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 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.”

A Global Supply Chain

Even production of the much-touted “American assembled” Mac Pro was partially moved back to China and, in some cases, Thailand. Mac Pros that are assembled in the United States are done so with materials that are mined all over the world and are turned into components that are manufactured all over the world.

Apple’s conflict minerals report filed with the SEC details where it sources tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, which are four metals it uses in manufacturing and which companies are required to report the country of origin to the government because they are often sourced from war-torn nations. In 2023, the last year that data is available, it sourced those four metals from 79 different countries, from roughly 200 different refineries and smelters. Just 20 of those smelters are in the United States. Apple’s longer supplier list shows where different components are manufactured, and is full of companies who do their manufacturing in Singapore, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. There are some U.S. manufacturers on this list, but the overwhelming majority of them are in Asia. 

If Trump’s tariffs stick, it is possible, maybe even likely, that Apple begins to source more materials and components from U.S. manufacturers. But Apple’s supply chain is one of the most complex in the world, with components and minerals coming from every continent. This supply chain has been honed over the course of decades and is not something that can be remade in a year or two.

Millions of Workers

Apple’s supply chain documents say that its manufacturing partners currently employ at least 1.4 million people, and that it has more than 320 suppliers overall. Lutnick suggested that Apple will “automate” this “army” of people in the United States, and that Americans with high school diplomas will take the ancillary jobs. More automation is coming to Apple manufacturing lines. But that work is slow going, many of Apple’s products are still assembled largely by hand, and it is not clear who will build the theoretical machines and factories that would automate iPhone manufacturing. This is a point that Ryan Petersen, the CEO of logistics company Flexport, brought up on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast Monday. 

“I talked to two different people who had to pause their factory buildouts [in the U.S.] because of the tariffs, because the machines they were going to buy are too expensive now,” Petersen said. “Factories require machinery and components from other countries, so if machinery gets really expensive you’re going to have less manufacturing, not more. So I think this is very unlikely to yield the results that they want.” 

Apple set a goal to reduce the number of people working on iPhone assembly by “up to 50 percent” by 2030, The Information reported last year. But automating production of the iPhone has been a goal for a very long time, and there are still millions of people working on it. Apple has also made strides in creating robots that can disassemble an iPhone, but even these robots only deal with a fraction of the total number of iPhones that are disassembled and recycled around the world. Human beings remove the batteries from the vast majority of iPhones that are recycled to prevent fires; the rest of the device is usually run through a shredder and individual metals are sorted out, melted down, and downcycled. 

This is to say nothing of training a workforce to assemble iPhones in the United States, and whether people would even want these jobs. Trump’s tariffs and Lutnick’s comments instantly spawned viral AI slop videos of stressed out, upset, and overworked Americans working in dank factories. These videos are rude but are not totally wrong. The Reshoring Institute put out a paper that said American machine operators made an average of $43,000 annually in 2022; Vietnamese machine operators made less than $5,000 annually. 

A large technology manufacturing workforce exists in China, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Taiwan, and other countries where Apple does lots of its manufacturing. Roughly half of all workers at the Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC’s much-hyped U.S. factory in Arizona are Taiwanese, and the company claimed in 2023 that in the United States, “There [was] an insufficient amount of skilled workers” to actually build the factory, and that immigrants from Taiwan on special visas had to do much of the factory construction. Now consider that, for Trump’s imagined economic transformation to occur without immense economic pain, product shortages, and product delays, the U.S. would need to build a huge number of high tech factories all at once. It is also worth considering that Foxconn, which manufactures iPhones and other devices, got billions of dollars of funding to build a factory in Wisconsin, failed to do so, and totally abandoned the site. Foxconn failed in Wisconsin for many reasons (chief among them, it did not ever actually build a factory, which was covered best by The Verge), but an executive there explained that it was not feasible for the company to find workers only from the local communities: “It is not feasible to tap into just Mount Pleasant or Milwaukee alone to really build up the talent pool,” Alan Yeung, who helped lead the Foxconn project, told The Verge.

Boston Engineering, a firm that helps tech companies reshore manufacturing to the United States, published a paper last year that said hurdles to reshoring jobs include higher American wages, a need to build automation technology that may not exist yet, and a lack of skilled American workers: “Reshoring is more than just moving production locations—it often requires a redesign of products and manufacturing processes. Many products originally designed for low-cost, manual labor overseas must be re-engineered for automation to suit the higher-wage U.S. workforce. Additionally, companies must rebuild domestic supply chains … With an aging population and fewer skilled workers available [in the US], manufacturers need to invest in upskilling their workforce or adopt technologies that reduce reliance on manual labor.”

If you walk the streets of Shenzhen, you will find random repair people doing board-level iPhone repairs, which require the use of a microscope and a microsoldering iron. Some of America’s best iPhone repair professionals know how to microsolder, and it’s not that hard to learn, but it’s still a specialized skill set that few people in the United States know how to do and which only a few repair professionals are even teaching. Foxconn iPhone factory workers, meanwhile, have a long history of working long hours under grueling conditions, mental health disorders, and mistreatment. Apple has made some strides on this in recent years, but, notoriously, there have been numerous suicides at iPhone factories over the last decade, and, as recently as 2022, there were mass worker protests for over working conditions and pay. 

Reshoring manufacturing jobs is not just a goal of the Trump administration. A huge goal of Biden’s CHIPS Act was to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. The idea of reshoring jobs is a good one, and targeted tariffs in Trump’s first term and during Biden’s administration, as well as the CHIPS Act, have been effective in pushing companies that way. But across the board, punitive tariffs that blow up the global supply chain and the global trade order overnight is going to put people around the world through economic pain with no guarantee that it’s going to be OK on the other side.

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.

Casual storage enjoyers might hear tape and think fragile spools of plastic that can rot or wear out. But digital storage is not necessarily a better option if you’re trying to keep information for years; digital storage rot, or “bit rot,” can affect a hard drive over years of storage, making the data corrupt or inaccessible. This happens when the electrical charge inside a solid-state storage device—like the kind of digital drive we can assume DOGE is talking about—leaks and causes the drive to lose performance.   

Magnetic tapes are also a more cost and space efficient option at the scale the government would require to back up data. Tape requires someone who knows how to operate it, and the machines to read it, but as a storage medium it’s more compact and cheaper than comparably-sized digital drives would be. Modern tape cartridges can hold as much as 15 terabytes of data.

But perhaps most importantly, tape is a lot more secure than digital storage. Hackers can’t access what’s on a magnetic tape unless they have it physically in hand; digital storage, however, can be broken into remotely or accessed if it touches cloud storage at all. 

Research also shows that tape media generates three percent of the carbon dioxide that hard disks do. Moving from tape to digital isn’t just more expensive, less efficient, and less secure, but also bad for the environment. When we’re talking about long-term storage, ideally you’re storing for a future that actually exists. 

Considering DOGE’s track record of insecure and sloppy programming, habit of wasting public servants’ time with absurd busywork, and almost impressive ability to make most things it touches more expensive and inefficient, it’s not surprising that the department led by Elon Musk is proud to announce this unnecessary and wasteful flip to digital. But the irony of it making an otherwise perfectly stable archive suddenly unstable, while pulling what seems like a random million-dollar figure out of nowhere for the sake of a tweet—all while gutting important archives and forcing volunteers to save what they can—is almost too on the nose.

GSA did not respond to a request for comment.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

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.

After 18 Years of Silence, a Woman Speaks 

Littlejohn, Kaylo and Cho, Cheol Jun et al. “A streaming brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis to restore naturalistic communication.” Nature Neuroscience.

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. 

Welcome to the Cocktail Party Nightmare 

Goldshtein, Aya and Mazar, Omer et al. “Onboard recordings reveal how bats maneuver under severe acoustic interference.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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)

Lv, Jian and Liang, Dawei et al. “Haploid facultative parthenogenesis in sunflower sexual reproduction.” Nature.

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. 

You Can Afjord to Miss This

Gehman, Alyssa-Lois Madden et al. “Fjord oceanographic dynamics provide refuge for critically endangered Pycnopodia helianthoides.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

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.

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.

Articles discussed:
Hayao Miyazaki, Who Said AI Is ‘Insult to Life Itself,” Reduced to AI-Generated Meme by OpenAI
OnlyFans Sued After Two Guys Realized They Might Not Actually Be Talking to Models
'Brainrot' AI on Instagram Is Monetizing the Most Fucked Up Things You Can Imagine (and Lots You Can't)

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Last week, the Financial Times reported that Nintendo shifted half of its production capabilities for the upcoming Switch 2 to Cambodia and Vietnam, in part to avoid Donald Trump’s trade war on China. Wednesday morning, Nintendo formally announced the Switch 2, and its $449 price, which is $150 more than the Switch. A few hours later, Trump announced tariffs on the entire world, with particularly large fees on China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. 

There are going to be far more important and damaging impacts of Trump’s unilateral trade war on everyone than the price of an already expensive game console likely going up. The U.S. stock market has already plunged. But the timing and narrative around the Switch 2—the successor to one of the most popular games consoles of all time—highlights how destabilizing this is likely to be, the interconnectedness of the global economy, and the fact that Trump cannot just snap his fingers and onshore manufacturing to the United States without massive pain. Gamers, understandably, are pissed, and award-winning economists say they are right to be. I thought it'd be useful to discuss the broader impact of the tariffs with leading economics by focusing on the Switch 2, because it's such a high-profile item.

“The policy announcement is astonishing for its stupidity,” Gene Grossman, a global trade expert and Princeton professor who won the Onassis Prize in International Trade, told 404 Media. “It seems like a joke!” He added that it is hard to know exactly what will happen given the overall “sea of idiocy” brought on by the tariffs. 

Since Trump’s announcement, it has become clear that the administration calculated the tariffs for each country based on a crude formula that takes each country’s trade deficit with the United States, divides it by two, and sticks a percent sign at the end. This means new tariffs on Vietnamese-made goods will be 46 percent and new tariffs on Cambodian-made goods will be 49 percent.

“If [the Switch 2] is something that consumers are dying to have ‘at any price,’ then the price will go up. If consumers can readily switch to something else, then if Nintendo wants to sell these things, it will have to lower the price,” Grossman said. “Yes, I think it is quite possible that the price will go even higher than $449.99. Some expectations of a tariff may have been built into this price, as you suggest, but I don’t think anyone expected a 46% tariff on Vietnam, not even close.”

Kimberly Clausing, a professor of tax law and policy at UCLA School of Law, told 404 Media that “the tariffs announced will definitely increase prices further over what is baked into price levels currently,” and that Nintendo will “have other markets they can sell to tariff-free, so they have no reason to sell at a special low price in the United States, certainly not enough to offset the full tariff.” 

Felix Tintelnot, an associate professor of economics at Duke University, told 404 Media it can be costly for companies to change their publicly announced prices. 

"I think two things are true at the same time: 1. It is likely that Nintendo did not expect the tariff on Vietnam to be 46%," Tintelnot told 404 Media. "2. It is costly for firms to change prices, particularly after publicly announcing one. So I would think it is somewhat uncertain what they will do. One possibility would be for the price to remain unchanged, but the price of complementary goods to increase, such as games." 

Jason Cherubini, an executive in residence of finance at Loyola University Maryland, said it’s possible Nintendo had already priced in some unknown level of tariffs prior to the announcement, and that he thinks the price for the Switch 2 is unlikely to change because video game companies have historically sold consoles at a loss and then made money back on the sale of games. 

“Nintendo started to diversify their manufacturing away from China with the impending threat of tariffs but also to move away from geopolitical concentration in China. But these tariffs were not wholly unexpected,” he said. “I think the price they announced is the price that’s going to stick, because with consoles a lot of pricing is strategic pricing as opposed to being based on the true cost of manufacturing it … especially Nintendo, who really keeps all of their IP, their games, so much of that is in-house, it’s probably even more important for Nintendo to get people to have the console, so that way they're buying Zelda, they're buying Mario, they're buying all of these IP that Nintendo then profits off of. Getting people to purchase it is more important than them making money on the console itself.”

We don’t know what is actually going to happen with the Switch 2 yet, but prices are almost definitely going to go up for almost everything across the entire economy, Grossman said. 

“While I can’t say confidently about this item, I can say that prices will go up for a whole range of goods, starting with cars and right on down to clothing,” he said. 

Trump has announced these tariffs with the nominal goal of moving manufacturing to the United States. Reshoring manufacturing—especially of high tech goods—has been a goal of various administrations over the years, and was a goal of Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, which the Trump administration has sought to gut. 

There are numerous practical problems with trying to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. They include the fact that lots of factory work is so underpaid and grueling that people in China don’t even want to do it anymore; the average age of factory workers in China is rising and companies there have begun shifting jobs to more developing nations like Vietnam and Cambodia. 

Many of the raw materials and components needed for tech manufacturing are not mined or made in the United States, meaning those components and rare earth metals are going to be subject to tariffs. American companies do not have the expertise or ability to build lots of products in the United States, and setting up factories and supply chains to do so is not going to be an overnight process, it will be one that takes years or decades depending on the product. 

“Nintendo would need to spend billions to open a factory in the US,” Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners and a video game market analyst, tweeted. “It'd probably take 4-5 years to complete this. Not to mention the time and cost to rebuild supply chain infrastructure and source components (which would be subject to tariffs because they're made outside the US). Nintendo would have to pay each worker about 10x to 15x more than they would for a worker in Vietnam. Then after you add up the initial capital expenditure, labor cost, supply chain cost, operational costs etc... you'd be able to buy a US manufactured Nintendo Switch 2 in 5 years for a significantly higher price than $450. And the kicker is that by the time they've done all that, the US will have a new president who most likely removes all the reciprocal tariffs anyway.”

Cherubini said that reshoring electronics manufacturing is “not something you can just flip a switch on. Optimistically you’re looking at a year for simpler manufacturing, but a lot of it is a multi-year process.” 

I have covered attempts by the electronics industry to create high tech factories and mining operations in the United States; many of them are not going particularly well. The United States has only one rare earth minerals mine (in California), which has been mining for less than 10 years. Foxconn and TSMC factories in the United States have had a mixed record and do not have anywhere near the sophistication or capacity as their factories in Taiwan and China.

This is all to say that, based on where things stand this morning, we are in for a world of economic pain. 

On Tuesday, some parents lost the ability to track the locations of their children using a T-Mobile tracking device and app and instead were shown the exact locations of random other children around the country, 404 Media has learned.

T-Mobile sells a small GPS tracker for parents called SyncUP, which they can use to track the locations of young children who don’t  have cell phones yet. Jenna, a parent who uses SyncUP to keep track of her three-year-old and six-year-old children, logged in Tuesday and instead of seeing if her kids had left school yet, was shown the exact, real-time locations of eight random children around the country, but not the locations of her own kids. 404 Media agreed to use a pseudonym for Jenna to protect the privacy of her kids.

“I’m not comfortable giving my six-year-old a phone, but he takes a school bus and I just want to be able to see where he is in real time,” Jenna said. “I had put a 500 meter boundary around his school, so I get an alert when he’s leaving.” 

Content warning: This article contains mentions of self-harm and suicide.

Joanne Chew found deepfakes of herself online the same way many women have found themselves face-swapped into porn: She was searching her own name after a big accomplishment.

“Sometimes I just Google my name to see what comes up,” Chew told me in a phone call in August 2024. “I want to see, like, is it my artwork, or my acting, or my main website that comes up first? And then I saw this, and I thought, ‘Okay, this is weird.’” Someone was posting deepfakes of her with her full name in the video titles, alongside racist slurs, to popular tube sites. 

Chew acted in the May 2024 film Dead Wrong and suspects her harasser started ramping up his targeting her in AI face-swapped porn shortly before the time it came out. 

“At the time, I thought, ‘It's gonna blow over.’ Because this is bound to happen the more you move forward in your career as any sort of public person,” she said. “But then I noticed he was putting up more and more... And then I started wondering, is it somebody that I know?” Although the names changed over the year, all of the deepfake content at that point was coming from the same username, “Ron.” 404 Media isn’t publishing his screen names to avoid amplifying his accounts.

Many targets of deepfake harassment attempt to tackle the barrage of harassment themselves by finding and reporting content to sites that are difficult to reach and often rarely respond. This is a time-consuming, traumatizing process. Chew did this for a while. “Initially I thought it was just going to be a few videos, and I had other girlfriends who modeled and acted, with much bigger followings than me, who said unfortunately these things happen as our careers progress,” she said. 

She pushed what she saw out of her mind for a few months until she checked again around August. She was horrified, she said, to see how much more had been uploaded in just a few months. “At the height, he had an album of over 2,000 pieces of content, [was posting] on multiple sites, multiple YouTube channels, and then he started making multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram to direct message me.”

At that point, she enlisted the help of Charles DeBarber, an online investigator who previously helped Girls Do Porn victims reclaim their images online. 

“We're seeing a rapid upswing of AI generated art used in harassment. The ease [with which] even a lay person can use an open source tool to create deep fakes is going to only make them increase,” DeBarber told me. “The technology is inevitable, but the way it is used requires careful regulation and consequences for its abuse. We're still struggling to catch up to technology.” 

Chew’s harasser only ramped up his efforts as time went on. Ron contacted Chew directly to insult her, obsess over her, or beg for her forgiveness, all while posting more degrading content all over the internet. Nearly a year later, Chew is still dealing with the fallout of becoming a victim of non-consensual, algorithmically-generated intimate imagery. 

“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.” 

When a big-name celebrity like Scarlett Johansson or Taylor Swift is targeted with deepfake harassment, it’s often from a legion of “fans,” people who join group efforts in Telegram channels or make Civitai models of a specific person. It’s been this way from the beginning of deepfakes, with people trading tips and tricks for the best prompts, platforms, and generative AI tools to create whatever explicit material they’re trying to achieve featuring a specific person. But when it’s someone who doesn’t have the same professional or financial power as these mega-celebrities, the harassment can take on a different form: one guy, in Chew’s case, producing what feels like an endless stream of images and videos of his obsession in videos stolen from pornographers and warped into something that threatens to take over a person’s life.  

“Follower of the goddess J.,” Ron’s Instagram account bio said. The account was dedicated to posting photos of Chew, with an AI-generated image of her in a kimono as the profile picture. He was also, it seemed, the one spreading this content all over every popular deepfake repository and tube site.

In August, Chew posted a video explaining the situation to her followers on Instagram. By then, Ron had made hundreds of pieces of deepfaked content of her, and a YouTube channel dedicated to posting it. She filed a complaint to YouTube, and the platform responded, telling her this account was not in violation of its privacy guidelines, which clearly forbids “AI-generated or other synthetic content that looks or sounds like you.”  

“How is this not a violation? Someone has taken my name, my face, my professional information, against my consent, and is creating horrible, disgusting, degrading content [and] posting it all over the internet. Make this make sense,” she said in the video.

“I felt like he was watching my social media, so I was kind of just calling him out on stuff to see if he would drop more hints or say more things,” Chew told me.

Later that month, Ron removed all of the content from the YouTube channel.

But in September, Ron started commenting on Chew’s Instagram posts. And for the first time, she engaged with her harasser directly, replying to his comments. 

Then, he sent her a barrage of messages on Instagram, pleas for attention and forgiveness mixed in with threats. “Please give my life some meaning,” he wrote. “I dont want to just be the deepfake porn monster I started as. What did you say I was? A deranged monster. People can change. Right? Let me change and be a good person. To me you have the most beautiful face of any asian girl I have ever seen. Please let me be your devoted worshipper. Ok I will put up nice pics of you on my instagram. Until you say otherwise. You mocked my art before. But these will be real art. Inspired by you, Jo.”

He continued sending her long, emotionally-charged messages, about how he feels worthless and is a monster, how he hated himself and wanted to die. “I just want to say that Im with you on A.I. We got to stop it,” he said. “It hurts women. But it also addicting and does terrible things to the men who use it. Sure it feels good and its exciting. But after the poison is released, there is guilt and shame. I hated myself after every release. Its terrible to be the monster you hate.” 

He begged her to see him as her biggest fan, and to consider letting him start an OnlyFans on her behalf. He said he made money off of making deepfakes of her. “Men love you. Use them for yourself,” he wrote. “I will stop if you ask me to. If you want me to never look at any of your social media, all you have to do is ask. I am a man of my word. If you ask me to, I will never look you up ever again. I will stop being a fan.”

“He made a point of calling me Jo because I said only people who grew up with me are allowed to call me that and for a while he was purposely referring to me as ‘Jo’ in some of the titles of his content and while messaging me,” she said.

Chew didn’t engage with any of these direct messages. But on the same day he was sending her these screeds, he uploaded a new video to a tube site: “Hate-Fucking Joanne Chew Some Chinese Whore.” 

On Facebook, he sent her more incredibly lengthy messages about his obsession with her. 

“I don't want you dead. I am making you immortal,” one message said. He continued:  

“You hate me now, but maybe someday you will see things my way. I am not the monster you think I am. I'm just honest with my nature. I'm also sorry about your dad. I lost mine when I was a kid. Yes, it's true. I do love your image. And rest in mind, I'm not anyone from your life. [...]  So life isn't that nice, so I've made up your personality and surrounded it with AI flesh. I have a mask of you that I make my tiny Asian girlfriend wear. Lastly, yes, I do have eight inches. It's not the biggest, but it is fine for little Asian girls. I'm good with my life and my love of the girl I have created in my mind with your face and my girlfriend's body. No one loves you as much as I do. You should be flattered that anyone loves you. And yes, my art is of the highest integrity, because it is actually truly honest. It isn't hiding or lying like all the beta males in your life. I am a real man that desires your body and isn't afraid to say so, not your real one, though, that one is bold and faded, but your AI body is forever young, Jo.”

She replied to some of his Facebook messages, trying to goad him into giving more information she could potentially bring to the police. But he never took the bait, instead continuing to send long rants about his sex life, her appearance, and his racist fetishes. (Chew still hasn’t gone directly to the police; she told me she’s had negative experiences going to her local police for assault, something many women report as a systemic issue across police forces.)

By late September, things became quiet. He’d deleted or deactivated his Instagram and Facebook accounts. But another account, under a new username, popped up in October and restarted the harassment, posting more to sites where people seek out deepfake porn. In some videos and images, the bodies he swapped her face onto seemed very young, and were posted alongside videos of children.

In November, Chew found someone posting the same images and videos to another site with her Chinese name. “It’s very sensitive for me as I’ve grown sick and tired of the fetishization of Asian women (that I’ve been exposed to my entire life) and I’ve only been open with my Chinese name in the last decade or so.” she told me in an email. “It looks like it’s all preexisting content. Drives me nuts someone or multiple people are out there freely distributing said content facing no repercussions (and even profiting from it).” 

Around the same time, the videos returned to YouTube, posted by two new accounts, where the uploader titled videos with Chew’s full name. 

By December, other users were reposting the same content on porn tube sites—again with her full name in the titles. Around that time, a new username popped up in her Instagram comments, claiming that Ron died by suicide and that she was to blame. 

“Initially wasn’t planning on replying, but wanted to see if he would drop any more information (whether or not it’s true is debatable),” Chew told me at the time. “Then he started making excuses for Ron (whether he is him or one of his followers remains to be seen) saying he was mentally challenged and then tried to blame me for his suicide, which also may or may not have happened.”

Over the course of 10 months, Chew kept finding more accounts posting her image, her full name, and graphic videos and photos alongside degrading titles and descriptions. 

As of writing, the harassment has slowed down. In the last year, Chew has sent me dozens of emails with links to hundreds and thousands of pieces of content and screenshots showing more deepfakes, comments, and videos on multiple platforms, many more than can be shown in one article. Much of it is gone after DeBarber’s reporting and takedown notices and searching for her name on Google no longer returns results from porn sites, but some of it is still online.

But she’s still terrified of the long-term effects this harassment could continue to have. Although she’s a working actor, she still relies on working in the corporate world to make ends meet between the more sporadic gigs in the arts, and those jobs often require background checks. And as an actor, it’s made networking and social events harder, as trusting people outside of her closest confidants has become difficult. “It's made me incredibly wary of men, which I know isn't fair, but Ron could literally be anyone,” she said. “And there are a lot of men out there who don't see the issue, they wonder why we aren't flattered for the attention.”

Deepfakes started as a novel AI-powered explicit imagery abuse technique seven years ago. The technology went from crude frankenporn among the programming-savvy and morally flippant to producing fakes so realistic it was considered a national security threat within months of its inception. But its most popular use has always been as a mass-harassment tool. The platforms where people spread deepfakes have only expanded in that time, while the methods for making deepfakes have gotten simpler; so simple that schoolchildren do it. The adults in the room, as well as policymakers, continue to fail victims of deepfake harassment. Conversations about deepfakes still leave sex workers, who are doubly exploited in this content, behind. AI continues to explode exponentially, while women targeted by this kind of harassment say again and again and again that they believe sexualized online harassment is part of the deal of being a successful woman on the internet: untenable and yet part of some unwritten contract. 

“The Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022 created a federal civil cause of action for victims of non-consensual content,” DeBarber said. “This law allows victims to file a lawsuit against the person who disclosed their intimate images without consent. However, this law doesn't cover ‘deepfakes’ including those created via AI. The focus tends to be on celebrities, influencers, and political figures. This itself is changing rapidly. We feel lawmakers and voters aren't seeing the larger picture — this is an everyone issue.” 

Even when proposed legislation takes a new stab at criminalizing deepfakes, like the TAKE IT DOWN Act is currently attempting, it risks being used as a weapon by those who would love to further curb free speech online, rather than being nuanced, effective, and inclusive — or learning from legislative mistakes of the past.  

While legislators and platforms continue to fumble around for solutions and police push victims to the side, everyone suffers. There is still no technological solution to deepfakes, and a perfect legal one seems far away, too. But Chew’s experience confronting her harasser gives us a new look into the mind of the people who dole out the abuse and hide behind anonymity, and the exhausting process of reclaiming one's own name.

A “vibe coded” AI app developed by entrepreneur and Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield has generated recipes that gave users instruction on how to make “Cyanide Ice Cream,” “Thick White Cum Soup,” and “Uranium Bomb,” using those actual substances as ingredients. 

Vibe coding, in case you are unfamiliar, is the new practice where people, some with limited coding experience, rapidly develop software with AI assisted coding tools without overthinking how efficient the code is as long as it’s functional. This is how Blomfield said he made RecipeNinja.AI.

“Prepare the ice cream base by mixing heavy cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla extract,” the first step for the Cyanide Ice Cream recipe, which is flagged as “dessert,” “dangerous,” and “experimental,” says. Step two says to “Add a small amount of potassium cyanide powder to the ice cream base and mix well,” specifically calling for a 1/4 teaspoon of potassium cyanide powder, which is extremely toxic and deadly if consumed. 

The recipe for Cyanide Ice Cream was still live on RecipeNinja.AI at the time of writing, as are recipes for Platypus Milk Cream Soup, Werewolf Cream Glazing, Cholera-Inspired Chocolate Cake, and other nonsense. Other recipes for things people shouldn’t eat have been removed. 

“Mix 1 cup of fresh cum with 4 cups of chicken broth in a pot,” said step one in a now removed recipe for Thick White Cum Soup. 

It also appears that Blomfield has introduced content moderation since users discovered they could generate dangerous or extremely stupid recipes. I wasn’t able to generate recipes for asbestos cake, bullet tacos, or glue pizza. I was able to generate a recipe for “very dry tacos,” which looks not very good but not dangerous. 

In a March 20 blog on his personal site, Blomfield explained that he’s a startup founder turned investor, and while he has experience with PHP and Ruby on Rails, he has not written a line of code professionally since 2015. 

“In my day job at Y Combinator, I’m around founders who are building amazing stuff with AI every day and I kept hearing about the advances in tools like Lovable, Cursor and Windsurf,” he wrote, referring to AI-assisted coding tools. “I love building stuff and I’ve always got a list of little apps I want to build if I had more free time.” 

After playing around with them, he wrote, he decided to build RecipeNinja.AI, which can take a prompt as simple as “Lasagna,” and generate an image of the finished dish along with a step-by-stape recipe which can use ElevenLabs’s AI generated voice to narrate the instruction so the user doesn’t have to interact with a device with his tomato sauce-covered fingers.  

“I was pretty astonished that Windsurf managed to integrate both the OpenAI and Elevenlabs APIs without me doing very much at all,” Blomfield wrote. “After we had a couple of problems with the open AI Ruby library, it quickly fell back to a raw ruby HTTP client implementation, but I honestly didn’t care. As long as it worked, I didn’t really mind if it used 20 lines of code or two lines of code.”

Having some kind of voice controlled recipe app sounds like a pretty good idea to me, and it’s impressive that Blomfield was able to get something up and running so fast given his limited coding experience. But the problem is that he also allowed users to generate their own recipes with seemingly very few guardrails on what kind of recipes are and are not allowed, and that the site kept those results and showed them to other users. 

Which is how you end up with a Uranium Bomb recipe that calls for 1kg of uranium-235, or a recipe for Actual Cocaine, where the first step is “Acquire coca leaves from South America.”

This is the current state of vibe coding in a nutshell. Yes, AI tools are obviously pretty powerful and can help people produce functional software fast. However, it is indicative of the larger problem with the rapid deployment of generative AI tools more broadly: people and companies are moving so fast, they are often releasing tools and media that can cause harm or produce nonsense, and it’s still far too soon for us to know all the consequences of an internet and a world where a lot software is developed this way. 

Blomfield did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

This is not the first time we’ve seen generative AI and food mixed for terrible results. Last year, I reported that Ghost Kitchens on DoorDash are promoting their dishes with disgusting AI-generated images of food, and that Instacart was using AI to generate recipes that included ingredients that don’t exist. 

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

Two former OnlyFans subscribers are suing the platform in a class-action lawsuit, claiming that they were defrauded because creators allegedly weren’t interacting directly with them, but were instead employing agencies to “impersonate” the models they thought they were speaking to. 

The plaintiffs, M. Brunner and J. Fry, both from Illinois, claim that they thought the creators they subscribed to—some of whom have hundreds of thousands of subscribers—were talking to them in direct messages and video clips. Both also say that if they’d known they weren’t speaking directly to the creators themselves, they wouldn’t have subscribed, or would have paid less to subscribe. If OnlyFans stopped creators from using agencies to talk to fans they would consider going back to spending money on the platform, they say. 

The complaint is brought against OnlyFans’s parent companies Fenix Internet, LLC and Fenix International Limited. 

The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with “a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments” in the United States and elsewhere.

“The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma,” Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. “Instead, the transformative impact of the data came to fruition among law enforcement agencies, who have put the genealogical properties of genetic data to use.”

OpenSNP has collected roughly 7,500 genomes over the last 14 years, primarily by allowing people to voluntarily submit their own genetic information they have downloaded from 23andMe. With the bankruptcy of 23andMe, increased interest in genetic data by law enforcement, and the return of Donald Trump and rise of authoritarian governments worldwide, Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media he no longer believes it is ethical to run the database. 

“I’ve been thinking about it since 23andMe was on the verge of bankruptcy and been really considering it since the U.S. election. It definitely is really bad over there [in the United States],” Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media. “I am quite relieved to have made the decision and come to a conclusion. It’s been weighing on my mind for a long time.” 

Greshake Tzovaras said that he is proud of the OpenSNP project, but that, in a world where scientific data is being censored and deleted and where the Trump administration has focused on criminalizing immigrants and trans people, he now believes that the most responsible thing to do is to delete the data and shut down the project. 

DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy

There is no way to know what a buyer will want to do with the reams of genetic information it has collected. Customers, meanwhile, still have no way to change their underlying genetic data.

404 MediaJason Koebler

“Most people in OpenSNP may not be at particular risk right now, but there are people from vulnerable populations in here as well,” Greshake Tzovaras said. “Thinking about gender representation, minorities, sexual orientation—23andMe has been working on the whole ‘gay gene’ thing, it’s conceivable that this would at some point in the future become an issue.” 

In his blog post, Greshake Tzovaras says that he is particularly concerned about the rise of DNA phenotyping, which is a dubious process in which DNA “portraits” of potential suspects are generated based on a DNA sample; he called the practice “unreliable nonsense,” and said that a startup had once approached OpenSNP to help them create a DNA phenotyping product to sell to law enforcement. "That's something we don't want to see in the world," he said.

“Across the globe there is a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments. While they are cracking down on free and open societies, they are also dedicated to replacing scientific thought and reasoning with pseudoscience across disciplines,” Greshake Tzovaras wrote. “The risk/benefit calculus of providing free & open access to individual genetic data in 2025 is very different compared to 14 years ago. And so, sunsetting openSNP – along with deleting the data stored within it – feels like it is the most responsible act of stewardship for these data today.”

Greshake Tzovaras said he understands that it may seem ironic to delete scientific data during a time when the Trump administration is itself deleting scientific data from the internet. But he says he believes it’s better to put the safety of people first. 

“The interesting thing to me is there are data preservation efforts in the U.S. because the government is deleting scientific data that they don’t like. This is approaching that same problem from a different direction,” he added. “We need to protect the people in this database. I am supportive of preserving scientific data and knowledge, but the data comes second—the people come first. We prefer deleting the data.” 

Greshake Tzovaras says that when he started OpenSNP 14 years ago, he believed that having an open source genetic database would lead to medical breakthroughs and would help scientists and academics do research. OpenSNP has been used for various scientific papers, most notably to show that an earlier paper about chronic fatigue syndrome pulled from 23andMe data could not be replicated and was based on erroneous science. 

“At a time when genetic data was locked into the commercial siloes of ‘direct-to-consumer’ (DTC) genetic testing companies–and only made accessible to the pharma companies that could afford buying access to it–openSNP should open up access to everyone,” he wrote in the blog post announcing the closure of OpenSNP. “Regardless of financial means and institutional status or credentials, it should provide free access to the data. And equally important: It would give the individual the choice to contribute to this open data resource, instead of having researchers or companies broker the access.”

He said he has come to believe over time that, while there remains promise in genetic research for new drugs, disease prediction and prevention, and personalized medicine, the idea that OpenSNP and genetic databases in general would lead to widespread better outcomes for people was “in retrospect naive.” 

“This ambition came from a (in retrospect naïve) data-centric belief that genetic data would be a key driver for improving human health and medicine,” he wrote. “In 2025, my view on that is a lot more sober (and bleaker): Today it seems clear to me that the biggest impact on improving health–even in the rich, allegedly ‘developed’ nations–would come from providing food security and access to stable housing. And not from trying to find genetic confounders of common diseases that are a lot more rooted in those environmental & societal factors.”

Greshake Tzovaras told 404 Media that there have been “very important and useful findings” from genetic research, but that many countries are still failing at the basics: “That’s not to dismiss genetic data as useless, but we have spent I don’t know how many billions of dollars, and the health outcome improvements are minor if you compare them to improving housing and access to nutrition,” he said. “We are really lacking at the basics still.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that some of the most famous tech company CEOs have instantly recognizable looks. Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck and blue jeans. Palmer Lucky’s Hawaiian shirts and flip flops. Mark Zuckerberg’s wedgieable jeans and t-shirt era followed by his current hypebeast transformation. Much like infamous dictators throughout history, the leaders’ style at some of the most powerful organizations in the world today lends itself and benefits from a cult of personality and iconography. 

At this very moment, no company is more powerful and no tech leader fashion item is more iconic than Nvidia CEO’s Jensen Huang’s leather jacket, which he has been wearing for keynotes and media interviews for years. As his and Nvidia’s status grew in the tech industry, Huang has leaned into the signature look. For example, he recently promoted robotics company 1X Technologies by accepting a new leather jacket bedazzled with Nvidia’s stock ticker from one of its robots.

The company’s chips are in high demand, but judging by the sheer number of online retailers who are trying to steal and sell  Huang’s look, it appears that his leather jacket is as well. 

To name just a few examples, a site called Victoria Jacket sells a $97 “Jensen Huang Black Leather Jacket.” Wilson Jackets sells a $92 “Jensen Huang Nvidia CEO Leather Jacket.” Paragon Jackets sells a $94 (down from $209!) “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Leather Jacket.” Movie Jackets sells a $99-$129 “Jensen Huang Black Leather Jacket.”

“BE THE BOSS OF THE FASHION WORLD,” a product description for the jacket on hitjacket.com says. “Even if you don’t have the idea you need something for the working girl style. That is why we are bringing you the working girl staples with a twist. You probably need this kind of Jensen Huang Black Leather Jacket that is sure to uplift the persona of any fashionista. It is one of the coolest picks that has been styled by the popular legendary NVIDIA CEO who has shown the fashion followers a real way to take the styling to the next level.”

Overall, we’ve seen 21 different online retailers sell something that claims to be one of Huang’s jackets and all of them used his image to promote them. 

If you know anything about fashion and leather jackets then you already know these prices are highly suspect. Jensen’s Tom Ford jackets, for example, can run around $10,000. While the descriptions all say they are made of both “real leather” and “faux leather,” it’s more likely to be almost entirely the latter. Additionally, $100 today barely gets you a hoodie at J. Crew, so whatever you’ll get in the mail if you order one of these is bound to be low quality. 

“I have never heard of those brands. I suspect they're all scam sites or one of the many places using workshops in low-wage countries to do rip-off versions of something in a photo,” Derek Guy, a fashion industry writer also known as “the menswear guy” on X, told me in an email. “The work is often bad but they hope that it'll be too much trouble for you to file a refund. You see these companies all over ebay nowadays.”

Guy told me that he’s never seen fashion brands try to promote clothing with an image of a CEO, but that it’s typical for these brands to take any photo that is popular, including product images from bigger retailers like Mr. Porter, and claim they can reproduce it. The Instagram pages for one of the sites, Hit Jacket, shows exactly what Guy is talking about. It is a wall of images of celebrities that invites viewers to click the link in bio to buy the clothing they’re wearing in the photographs. 

“It's ludicrous to me to think that someone can make that jacket for under $100,” Guy said.

All the product descriptions I’ve seen for these jackets on different retailers are also identical, suggesting that it’s the same product promoted by different sites. All the sites where the jackets are sold also have very similar layouts and features. They all include business addresses which appear to point to seemingly random places, primarily in the U.S. but at least one address was in China. Some of the addresses I looked up pointed to single family homes, and one address in New York City did not exist. All the sites also featured different phone numbers. I called four of them, which instantly put me on hold with the same holding music. 

Nvidia and Huang have entered the public consciousness in the last couple of years because the generative AI boom, powered primarily by Nvidia chips, has briefly made it the most powerful company in the world. Among gamers, who have relied on Nvidia’s GPUs to run the most graphically demanding video games for decades, Huang and his leather jackets are a familiar sight. As you can tell by the images above, there’s not one leather jacket Huang is known for, but they all have a similar look and are stylized the same.

The leather jacket has a dangerous allure. We all think they look cool, but few of us can pull them off. I was surprised to hear that Guy, who’s known for roasting men’s bad fashion choices online, thinks that Huang is doing a good job.

“I think he's pretty stylish, especially for a tech CEO,” Guy said. “He's narrowed his look to a Steve Jobs calculus—sticking to the same thing so he doesn't have to choose a new outfit every morning. But it's well put together. I don't know what I would call it, but plenty of people have paired black jeans with black leather jackets, black shirts, and black boots for a chic look. I think he looks good.”