For the last week, several news outlets have published shocking headlines about a game called No Mercy on Steam that features incest and “rape.”
In the UK, Peter Kyle, a member of Parliament and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology described the game as “deeply worrying” and demanded Valve, which operates the PC’s leading digital game store Steam, take it down. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a “Rape game available online for Australian Children.” Two organizations, Women in Games and Collective Shout, called on Valve to remove the game.
I downloaded and played No Mercy today for about 20 minutes. It’s crude, badly made, very boring, and about as pornographic as a seventh grader who is really good at drawing boobs. You click through endless lines of inane dialogue and eventually get to a point where two characters who look like stiff action figures of the same age are miming sex in a way that is barely recognizable as human. This is what many of the sex games on Steam look like, and the only reason you’ve heard about this one is that one of the characters is labeled “son” and the other is labeled as “mom.”
I understand how conceptually, in the way it is written out and pitched on Steam, No Mercy can sound highly offensive. That’s the point. But playing it makes clear that it’s not interesting or well made enough to follow on its own shocking pitch. It’s just shovelware, low quality games published in huge quantities in hopes of making a few bucks.
No Mercy is a visual novel, meaning it’s a kind of choose-your-own-adventure presented mostly with still or barely animated images made with crude 3D models that players click through to advance the story and occasionally make choices about how that story unfolds. With adult games, those choices usually result in some kind of sexual encounter that is also rendered with those crude 3D models. It’s a common type of game on Steam, and No Mercy differentiates itself by focusing on taboos.
“In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they'll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that's the only thing they all want. Never take 'no' for an answer,” the games Steam page reads. “Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?”
It’s a shocking way to pitch a game if porn tube site algorithms aren’t already serving you similar pornography, and doubly so if you haven’t kept up with Valve’s policy surrounding adult content on Steam, which is extremely permissive when compared to other platforms.
Valve’s current position is that pretty much anything goes when it comes to adult content. Users can easily choose not to have any of those games surfaced to them, and if they do, Steam does a good job of filtering that content out. If they choose to see that stuff, which I do, it’s all over the place, including the front page, game recommendations, and lists of new releases and best sellers, where at least one of these games is always featured.
Looking at my Steam account right now under the list of “popular upcoming” games, I see Office Affairs : Executive Decisions, an adult only visual novel with a an office romance angle, Saviour of the Wasteland, an adult only visual novel with post-apocalyptic/Fallout-y premise, and Lust’s Cupid, an adult only “pleasure simulator” with an anime aesthetic.
As PC Gamer helpfully keeps track, there were over 19,000 games released on Steam in 2024. A lot of those games are not good, and the list includes plenty of copycats, cheap asset flips, and shovelware. There are exceptions among Steam’s sex games, but the ratio there is even worse. There are a few formulas that developers in this space follow. There are games that basically use existing, well-known game mechanics like bullet hell and breakout-likes that reward players with some form of nudity, often furry or anime themed, and there are visual novels that usually follow porn genres and conventions, and are often rendered with cheap 3D graphics. Often, and especially in the latter category, these games have some kind of shocking, edgelord premise in an attempt to get players’ attention. For example, back in 2022 Sam and I played a Steam game called Sex with Hitler, which was a very bad top-down shooter/visual novel where, after a lot of very boring filler, you occasionally see a few images of having sex with Adolf Hitler. Most of these games barely rise above the level of the type of games advertised on porn sites that dare players “not to cum.”
No Mercy is just a more extreme example of what Valve has been allowing on Steam for years. I understand why people are upset that it’s on the platform, but at least Valve makes it easy to filter out those games if you don’t want to see them, something much bigger platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are terrible at, as we report on constantly. This is not to say that Valve is doing a great job of moderating its platform. I’ve been reporting on its problem with hate groups since 2017, which it still deals with today, and which there is no simple filter for as there is for adult content. Steam has also previously hosted games with an explicit connection to pick-up artists, the manosphere, and misogynist world views that are straight up marketed as instructions on how to talk to women in the real world, as opposed to the ridiculous fantasies included in No Mercy.
We’ve also reported on the adult industry for years, and there’s an infinite variety in genres and fetishes. Sexuality can be strange, funny, and weirdly specific, and because it is generally a suppressed aspect of the human condition, it’s often offensive to people.
Step-sister/step-brother porn is such a popular trope in pornography it’s become a punchline. There are more than 97,000 videos under Pornhub’s “Rough Sex” category. There are many things people get off to that other people find objectionable, but a good rule is that if the adult content is entirely consensual and is not hurting anyone, people should be able to engage with it if they wish.
Every platform decides the terms it’s going to allow, and then the people who make and play games, write ebooks, or make porn find whatever the edge is. Pornhub does not let users search for “rape,” and not all of the “rough sex” videos on Pornhub are rape fantasies, but some of them are. From what I’ve seen, No Mercy is like many other games that are on Steam but has successfully won the outrage lottery, allowing it to stand out from thousands of other games that are doing much the same thing.
Earlier this week I wrote an article called “A US-Made iPhone Is Pure Fantasy." The long and short of it is that Trump’s dream of moving all high tech manufacturing to the US is extremely difficult because global supply chains are so intricate, manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries, and the components that go into a phone are often made in other countries as well.
But there is currently one smartphone that qualifies for a “Made in the USA” title from the FTC. It’s the Liberty Phone, which is made by a company called Purism. The phone is a version of Purism’s Librem 5. The Made-in-China Librem 5 costs $800, and the Liberty phone costs $2,000. It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated. Not every single component in the Liberty Phone is made in the USA, but the company has been trying very hard to make it as American-made as possible. The fact that it exists at all is kind of a miracle, and the way that Purism is approaching manufacturing is really interesting, so I called Purism’s founder, Todd Weaver, to talk about smartphone supply chains, making tech products in the United States, and tariffs. Here’s our discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity. The full, hour-long discussion is available here as a bonus episode of the 404 Media podcast:
404 Media: What you're doing is super interesting and I know you've been doing it for a while. I know that there's been tons of discussion over the last few weeks about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, the difficulty of doing that with different supply chains and components and things like that. And I know to the best of your ability, you've brought the Liberty Phone to the U.S. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Liberty Phone is and how long you've been doing it for?
Todd Weaver: So the first thing is I started the company, Purism, in 2014. The original business plan is actually what we were able to execute on over the course of the last 10 years, and looking at doing a fair number of things different than is currently done.
One of those is US manufacturing for a lot of reasons, secure supply chain, where we get to manage all the components, full transparency, I can also release my schematics. And then that gets us to where we're really targeting that security market as well, because the security market needs to have control and also verify the claims of any technology stack being used. When I started the company, we also did laptops. And then I knew I wanted to get to the point of phones. But I also knew that I had to increment my way there by building laptops first, showcasing that I'm able to do all of that on the hardware, software services side, and then get to the point of the phone. When we did the phone, it was the Librem 5 phone.
After we were successful on the Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign, we took our own electronics engineers (EEs), and then we worked with Chinese design and manufacturing through 2018, 2019, and 2020, because that's where every phone is made.
We had to leverage the knowledge base that was offshored into that country to do so. And so at that point, we were able to take our designs and educate our staff on the entire process and produce the Librem 5. And then we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology, where we can actually produce the entire electronics of the device at our facility, therefore bringing it back to US soil. And so we have a few different SKUs of our product offering that are manufactured in our facility.
One of the Liberty Phone's boards. Image: Purism
We have a varying degree of the country of origin for components or the total product. So on one end of that spectrum, you have our server, which is an Intel reference design manufactured out of China, and then we're importing it. And then you go through the whole scale all the way down to Liberty Phone and our Librem Key that are 100% produced at our facility in Carlsbad, California.
On those two products we take the printed circuit board, which is just a blank board that has no components and run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators. And so we go from resistors and capacitors and integrated circuits, put them all on the board, take it off the board, do quality control, any firmware loading. Then we assemble the entire phone and then do a software load for the customer and then ship it direct. That whole process is top to bottom done at our facility.
There’s a difference between a phone that is fully made and manufactured in the United States and one that is assembled in the United States. Do you believe that you're manufacturing the phone from start to finish in the United States?
There's no question about it. The difference is actually defined by the FTC. So the Federal Trade Commission has language that describes the difference between assembled and manufactured. Assembly is where you are putting parts together. And they actually even have a sub definition of that called screwdriver assembly. So if you only take a screwdriver to it, and that's the only tool you're using, meaning snapping parts and using a screwdriver, then you cannot claim it was ‘made in the USA’ or you can't even claim ‘assembled in the USA.’ When you're looking at the Liberty phone, we are taking the bare board and we are doing the entire manufacturing process of all of the electronics, meaning resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits are being put onto that board.
It's going from raw materials to finished goods at our facility. And then we assemble the entire printed circuit board into the actual chassis of the phone. And then we also load our own operating system and then ship it to the customer. So, not only are we doing full electronics manufacturing at our facility on US soil, but we're also doing the entire operating system and authorship and releasing of that.
You're not buying components from overseas and then screwing them together here? You're making the components here as well?
Components are the things that you're actually purchasing like a resistor and a capacitor and integrated circuit. Those we are buying from a Western distributor and each chip set that you use has a country of origin. In our case, we also use chip sets that are like ST Micro [a Swiss company with American factories], Texas instruments. These are manufactured on US soil.
So we also go down as deep as we possibly can to purchase from US or Westernized distribution or manufacturers of those components and chips. So obviously resistors, capacitors are manufactured on US oil. We purchase those and install them. When you're talking about the PCB, which is the blank board and the PCBA, which is the printed circuit board assembly. You're taking those raw components and you're putting them onto a board, meaning soldering them onto a board, and then you have a finished electronic circuit board. When you're talking about other companies, what they're importing is typically finished goods, finished electronics. Meaning the chassis, the battery, the whole entire electronics inside. And in rare cases, they might import just the motherboard, meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly. We're very unique in the sense that we actually go from parts in stock all the way to the manufacturing process, all the way to finished goods at our facility. It is a vertically integrated manufacturing process. And that is, as you can recognize, extremely rare.
The last part of this is the raw materials, the minerals that are being mined and turned into the different parts that you're sourcing from suppliers. Do you try to work with suppliers who are making parts using materials mined in the US? Or is that too hard to follow that deep into the supply chain?
Yes, we do, but there's levels of complexity, as you can imagine, where the desire is there, but sometimes the parts aren't, or sometimes the negotiation with the suppliers turn into much more challenging or time consuming for the scale that we happen to be at. And then there's another bit of that, which also is leverage. If you're talking millions of units, as a manufacturer you have a lot more leverage than if you have a hundred thousand or tens of thousands. And so there is a degree of how hard can you push into the supply chain for contractual sourcing of raw materials, meaning mined materials. What we tend to do when we're doing Liberty phone is use Western distribution which has to comply with an awful lot more regulation on where it can source components from.
"If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's"
Our philosophy from the very early days, especially as it relates to US manufacturing, is we go as deep as we possibly can to releasing our schematics, to sourcing our components, to having our HBOM, it's called a hardware bill of materials, a country of origin available, to the transparency of all of our source code that we author being published as well so you can verify that all of our claims are accurate.
How long did it take you to implement this vision for manufacturing everything in the United States?
2017 was when we actually began to say ‘We want to manufacture a phone and we would like to do it on US soil.’ We then actually manufactured our Librem Key as a very small security token at the same facility, same US soil manufacturing process. But it was a much easier product to produce, but that also showed, hey, we're able to do it on a simpler product.
Then in 2019, we were able to get what's called PVT samples. That's where you sort of get the initial versions of hardware being produced. So that two years is really about design changes that we needed, developing every bit out. But also in parallel to that, we were educating our electronic engineers to say, every time we're sourcing a Chinese resistor [a circuit board component], let's make sure we're getting the same resistance on a US resistor.
We always were sort of maintaining two different bills of materials of Chinese componentry and Western componentry because they're different. Then we produced five different iterations of the Librem 5 phone through Chinese contract manufacturing. And we iterated through those five changes over the course of about 18 months. At that point, we finally had a production ready product. And then we were able to take everything that we did and bring it to US soil.
[The Librem 5 USA was released in 2020, after three years of development.]
Imagine this literally starting from scratch, you're looking at probably a three year cycle from, from ‘Let's take an existing made-in-China product and then just produce the same thing in the US.’
Were there specific components or specific parts of the phone that were harder to source in the United States or harder to manufacture in the United States because we don't make that type of component in the US or there's not a US supplier that sells it?
Yes. There's US-manufactured, and then there’s ‘Westernized’ sourcing, so something from Germany or Europe or Canada. There's a bunch of these where you can’t get a US-component but you can get a ‘Western’ component. And then there’s things you can’t get [from a Western manufacturer].
One specific item is a type of crystal that needs to be put into phones, which is basically for keeping track of time and a few other measurement metrics. That crystal is something that only comes from China, and maybe I think you can get it from South Korea, which is where we either are sourcing or trying to source that last component from.
Even where we care to do 100 percent of it, there's still always something that you can try and dig one level deeper and you realize, that's a mineral or a mineral resource of something that's coming from somewhere that would be outside of the U.S. So then you need to import it and you wonder, ‘Is that ever going to be produced in the US or is there some company who would like to begin doing so?’ It's obviously a very complex question when you're dealing with, you know, in our case, 200 unique parts and the entire sourcing of all of them.
You can imagine the majority of companies who are just selling electronics from manufacturers somewhere else, they don't care. There's no transparency, no visibility, and the company itself doesn't even know the designs or what goes into it.
Your table of component origins on the Liberty Phone site shows where things come from. Most of it is USA, but then you have the M2 Modem module that says its origin declaration is China. Is there a specific reason that’s not USA?
The M2 module, we actually have options for US made and then we also have European, Germany. That module, specifically for cellular, it depends on the bands that you're looking to install it at or in some cases cost, right? So we have that as an actual module that you can snap in. The one that we ship for when we sell the [Chinese-made] Librem 5 is a Chinese modem. But we have a US-made one and a few other westernized countries for that modem module. We have the options of different bands, different country of origin, and to be able to put that in after the fact or during final assembly.
But I would just imagine that the Chinese one is a lot cheaper.
Yeah, absolutely. It's cheaper, it also has pretty wide bands.
The phone that you were able to manufacture in the United States is not as fast as the latest iPhone. Can the newest best chips and components be manufactured in the US, and what would it take to do it here?
The short answer is yes, I do, because you didn't ask me the timing. It's going to be multiples of years and a major investment and undertaking. And it has to show that there's a ROI and that there’s stability, like ‘This is the future that we’re going to live in, so let’s actually invest in doing all those things.’
When you're talking chipsets, the actual CPUs inside of Apple and Samsung and Google phones, those are a complete computer where it's hardware, the CPU, memory, and baseband modem, the cellular modem all combined onto one. And typically that's from Qualcomm or MediaTek. And those particular chipsets are produced outside of China. So really what you're referring to is the actual design of a finished good saying, take the semiconductor and put it into a phone and then add all the other components, the 200 and some other unique components into the finished good. And that is done in China specifically for Apple and a bunch of other major manufacturers.
It's obviously far more complex, but to try and just level set a little bit about that, where you're at now is you say ‘Let's take what we have in China and try to replicate that in the U.S.’ Well, the challenge is that all high tech jobs were put into China. You have a brain transfer where the ODMs, the original design manufacturers, are in China. If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's.
These are people who design the actual board that goes into devices. That training takes time and effort and energy to get to the point where you can design new devices.
Then you have the next step, which is the actual assembly process. When you're looking at costing, machine versus machine, it's the same price to produce a product in US or China. Because the machine is doing the effort.
But then you have a person who physically grabs the board and does the assembly, which is a much more costly endeavor in the US than it is in China. China can solve problems by throwing people at it. The US and Western countries can solve problems by throwing engineering at it. If you were to go to Dongguan, China, and you see a manufacturing line, they're going to have rows and rows and rows of people who are taking a tablet or a phone that passes by them, and they just do [quality assurance on] pinch to zoom. They have gloves and they touch the screen, drag it open and drag it back and then it moves on the line. If one doesn't do pinch to zoom properly, they send it back. And that is a job for an entire row of people.
But what we did at Purism is we solved it with engineering. How we do that is we actually plug in the phone and we flash the entire device and we run through what we call auto Quality Assurance. And that is where we actually hack the firmware to receive or fake to receive a touch screen event into the firmware itself on the screen. And then we actually replicate a pinch to zoom, take a picture and then back again and take another picture. And as long as those pictures match, we have a functioning touch interface, where we didn't have to have people doing that task.
You can look at our concrete numbers. We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
Do you feel like you are in a better spot tariffs-wise than a company that is doing all of their manufacturing in China because you've done all of this?
Absolutely, without question. If there’s a vertically integrated company where they have engineers, they have designers, they have the knowledge to be able to do it, then those companies will be able to adapt and bring it forth. If they choose to do US manufacturing, they have at least the ability to.
Whereas a company that is marketing and finance, and that's really the bulk of what they're doing, and they don't have any engineering, and they've offloaded all of those tasks. If they have no R&D budget, and they have no operating expenses for any type of engineering or manufacturing, then they're gonna be in a very difficult position because you can also imagine there's kind of a run on the bank, right? Everybody is going to be looking for a company who can build their product at the same time. They have no knowledge of how to do it because that entire process has been brought into China. In China, you’re basically talking to a project manager, who's finding all of the right parties that does all the other tasks, and then they bring in all the engineers and everything else that's needed operationally and what you're receiving at the end of the day is something you can drop ship to a customer without ever actually even opening the box. It’s going to be very challenging to find someone in the US who's going to fill that same void at the same time that everybody else is looking to see if they can fill that void.
You are doing this manufacturing in Carlsbad, California. Did you find it difficult to find workers who were able to work on a high tech factory line?
We did not have difficulty in finding line operators, or what we call ‘skilled labor’ where you're able to solder something or do assembly with tweezers. That type of skilled labor exists, but it’s also in [geographical] pockets. If you're to say ‘Why in the world are you in Carlsbad, California?’ It's because there’s skilled labor there. There's companies here that currently work for government contract manufacturers, so that's where the labor is, that's why it was easy for us to spin up a line there and hire skilled labor from some of the other companies who have trained up those same staff.
Electronics engineers is a rarer position. And that's what I was describing earlier when you scour the nation you'd come up with, you could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil and there's probably a million in Shenzhen alone.
One thing that I worry about or think might be a problem is if you have tons of companies trying to do this all at once, very quickly, what is that going to be like? Are there enough skilled people to do that here?
The answer has to be no. There's enough skilled labor to handle the necessary manufacturing that we're currently doing and you know if you increment it slowly then you can probably get there. If you're talking full EEs, that's multi years of education to get to the point of actually being able to do proper designs that actually work.
"If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions."
There's another bit that you sort of hinted at there that I think is important, and I’m going to address it. The reliability of knowing that a tariff is in place and how long it's going to be in place allows a business to make informed decisions. If it was something where you knew that importing from China is going to be a hundred percent tariff for the next 10 years concretely, every business owner would be making decisions based off of that assumption, and the reliability of that assumption is important.
If it's something where ‘Hey, this is what's going to be 100%, but in two months it might not be, and who knows what's going to happen in three years or four years?’ It makes it very hard for a business owner or the board of directors to say ‘It's worth spinning all this up.’
Did you look at bringing manufacturing to the US as a political project for you? Were you interested in the politics of doing this in the United States or was it a matter of differentiating yourselves?
There's like probably about 10 items on the list of reasons why we chose to do manufacturing in the US. And obviously one of those is from a civil liberties perspective. So manufacturing high tech componentry in a hostile nation to the United States is not good geopolitical politics, right? Purism as a company, we also care tremendously about civil liberties and the privacy side of things which is to say we manufacture a phone that doesn't spy on you. That's why we manufacture it and also do all the source code. We can't have some nefarious chip put into the supply chain from a hostile country.
So the short answer is not in the short-term political game, but more of the geopolitical game and also understanding security and privacy and sort of how all those things weave together
I think no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you can look at the last two weeks of tariffs, more tariffs, maybe not tariffs, maybe a delay in tariffs, increased Chinese tariffs and agree that this is chaotic. And you mentioned the stability of sort of knowing what the rules are going to be. Does this all stress you out?
I do not stress about the SKUs that we are fully making in the US, right? We don't have to worry about it for our US side, because the majority of it will not be affected. But for others [that we make overseas], you can’t project out, right? What is it gonna be in three months? Should we buy components now? What is it gonna be a year from now? Maybe we should stock up on a bunch of other things?
Should we buy it today? Then maybe somebody on your procurement team says, ‘Well, maybe we should wait a week, right?’ Because if it's going to change, is it going to change for the better or worse? And you can imagine those little micro example carries forward to everything else that a business has to decide
If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions.
AkiraBot is a program that fills website comments sections and customer service chat bots with AI-generated spam messages. Its goal is simple: it wants you to sign up for an SEO scheme that costs about $30 a month. For that low price it swears it can enchant Google’s algorithms to get you on the frontpage. But it’s a scam.
A new report from researchers at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne documented how scammers deployed AkiraBot, the tool’s use of OpenAI generated messages, and how it avoided multiple CAPTCHA systems and network detection techniques. According to the report, the bot targeted 420,000 unique domains and successfully spammed 80,000.
Whoever runs AkirBot operates their SEO company under a bunch of different names, but they all tend to use the words “Akira” or “ServiceWrap.” SentinelOne says the tool finds websites crafted by third party software like Wix or Squarespace and spams comments sections and automated chatbots with a promise to get the site on the frontpage of various search engines. If you have a small business that exists on the web or have run a WordPress-based website in the last 15 years, you’ve likely seen messages like those AkiraBot crafts.
Bias in artificial intelligence systems, or the fact that large language models, facial recognition, and AI image generators can only remix and regurgitate the information in data those technologies are trained on, is a wellestablishedfact that researchers and academics have been warning about since their inception.
In a blog post about the release of Llama 4, Meta’s open weights AI model, the company clearly states that bias is a problem it’s trying to address, but unlike mountains of research which established AI systems are more likely to discriminate against minorities based on race, gender, and nationality, Meta is specifically concerned with Llama 4 having a left-leaning political bias.
“It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics,” Meta said in its blog. “This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.”
A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are suspected of relatively minor infractions or who fit certain characteristics, but said the fact that we don’t necessarily know the exact mechanisms by which people are being identified and detained is a major problem.
The database, called “Investigative Case Management” (ICM), “serves as the core law enforcement case management tool for ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),” according to a 2021 privacy impact assessment for the tool.
404 Media saw a recent version of the database, which allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, which include things like resident status and entry status (“refugee,” “border crossing card,” “nonimmigrant alien refused admission,” “temporary protective status alien,” “nonimmigrant alien transiting without visa,” “undocumented alien,”); “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos)”; “criminal affiliation”; location data; license plate reader data; country of origin; hair and eye color; race; social security number; birthplace; place of employment; driver’s license status; bankruptcy filings, and hundreds more. A source familiar with the database told 404 Media that it is made up of “tables upon tables” of data and that it can build reports that show, for example, people who are on a specific type of visa who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who have a specific hair color (or any number of hundreds of data points).
ICE agents can set up a “Person Lookout Query” that sends email notifications if a person suddenly triggers the parameters of a search query. 404 Media has seen parts of the infrastructure of this database, which shows the characteristics that can be searched for, as well as several example reports that can be generated by it.
A 2016 privacy impact assessment filed by DHS about the database says that ICM connects to other DHS and federal databases, including SEVIS, which are records about all people who are admitted to the United States on a student visa; another search tool called FALCON; “real-time maps” associated with ICE’s location tracking tools; “limited location data from license plate reader cameras operated by ICE,” as well as information from “other federal agencies.” The Intercept previously reported those agencies include the DEA, the FBI, the ATF, and the CIA.
We start this week with Joseph's story revealing how the FBI secretly ran a massive money laundering ring to catch drug traffickers and hackers. After the break, we run through a bunch of tariff stories and how it's going to impact everything from the Nintendo Switch to the iPhone. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why he found the new book on Facebook particularly illuminating.
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This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States: “The army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America, it’s going to be automated, and the tradecraft of America is going to fix them, is going to work on them, there’s going to be mechanics, HVAC specialists, electricians,” Lutnick said. “The tradecraft of America, the high school educated Americans, the core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high tech factories which are all coming to America.”
"The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America." - Lutnick
The idea of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone has been an obsession for politicians for years, a kind of shorthand goalpost that would signal “American manufacturing is back” that is nonetheless nowhere close to being a reality and would require a nearly impossible-to-fathom restructuring of the global supply chains that make the iPhone possible in the first place. Over the years, economists and manufacturing experts have attempted to calculate how much an American-made iPhone would cost. In recent days a Quora answer from 2018 that suggests an American iPhone would cost $30,000 has gone repeatedly viral. A Reuters story that claims a tariffed iPhone would cost $2,300 has also gone viral.
These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months.
The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.
We can see how the iPhone is made today by looking at numerous reports that Apple puts out every year, which outlines its current supply chain and workforce requirements. So let’s start there. The home page of Apple’s supply chain website states “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that the General Services Administration converted 14,000 magnetic to digital records, and claimed the process saved a million dollars a year.
The problem is, magnetic tapes are regarded by storage and archivist professionals as being a stable, reliable, and safe medium for long-term data storage. Just because it’s a 70 year old medium doesn’t mean those records needed a massive overhaul to digital, that it will save any money in the long term, or that the new storage method is better.
The shed-sized post office opposite a Baptist Church 40 miles outside of Louisville, Kentucky, was an unlikely starting point for one of the most significant undercover FBI operations in recent years. Inside that post office on September 17, 2021, sat a package that had arrived a few days earlier. On the face of it that package and others like it shipped over the coming months were not suspicious. They often contained children’s books. Nestled in those, though, was an envelope. Then another envelope inside that. And inside that, thousands of dollars of cash.
This money came from “ElonmuskWHM,” one of the biggest online money launderers and who advertised on the dark web site White House Market (WHM). For nearly a year by that point, ElonmuskWHM had been a crucial cog in the underground economy. Criminals came to ElonmuskWHM when they needed to cash out their ill-gotten cryptocurrency, bypassing the legitimate banking system that ordinarily kept tabs on their customers and gave information to law enforcement. So the FBI wanted to shut ElonmuskWHM down.
The FBI eventually identified ElonmuskWHM as Anurag Pramod Murarka, a 30 year-old Indian national who authorities arrested after luring him to the country by approving his travel visa application. More extraordinarily, the FBI then took over ElonmuskWHM’s money laundering operation and ran it themselves for nearly a year, Gabrielle Dudgeon, public affairs specialist at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky, which prosecuted the case, told 404 Media. With criminals believing they were interacting with the real ElonmuskWHM, the FBI then investigated the launderer’s customers, including drug traffickers and hackers.
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Do you know anything else about this case? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
As part of the investigation into ElonmuskWHM, both before and after the account takeover, investigators linked the money launderer to drug traffickers in Miami; a robbery at knife point in San Francisco, and numerous multi-million dollar hacking cases. During this window of time, the FBI investigated an alleged member of the notorious Scattered Spider hacking collective, which was responsible for the MGM Resorts hack and has caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. In this operation, rather than following the money, the FBI would become the money, potentially giving criminals tens of thousands of dollars in an effort to learn their real identities.
Framework—a company that makes upgradeable and repairable laptops—has said it will pause sales on several versions of one of its models in America thanks to Trump’s tariffs.
“Due to the new tariffs that came into effect on April 5th, we’re temporarily pausing US sales on a few base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U). For now, these models will be removed from our US site. We will continue to provide updates as we have them,” Framework said in a post on X.
On Monday stocks plummeted again following President Trump’s tariff announcements last week. For a brief moment, they dramatically shot back up following reports that Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. But, that turned out to be false, and people have been trying to find out where the idea that there would be a 90-day pause actually came from.
A company called Benzinga carried the headline “Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett Says Trump Is Considering A 90-Day Pause in Tariffs For All Countries Except China,” according to what appears to be a screenshot of the headline posted to Bluesky.
Benzinga itself is now blaming posts on X for the market-moving mistake.
On Saturday Elon Musk sat in his personal jet and tested out Starlink’s in-air WiFI by streaming some Path of Exile 2. Less than five minutes into the stream, someone in game chat asked him to “jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack!” For the next hour and 40 minutes, the world’s richest man frowned his way through a livestream while people yelled at him.
Path of Exile 2 is an action role-playing game and Musk loves it, but he’s terrible at it. He has claimed he’s one of the top players in the world and later admitted he’s paid people to help keep his account leveled up and full of the high-end gear it needs to play the game at the highest level.
Over the weekend, in his jet, he was playing the game in hard core mode. When a player dies in this mode they cannot progress any further. Essentially, players have one life. Musk died a lot. The stream’s entire vibe was fucked. This is the richest man in the world sitting in a private jet playing a game by himself for an audience of strangers while techno music blasted through the speakers. Streaming on a platform he owns using technology he owns in a jet he owns, he sat stone-faced and grinded his way through the early portions of Path of Exile 2 while other players yelled at him.
It’s the first Monday after Donald Trump started implementing his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” and the markets are seeing red. At the time of writing the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq are all down around four percent with the latter taking the hardest hit. And that’s on top of the S&P 500’s 10 percent fall last week. Things can still change quickly, and it’s up to historians to decide what to call Trump’s decision to push the economy off a cliff when they write their history books, but Wikipedia editors, who are arguably writing one of the first drafts of history, have already called it the “2025 stock market crash.”
“At the beginning of Donald Trump's second term, he was inaugurated inheriting a particularly strong domestic stock market,” the top section of the Wikipedia article titled “2025 stock market crash” reads. “Whilst this was maintained for a period of a few weeks after his inauguration, the Trump administration began making and announcing increasingly aggressive trade policies in an attempt to practice protectionism and economic pressure, including heightening previous trade wars, starting new trade wars, heavy tariffs, and increasing tensions with allies; most prominently, Canada. As the administration continued to practice these policies, markets began to experience continued turbulence, volatility, and general uncertainty.”
While the current title of the article definitely calls it a stock market crash, it is, like every Wikipedia article, subject to change depending on how editors continue interpreting events. The article currently includes two disclaimers. The first notes that it “may be affected by a current event,” and the “article may change rapidly as the event progresses.” The second notes that there is a pending request from some editors to change the article title to “2025 stock market decline.”
“The suggested renaming is just a placeholder,” one editor who wants to call it a “decline” said in the “talk” page where Wikipedia editors debate the decision. “I cannot find many reliable sources describing this as a "crash", at least not yet. A crash is generally considered to be a fall of >20%.[1] Most indices are bubbling around 9–10%; it is certainly contentious to label it a crash.”
The talk page for the Wikipedia article shows that previously there were two Wikipedia pages for the current economic turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs, one titled “stock market crash” and the other titled “stock market decline.” Editors agreed to merge the articles, and at least for now keep the “crash” title.
Although there is no definition of a stock market crash it's generally accepted an “‘abrupt double-digit percentage drop in a stock index over the course of a few days’” is a crash (which both have happened),” the editor said, citing Investopedia. “Also this is a really big crash, the last time the smp was at 5000 points was in April of 2024, meaning a year of progress has been wiped out in 48 hours. My personal stock portfolio dropped by 25%. But with that being said it might be better to change the title of the article to something like April 2025 stock market crash as there might be a bigger crash later.”
Just because Wikipedia says something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fact. It’s a crowdsourced repository that ultimately reflects what Wikipedia editors decide. But it’s also one of the most useful and reliable repositories of information humanity has created, which feeds Google and countless other tools on the internet, and at the very least it reflects a prevailing point of view on what Trump did to the global economy.
In 2018, I spent two days at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus doing back-to-back on-the-record interviews with executives who worked on the company’s content policy teams. This was after we had published article after article exposing the many shortcomings of Facebook’s rules, based on internal guidebooks that were leaked to Joseph. We learned, for example, that Facebook would sometimes bend its rules to comply with takedown requests from governments that were threatening to block the service in their country, that Facebook had drawn an impossible-to-define difference between “white supremacy,” “white nationalism,” and “white separatism” that didn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny, and that it had incredibly detailed rules about when it was allowable to show a Photoshopped anus on the platform.
After months of asking for interviews with its top executives, Facebook’s public relations team said that, instead, I should fly to Menlo Park and sit in on a series of meetings about how the rules are made, how the team dealt with difficult decisions, how third party stakeholders like civil liberties groups are engaged, and how particularly difficult content decisions were escalated to Sheryl Sandberg.
One of the people I interviewed while at Facebook headquarters was Guy Rosen, who was then Facebook’s head of product and is now its chief information security officer. I interviewed Rosen about how it could be possible that Facebook had failed so terribly at content moderation in Myanmar that it was being credibly accused of helping to facilitate the genocide of the Rohingya people. What Rosen told me shocked me at the time, and is something that I think about often when I write about Facebook. Rosen said that Facebook’s content moderation AI wasn’t able to parse the Burmese language because it wasn’t a part of Unicode, the international standard for text encoding. Besides having very few content moderators who knew Burmese (and no one in Myanmar), Facebook had no idea what people were posting in Burmese, and no way to understand it: “We still don’t know if it’s really going to work out, due to the language challenges,” Rosen told me. This was in 2018; Facebook had been operating in Myanmar for seven years and had at that time already been accused of helping to facilitate this human rights catastrophe.
Posters that were hanging at Facebook HQ in 2018. Image: Jason Koebler
My time at Facebook was full of little moments like this. I had a hard time squaring the incredibly often thoughtful ways that Facebook employees were trying to solve incredibly difficult problems with the horrendous outcomes we were seeing all over the world. Posters around HQ read “REDUCE CLICKBAIT,” “DEPOLARIZE,” “REDUCE MISINFO,” and “UNSHIP HATE.” Yet much of what I saw on Facebook at the time and to this day are, well, all of those things. Other posters talked about having respect for employees, as I wrote about a workforce that was largely made up of low-wage contractors around the world whose job was to look at terrorism videos, hate speech, graphic sexual content, etc. When I asked a Facebook executive about what it was doing to support the mental health needs of its content moderators and to help them deal with PTSD, the Facebook executive in charge of content moderator training at the time told me that they had designed “actual physical environments” in its offices where traumatized employees could “just kind of chillax or, if you want to go play a game, or if you want to just walk away, you know, be by yourself.”
The biggest question I had for years after this experience was: Does Facebook know what it’s actually doing to the world? Do they care?
In the years since, I have written dozens of articles about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, have talked to dozens of employees, and have been leaked internal documents and meetings and screenshots. Through all of this, I have thought about the ethics of working at Facebook, namely the idea that you can change a place that does harm like this “from the inside,” and how people who work there make that moral determination for themselves. And I have thought about what Facebook cares about, what Mark Zuckerberg cares about, and how it got this way.
Mostly, I have thought about whether there is any underlying tension or concern about what Facebook is doing and has done to the world; whether its “values,” to the extent a massive corporation has values, extend beyond “making money,” “amassing power,” “growing,” “crushing competition,” “avoiding accountability,” and “stopping regulation.” Basically, I have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering to myself if these people care about anything at all.
Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, is the book about Facebook that I didn’t know I had been waiting a decade to read. It’s also, notably, a book that Facebook does not want you to read; Wynn-Williams is currently under a gag order from a third-party arbitrator that prevents her from promoting or talking about the book because Facebook argued that it violates a non-disparagement clause in her employment contract.
Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, rising to become the director of public policy, a role she originally pitched as being Facebook’s “diplomat,” and ultimately became a role where she did a mix of setting up meetings between world leaders and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, determined the policy and strategy for these meetings, and flew around the world meeting with governments trying to prevent them from blocking Facebook.
The reason the book feels so important and cathartic is because, as a memoir, it does something that reported books about Facebook can’t quite do. It follows Wynn-Williams’ interior life as she recounts what drew her to Facebook (the opportunity to influence politics at a global scale beyond what she was able to do at the United Nations), the strategies and acts she made for the company (flying to Myanmar by herself to meet with the junta to get it unblocked there, for example), and her discoveries and ultimate disillusionment with the company as she goes on what often feels like repeated Veep-like quests to get Mark Zuckerberg to take interactions with world leaders seriously, to engineer a “spontaneous” interaction with Xi Jinping, to get him or Sandberg to care about the role Facebook played in getting Trump and other autocrats elected.
Facebook HQ. Image: Jason Koebler
She was in many of the rooms where big decisions were made, or at least where the fallout of many of Facebook’s largest scandals were discussed. If you care about how Facebook has impacted the world at all, the book is worth reading for the simple reason that it shows, repeatedly, that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook as a whole Knew. About everything. And when they didn’t know but found out, they sought to minimize or slow play solutions.
Yes, Facebook lied to the press often, about a lot of things; yes, Internet.org (Facebook’s strategy to give “free internet to people in the developing world) was a cynical ploy at getting new Facebook users; yes, Facebook knew that it couldn’t read posts in Burmese and didn’t care; yes, it slow-walked solutions to its moderation problems in Myanmar even after it knew about them; yes, Facebook bent its own rules all the time to stay unblocked in specific countries; yes, Facebook took down content at the behest of China then pretended it was an accident and lied about it; yes, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg intervened on major content moderation decisions then implied that they did not. Basically, it confirmed my priors about Facebook, which is not a criticism because reporting on this company and getting anything beyond a canned statement or carefully rehearsed answer from them over and over for years and years and years has made me feel like I was going crazy. Careless People confirmed that I am not.
It has been years since Wynn-Williams left Facebook, but it is clear these are the same careless people running the company. When I wonder if the company knows that its platforms are being taken over by the worst AI slop you could possibly imagine, if it knows that it is directly paying people to flood these platforms with spam, if it knows it is full of deepfakes and AI generated content of celebrities and cartoon characters doing awful things, if it knows it is showing terrible things to kids. Of course it does. It just doesn’t care.
Throughout the book, Wynn-Williams grapples with the morality of what she’s being asked to do, and whether it feels ethical for her to be doing it at all. This is her book, of course, and she generally comes off as someone fighting to do the right thing at a company that often did not do the right thing. But even this retrospective introspection hit hard for me; Wynn-Williams is a funny, colorful, and sometimes heartbreaking writer. She writes about staying at Facebook even as she’s treated terribly and asked to do horrible things following a near-death health emergency she suffered during childbirth because she needs the health insurance, she talks about sexual harassment she says she endured from her boss and Sheryl Sandberg, and about being fired after reporting it.
It is obvious why Facebook doesn’t want people to read this book. No one comes out looking good, but they come out looking exactly like we thought they were.
This week has been a lot. This year has been a lot. THIS MILLENIUM HAS BEEN A LOT. That’s why there’s only good news in the column this week. We deserve it.
Normally, I’m not a big fan of putting artificial stuff in our brains (see: plastic spoons). But I’ll make an exception for a new neural implant that has allowed a woman to regain the ability to speak nearly 20 years after suffering a debilitating stroke. It’s an encouraging story about the profound human triumphs that scientists can deliver, assuming you don’t fire them all for no discernible reason.
Then, bats! We’re back on the bat beat, baby. It’s not my fault, they just keep doing interesting things. Then, these sunflowers don’t need sperm to reproduce. Will this create a male sunflower loneliness epidemic? Last, time to retire to the fjords. See you there.
In 2005, a 30-year-old woman who was otherwise in good health suddenly reeled from dizziness and found herself unable to speak. She had suffered a pontine stroke, which obstructs blood flow to the pons region of the brainstem, leaving her unable to verbally communicate beyond a few sounds.
But over the past several years, this woman, now in her late 40s, has been able to speak again with the help of a neuroprosthesis device that can translate thoughts into speech in real time, similar to transcription software.
An implant in the woman’s brain records neural activity and streams it into a synthesized audio unit that is based on a recording of her voice before her stroke. This brain-computer interface is an improvement over past iterations because there is no appreciable delay between thoughts and speech for the woman, who is identified by her first name Ann.
“Natural spoken communication happens instantaneously,” said researchers led by Kaylo Littlejohn and Cheol Jun Cho of the University of California, Berkeley. “Speech delays longer than a few seconds can disrupt the natural flow of conversation. This makes it difficult for individuals with paralysis to participate in meaningful dialogue, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and frustration.”
“We developed a ‘streaming’ speech neuroprosthesis that seamlessly converts short windows of neural activity to audible sound without waiting for an entire sentence to be attempted,” the team continued. “Speaking seamlessly with real-time, low-latency communication at will is integral to our sense of identity and belonging, which is severely decreased in individuals with anarthria.”
The study includes a few videos of Ann reading sentences on a screen, which are then converted into speech through the neuroprosthesis. The speech is still slow and halting, and the authors outline future improvements in the study, but the device is nonetheless a “major step” toward technologies that can restore speech.
In addition to the ingenious work from the team, Ann deserves mad props for devoting so much of her time and mental energy to refining the device.
Speaking of speech, time to check in with the ultimate chatterers: Bats. This week, we’re all invited to the “Cocktail Party Nightmare,” which is the actual term for the “tremendous nightly challenge” bats face as they careen from their cave roosts while “maneuvering under severe acoustic interference” and “trying to avoid collisions,” according to a new study.
Basically, as thousands of bats fly together into the night, they produce a cacophony of echolocating chatter that should, in theory, overload their sensory acoustic band. Yet bats seem to be able to seamlessly navigate through this acoustic maelstrom with very few collisions. How to solve this riddle? Mic the bats, of course!
“We…fitted some of the bats with onboard microphones, enabling us to record the auditory scene from the individual bat’s point of view,” said scientists co-led by Aya Goldshtein of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Omer Mazar of Tel Aviv University. “These unique data…enabled us to examine how bats move collectively at such high densities while relying on echolocation.”
The experiment, which was conducted on greater mouse-tailed bats in Israel’s Hula Valley, revealed that bats adjust their echolocation frequencies as they leave the cave, when they are most closely clustered, so that they can focus on avoiding crashes with their near-neighbors. Once they are out in the open, they quickly disperse to more peaceful sonic environments.
“We found that the bats gradually increased their spread as they flew farther from their cave while still maintaining a group structure over several kilometers,” the team said. “This movement strategy allowed the bats to rapidly reduce group density and, consequently, to decrease conspecific sensory masking and almost nullify collision risk.”
In other words, the next time you’re at a Cocktail Party Nightmare, mind your echo etiquette.
Sisters are Doing it for Themselves (Sunflower Edition)
Step aside, Jesus Christ: There’s a new virgin birth in town. Scientists this week reported the surprise discovery that sunflower seeds can be developed without fertilization, a process known as parthenogenesis.
Many animals and plants—and perhaps, Mothers of God—reproduce through this ladies-only form of reproduction, in which females asexually produce viable embryos from only their eggs.
But scientists who were tinkering with “emasculated sunflowers”—which is, yes, a great band name, but also a common form of pollination control—have now reported that they just kind of accidentally did an immaculate conception.
“We serendipitously discovered that emasculated sunflowers spontaneously form parthenogenic haploid seed,” said researchers co-led by Jian Lv and Dawei Liang of the State Key Laboratory of Crop Germplasm Innovation and Molecular Breeding in China. “To our knowledge, this is the first report of a crop species exhibiting facultative parthenogenesis as a rare and likely unselected back-up pathway to failed fertilization.”
The discovery could have big implications for this important crop. Sexual reproduction is pretty time intensive (relatable!) so the unexpected discovery that sunflowers can pop out seeds without pollination could optimize the growing multi-billion dollar industry for sunflowers.
Time to end on a moment of zen. And what better place to find serenity than the fjords of coastal British Columbia?
You don’t have to take my word for it; just ask the sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides), a species that has been so stressed in recent years that it has literally been tearing itself to pieces. This grotesque affliction, known as sea star wasting disease, has devastated many sea star populations around the world, but P.helianthoides is among the hardest hit, losing more than 90 percent of its Pacific Coast population.
I know, I know, I promised some zen! There may be some light at the end of the tunnel for this species, as scientists have observed populations recovering in fjord refuges along the BC coast. Sea stars in these havens are not necessarily less exposed to the disease, but the conditions in fjords, which are regularly fed with freshwater flows, may give the animals a better chance to recover from infection.
“P. helianthoides in fjord habitats appear to be responding differently to SSWD than those in other habitats and regions,” said researchers led by Alyssa-Lois Madden Gehman of the Hakai Institute. “The contrast between the interaction between salinity and temperature on biomass density within the fjords and outer islands suggests that these habitats could be a refuge from disease.”
“We suggest that the unique oceanographic conditions within the fjords, specifically through the increase in freshwater input during snowmelt, known as the freshet, could be keeping P. helianthoides in conditions that optimize host health and/or limit disease progression and transmission,” the team said.
Honestly, the compulsion to tear one’s own body limb-from-limb due to environmental stress seems dangerously relatable. But if sea stars can find some sanctuary from their hellish plight, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.
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 learning from civilizations past and learning to drive.
JASON: I mentioned this on a podcast a few weeks ago, but I have been falling asleep lately to the Ancient Americas YouTube channel. Made by a guy in the midwest named Pete, Ancient Americas makes 30-minute to hour-long videos about indigenous American civilizations: The Mayans, the Incans, the Aztecs, the Nazca, sure. But also the Calusa, the Toltecs, the Tarascans, the Marajoara, the Cahokia, and lots of other civilizations / peoples / cities / ruins that I had never heard of and never learned about in school.
I didn’t have any specific interest in this—Ancient Americas started autoplaying one night at 3 AM when I couldn’t sleep, and Pete’s monotone voice put me back to sleep very quickly. I started listening more often, and it has quickly become my go-to thing to fall asleep to. Pete says he is not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, but each of his videos is insanely well researched, and he includes a Google Doc bibliography with each one. His recent video about the “Mayan Collapse” sources 10 books and academic papers, and includes 16 pages of single-spaced image credits and licenses. I have seen Pete go on the channels of historians and archaeologists with PhDs and more than hold his own. In short, he is the real deal.
In October of 2023, Marc Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published the “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” arguing that human ingenuity has been stagnated and demoralized by regulation, and that the only viable path forward for society is the accelerated development and adoption of new technologies, and specifically artificial intelligence.
Andreessen was only formalizing and articulating a position that had already gained traction among tech company executives and Twitter shitposters like @BasedBeffJezos (Andreessen crowned him a “patron saint” of techno-optimism), who adopted the label of effective accelerationists, or e/acc.
Almost two dozen repositories of research and public health data supported by the National Institutes of Health are marked for “review” under the Trump administration’s direction, and researchers and archivists say the data is at risk of being lost forever if the repositories go down.
“The problem with archiving this data is that we can’t,” Lisa Chinn, Head of Research Data Services at the University of Chicago, told 404 Media. Unlike other government datasets or web pages, downloading or otherwise archiving NIH data often requires a Data Use Agreement between a researcher institution and the agency, and those agreements are carefully administered through a disclosure risk review process.
Jason, Sam, and Emanuel talk about Miyazaki being turned into a meme, the guys suing OnlyFans after being surprised to learn they were not actually talking to models, and the depravity of "brainrot" AI.
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