancé and I decided that it would maybe be a good idea to get out of New York City for a while. Together with our dog, we spent months driving across the country and eventually made it to Los Angeles, where we intended to stay for two weeks. We arrived just in time for the worst COVID spike since the one we had just experienced in New York. It turned out we couldn’t and didn’t want to leave. Our two week stay has become five years.

While debating whether we were going to move to Los Angeles full time, my partner and I joked that we had to choose between the “fire coast” and the “water coast.” New York City had been getting pummeled by a series of tropical storms and downpours, and vast swaths of California were fighting some of the most devastating wildfires it had ever seen. We settled on the fire coast, mostly to try something new. 

It turns out this was a false choice. Since we’ve moved to Los Angeles, we have experienced the heaviest rains in the city’s recorded history, the first hurricane to ever trigger a tropical storm warning in Los Angeles, and, of course, the fires. New York City, meanwhile, has had both tropical storms and this summer fought an out-of-control brushfire in Prospect Park after a record drought. Both coasts are the fire coast, and the water coast. 

We have been very lucky, and very privileged. Our apartment is in Venice Beach, which is probably not going to burn down. This time, we will not lose our lives, our things, our memories. We had the money and the ability to evacuate from Los Angeles on Wednesday morning after it became clear to us that we should not stay. What is happening is a massive tragedy for the city of Los Angeles, the families who have lost their homes, businesses and schools. 

I am writing this to try to understand my place in a truly horrifying event, and to try to understand how we are all supposed to process the ongoing slow- and fast-moving climate change-fueled disasters that we have all experienced, are experiencing, and will definitely experience in the future. My group chats and Instagram stories are full of my friends saying that they are fine, followed by stories and messages explaining that actually, they are not fine. Stories that start with “we’re safe, thank you for asking” have almost uniformly been followed with “circumstances have changed, we have evacuated Los Angeles.” Almost all of my friends in the city have now left their homes to go somewhere safer; some people I know have lost their homes.

I knew when I moved to Los Angeles that we would to some extent experience fires and earthquakes. I live in a “tsunami hazard zone.” I also know that there is no place that is safe from climate change and climate-fueled disaster, as we saw last year when parts of North Carolina that were considered to be “safer” from climate change were devastated by Hurricane Helene.

We are living in The Cool Zone, and, while I love my life, am very lucky, and have been less directly affected by COVID, political violence, war, and natural disasters than many people, I am starting to understand that maybe this is all taking a toll. Firefighters and people who have lost their homes are experiencing true hell. What I am experiencing is something more like the constant mundanity of dystopia that surrounds the direct horror but is decidedly also bad.

I knew it would be windy earlier this week because I check the surf forecast every day on an app called Surfline, which has cameras and weather monitoring up and down nearly every coast in the world. The Santa Ana winds—a powerful wind phenomenon I learned about only after moving to California—would be offshore, meaning they would blow from the land out to sea. This is somewhat rare in Los Angeles and also makes for very good, barreling waves. I was excited. 

I had a busy day Tuesday and learned about the fire because the Surfline cameras near the fire were down. In fact, you can see what it looked like as the fires overtook the camera at Sunset Point here: 

The camera livestream was replaced with a note saying “this camera is offline due to infrastructure issues caused by local wildfires.” The surf forecast did not mention anything about a fire. 

I walked out to the beach and could see the mountains on fire, the smoke plumes blowing both out to sea and right over me. The ocean was indeed firing—meaning the waves were good—and lots of people were surfing. A few people were milling around the beach taking photos and videos of the fire like I was. By the time the sun started setting, there were huge crowds of people watching the fire. It was around this time that I realized I was having trouble breathing, my eyes were watering, and my throat was scratchy. My family locked ourselves into our bedroom with an air purifier running. Last week, we realized that we desperately needed to replace the filter, but we did not. A friend told us the air was better near them, so we went to their house for dinner. 

While we were having dinner, the size of the fire doubled, and a second one broke out. Our phones blared emergency alerts. We downloaded Watch Duty, which is a nonprofit wildfire monitoring app. Most of the wildfire-monitoring cameras in the Pacific Palisades had been knocked offline; the ones in Santa Monica pointing towards the Palisades showed a raging fire.

Every few minutes the app sent us push notifications that the fire was rapidly expanding, that firefighters were overwhelmed, that evacuation orders had expanded and were beginning to creep toward our neighborhood. I opened Instagram and learned that Malibu’s Reel Inn, one of our favorite restaurants, had burned to the ground.

Apple Intelligence began summarizing all of the notifications I was getting from my various apps. “Multiple wildfires in Los Angeles, causing destruction and injuries,” from the neighborhood watch app Citizen, which I have only because of an article I did about the last time there was a fire in Pacific Palisades. Apple Intelligence’s summary of a group chat I’m in: “Saddened by situation; Instagram shared.” From a friend: "Wants to chat about existential questions." A summary from the LA Times: “Over 1,000 structures burned in LA Count wildfires; firefighter were overwhelmed.” From Nextdoor: “Restaurants destroyed.” 

Earlier on Tuesday, I texted my mom “yes we are fine, it is very far away from us. It is many miles from us. We have an air purifier. It’s fine.” I began to tell people who asked that the problem for us was "just" the oppressive smoke, and the fact that we could not breathe. By the time we were going to bed, it became increasingly clear that it was not necessarily fine, and that it might be best if we left. I opened Bluesky and saw an image of a Cybertruck sitting in front of a burnt out mansion. A few posts later, I saw the same image but a Parental Advisory sticker had been photoshopped onto it. I clicked over to X and saw that people were spamming AI generated images of the fire.

We began wondering if we should drive toward cleaner air. We went home and tried to sleep. I woke up every hour because I was having trouble breathing. As the sun was supposed to be rising in the morning, it became clear that it was being hidden by thick clouds of smoke. 

Within minutes of waking up, we knew that we should leave. That we would be leaving. I opened Airbnb and booked something. We do not have a “Go Bag,” but we did have time to pack. I aimlessly wandered around my apartment throwing things into bags and boxes, packing things that I did not need and leaving things that I should have brought. In the closet, I pushed aside our boxes of COVID tests to get to our box of N-95 masks. I packed a whole microphone rig because I need to record a podcast Friday. 

I emailed the 404 Media customers who bought merch and told them it would be delayed because I had to leave my home and cannot mail them. I canceled meetings and calls with sources who I wanted to talk to. 

Our next-door neighbor texted us, saying that she would actually be able to make it to a meeting next week with our landlord with a shared beef we’re having with them. Originally she thought she would have to work during the time the meeting was scheduled. She works at a school in the Palisades. Her school burned down. So had her sister’s house. I saw my neighbor right before we left. I told her I would be back on Friday. I had a flashback to my last day in the VICE office in March 2020, when they sent us home for COVID. I told everyone I would see them in a week or two. Some of those people I never saw again.

A friend texted me to tell me that the place we had been on a beautiful hike a few weeks ago was on fire: “sad and glad we went,” he said. A friend in Richmond, Virginia texted to ask if I was OK. I told him yes but that it was very scary. I asked him how he was doing. He responded, “We had a bad ice storm this week and that caused a power outage at water treatment that then caused server crashes and electrical equipment to get flooded. The whole city has been without water since Monday.” He told me he was supposed to come to Los Angeles for work this weekend. He was canceling his flight.

A group chat asked me if I was OK. I told them that I did not want to be dramatic but that we were having a hard time but were ultimately safe. I explained some of what we had been doing and why. The chat responded saying that “it’s insane how you start this by saying it sounds more dramatic than it is, only to then describe multiple horrors. I am mostly just glad you are safe.”

We got in the car. We started driving. I watched a driverless Waymo navigate streets in which the traffic lights were out because the power was out. My fiancé took two work meetings on the road, tethered to her phone, our dog sitting on her lap. We stopped at a fast food drive through.

Once we were out of Los Angeles, I stopped at a Best Buy to get an air purifier. On my phone, I searched the reviews for the one they had on sale. I picked one out. The employee tried to sell me an extended warranty plan. I said no thank you, got back in the car, and kept driving away from the fire. I do not know when we will be able to go back.

When Google’s AI Overview search feature launched in May, it was generally regarded as a mess. It told people to eat glue and rocks, libeled newsworthy figures, plagiarized journalists’ work, and was so bad Google added a feature to turn it off entirely. In the nearly 10 months since AI Overview launched, it’s still getting things wrong, like telling people that vibrators can be used for childrens’ behavioral therapy. 

As discovered by Reddit user clist186, searching for “magic wand pregnancy” returns a bizarre answer about creativity with children as a “fun and engaging” activity alongside an image of a Magic Wand vibrator, one of the most popular and universally recognized sex toys in the world: 

“The Magic Wand tool is a creative way for parents to identify behavioral changes they want to make, including those related to pregnancy. It can be used to make assessment fun and engaging, especially for long-time WIC clients. Here's how the Magic Wand tool works:
Parents describe what parenting challenges they would change by ‘waving a magic wand’. The responses of both parents and older children can be used to start discussions. The Magic Wand tool can be purchased online or at a local store.”

Making this even weirder, I don’t get the parenting-related AI Overview result when I search that term, but 404's Emanuel Maiberg (famously, a parent himself) does. 

AI Overview, which is powered by Google’s Gemini model, provides links to where the information comes from as part of its results; In this case, it’s summarizing a document from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services about a thought exercise where a therapist passes clients a “magic wand” that helps them imagine an ideal scenario. This isn’t referring to passing a Hitachi to a child, but the AI doesn’t know that.

In another result for the search term "what is a magic wand," AI Overview pairs a photo of a Magic Wand sex toy with a description of a magician’s trick:

“A magic wand is a small stick used by magicians to perform tricks and make magic happen. It's often short, black, and has a white tip. Magicians use magic wands as part of their misdirection and to make things hap- pen like growing, vanishing, moving, or dis- playing a will of their own. For example, a classic magic trick involves making a bouquet of flowers appear from the wand's tip.”

This Overview result does eventually get around to describing the Magic Wand in question, though: “Magic wand may also refer to a brand of massager: Hitachi Magic Wand. A massaging device that was first listed for business use in 1968 and became available to the public in the 1970s. It's designed to relieve pain and tension, soothe sore muscles and nerves, and aid in rehabilitation after sports injuries.”

In a company blog about AI Overview, Google said the feature uses “multi-step reasoning capabilities” to “help with increasingly complex questions.” The search term “magic wand pregnancy” isn’t particularly complex; most people with basic reading comprehension skills would probably put it together that the term is looking for answers about using one of the world’s most popular sex toys while pregnant. But Gemini took the weirdest route possible instead, pulling from an obscure document about a talk therapy technique that happened to contain the phrases “magic wand” and “pregnancy.” 

Searching with a full, natural language query — “can you use a magic wand while pregnant” — returns a more nuanced AI-generated response that considers the searcher might have several different kinds of wands in mind: 

Last year, Reddit signed a $60 million per year contract with Google in exchange for licensing users’ content to train Google’s AI models. Adult content, including sex education and conversations about sex toys, are still allowed on Reddit as one of the few platforms that hasn’t banned sex entirely, and pregnancy-related questions are massively popular there. (There are dozens of questions specifically about using vibrators while pregnant.) It makes sense that phrasing the search term as a question rather than a set of keywords would turn up a better response from the AI: it’s what the AI was trained on. 

Thankfully, most people searching “magic wand pregnancy” are probably able to use their human brains to deduce that they shouldn’t use a vibrator as a talking stick in group therapy with kids. But it’s yet another example of AI being shoved into every product and tool that adds more work, friction, and confusion to the experience of being online, instead of less — as tech companies constantly promise. 

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In early December I got the kind of tip we’ve been getting a lot over the past year. A reader had noticed a post from someone on Reddit complaining about a very graphic sexual ad appearing in their Instagram Reels. I’ve seen a lot of ads for scams or shady dating sites recently, and some of them were pretty suggestive, to put it mildly, but the ad the person on Reddit complained about was straight up a close up image of a vagina. 

The reader who tipped 404 Media did exactly what I would have done, which is look up the advertiser in Facebook’s Ad Library, and found that the same advertiser was running around 800 ads across all of Meta’s platforms in November, the vast majority of which are just different close-up images of vaginas. When clicked, the ad takes users to a variety of sites for "confidential dating” or “hot dates” in your area. Facebook started to remove some of these ads on December 13, but at the time of writing, most of them were still undetected by its moderators according to the Ad Library.

Like I said, we get a lot of tips like this these days. We get so many, in fact, that we don’t write stories about them unless there’s something novel or that our readers need to know about them. Facebook taking money to put explicit porn in its ads despite it being a clear violation of its own policies is not new, but definitely a new low for the company and a clear indicator of Facebook’s “fuck it” approach to content moderation, and moderation of its ads specifically.   

We're back! And holy moly what a start to the year. We just published a bunch of stories. First, Jason talks about blowback inside Meta to its new board member, and Meta's subsequent censoring of those views. We also chat about those mad Meta AI profiles. After the break, Sam explains why Pornhub is blocked in most of the U.S. south. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph talks about why the government is planning to name one of its most important (and at risk) witnesses.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Facebook Deletes Internal Employee Criticism of New Board Member Dana White
• Meta's AI Profiles Are Indistinguishable From Terrible Spam That Took Over Facebook
• Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South
• Government to Name ‘Key Witness’ Who Provided FBI With Backdoored Encrypted Chat App Anom