The internet is real life now. “Have you spoken to a normal person recently? They aren’t actually normal anymore. Nobody is. In all aspects of American life, the internet is upstream of everything else. Sooner or later (and, more often […]
Peptides are going legal. “Whenever a government tries to ban something people actually want, the same sequence of events plays out every time.” Max Marchione argues the FDA’s peptide crackdown mostly pushed supply into sketchier channels, and that the reversal […]
The worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do. “We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; you throw those pitches into the dirt; we’ll win the bets and give you some money.” Thompson’s point is that modern gambling […]
AI-generated ads win, as long as users don’t know. “Across studies, we find that genAI-created ads consistently outperform both human-and genAI-modified ads, increasing click-through rates by up to 19% in field settings.” Visual generative AI shows more promise in creating […]
Armpit thumbnails win. “if the thumbnail showed the woman’s armpit that the views would oftentimes 5-10x” A guy ran A/B tests on AI UGC ads and ended up with a weird theory about exposed body language and clicks. ~ learn […]
Not a page builder. Bookmarking for the next time I moonlight as a web designer. “Section Store adds sections directly to your existing theme, so you can keep working in Shopify’s native editor.” It’s a marketplace of 700+ Shopify theme […]
Does Amazon illegally price fix? “Yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed for an immediate halt to what he says is a widespread price-fixing scheme run by the largest online retailer in America, Amazon.” The piece argues Amazon leverages the […]
AI customer service on United. “haha no ma’am but I get that a lot” Grace called United after a snowstorm cancellation and got rebooked in about 20 minutes by a voice that sounded very AI, down to doing a quick […]
Ring just showed the surveillance future. “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.” Amazon pitched “Search Party” as lost-dog reunions, but the ad also made […]
China’s doing more on AI disclosure, but also not that much. “China is essentially the only major country to enact a preemptive, upstream requirement that all AI-generated video be labeled, watermarked, and traceable across the stack.” The piece explains why […]