SBS News: The ‘harmful’ online rabbit hole finding teens within minutes Australian activist Chanel Contos is telling the National Press Club that major social platforms’ algorithmic feeds expose young people to misogynistic content. Teen boys are shown content that blames women and glorifies male dominance within 25 minutes of signing up, and Contos is calling on the government […]
links: 01.09.2026
Sveriges Radio: TikTok and Meta paid by racist account to promote posts A Sveriges Radio P3 News investigation found that openly Nazi and far-right accounts operate freely on TikTok despite violating both EU law and the platform’s own rules. Reporters found the accounts behind them were able to buy paid ads from both TikTok and Meta. TikTok’s Nordic […]
links: 04.08.2026
SBS News: ‘Unfounded and premature’: Why experts say parents shouldn’t panic about screen time A new international study following more than 3,000 children since 2009 found no link between screen-time duration and developmental difficulties at age five or ten. Australian experts note that worries about an “iPad baby” generation may be both unfounded and premature — the study […]
links: 03.08.2026
The New York Times: What Are Companies Getting for All That A.I. Spending? The New York Times reports on a new field of economics — “tokenomics” — that studies what companies are actually paying for AI use and what they’re getting for it. There’s still no standard way to compare cost and value, so some firms are inventing […]
links: 30.07.2026
TechCrunch: Microsoft logs $3.2B from Anthropic investment, but OpenAI was a mixed bag TechCrunch reports that Microsoft booked a $3.2 billion gain on its Anthropic investments for the quarter, while writing down its OpenAI stake by about $600 million over the same period. A single quarter of Anthropic gains nearly matched a full year of OpenAI gains, which […]
links: 29.07.2026
Axios: Anthropic’s lonely island Axios writes that Anthropic, guided by its company values and principles, has become something of a rare bird. It was the only major AI lab not to sign the Nvidia-led letter against restricting open-weight models, the Pentagon blacklisted it in February, and this summer export controls forced its newest models offline for almost three […]
links: 30.06.2026
Wired: How Hunter Biden Won the Internet Wired spent months talking to Hunter Biden — the son of a former US president — about his return to public life. For three years he stayed silent and painted in a Malibu garage, but in May, after nearly a decade away, he began posting on X again and gained more […]
links: 26.06.2026
The New York Times: Climate Change Fueling Europe’s Ferocious Heat Wave, Scientists Find A rapid scientific analysis concludes that this June’s scorching heat in Western Europe would not have been possible without human-caused climate change. Even in today’s climate, a heat wave this widespread and intense is still rare for June — with a less than 1% chance […]
links: 24.06.2026
Wired: The ‘Parasite of Parasites’ Has Been Discovered in the Tropical Forests of Borneo In the rainforests of Borneo, Malaysian scientists have identified a new fungal species, Pleurocordyceps cornusynnemata — a parasite that feeds on another parasite. Its victim is the so-called zombie fungus (Ophiocordyceps), which infects ants, hijacks their nervous system and drives them to spread its […]
links: 21.06.2026
LSM: Turning all of Pārdaugava into one big Victory Square? An interview with researcher Skaidrīte Lasmane Skaidrīte Lasmane — an emeritus professor, philosopher and historian at the University of Latvia — discusses the history of Riga’s Victory Square (Uzvaras laukums) and the grandiose construction planned under Kārlis Ulmanis, which was deliberately turned into a nationwide volunteer effort, a […]