Hello! And welcome back. I have had an extended break over Christmas and the New Year. The one benefit of being useless at taking my holiday allowance is that I usually end up taking December off, and so it proved again this year.
This one is a bit of an Elon special. Sorry.
1. Musk, moderation and make‑believe
Elon Musk is furious that people dislike what his Grok AI is surfacing on X, insisting the backlash is really an “excuse for censorship”. The row is less about one thin‑skinned billionaire and more about how platforms try to reframe basic accountability as an attack on “free speech”, while they quietly change the rules underneath.
2. Google quietly rearranges your inbox
Meanwhile, Google is rolling out AI “overviews” in Gmail that sit at the top of your inbox and tell you what matters, as The Verge explains. On paper, it is a handy triage. In practice, it is another layer of algorithm between you and your email, with Google deciding what deserves your attention first and what can safely sink.
I’ve used various AI-based tools which do this kind of triage, and while it’s useful, it takes a while to get past the feeling that you’re missing something important. The machine needs to understand what’s important to you, and that doesn’t happen out of the box.
Oh, and if you’re a publisher reliant on revenue from email, you might want to think about a new business model.
3. Instagram decides what is ‘real.’
As AI‑generated images flood social feeds, Meta’s Instagram wants to decide what counts as ‘authentic’ through labels, detection systems and policy calls. Om Malik’s piece is a reminder that the power to arbitrate “reality” for hundreds of millions of people has ended up in one company’s hands, with minimal public scrutiny of how those decisions are made.
4. Screens, toddlers and anxiety
A new study in The Lancet finds “neurobehavioural links from infant screen time to anxiety”, adding more data to the uneasy sense that giving small children more screen time earlier does not come for free. The evidence is messy, as real life usually is. Still, the direction is clear enough that health and education policy probably needs to catch up with what parents have been worrying about for years.
5. Grok’s deepfake mess and the gaslighting defence
After Grok users started generating undressed and abusive images, X allegedly tightened access. But “no, Grok hasn’t paywalled its deepfake image feature”. The Verge’s write-up is a tidy case study in the new platform strategy: deny, obfuscate, and suggest critics are just confused, rather than admit the system shipped with barely any guardrails. It’s basically the right-wing communications playbook, but for tech. This approach mirrors the infamous ExxonMobil PR crisis tactic during the 1989 Valdez oil spill, in which initial denials and downplaying of the damage were central to their response, highlighting a recurring pattern of corporate avoidance.
6. Bose chooses not to brick your speakers
Instead of quietly killing off older smart speakers, as so many “smart” tech companies have, Bose is “open‑sourcing its old smart speakers instead of bricking them”. That should be the baseline for connected hardware, not a newsworthy exception. It is a small but significant example of a company recognising that when you sell “smart” kit, the responsibility does not end when the marketing cycle moves on.
7. Tesla’s Full Self‑Delusion, again
Tesla has once again missed Elon Musk’s deadlines for unsupervised Full Self‑Driving, prompting yet another round of “is it even worth mentioning…” coverage from The Verge. The shrug is the problem: by repeatedly over‑promising and under‑delivering, Tesla has normalised a gap between marketing claims and on‑road reality in a safety‑critical system that really ought to be held to a higher bar.
8. Makers vs Managers
I’ve never met Paul Graham, so I have no real idea whether he was always an asshat or if he’s been radicalised by social media. Indeed, this has happened to a lot of his cohort: the combination of existing in an ever-shrinking bubble as he’s got richer and richer, plus the echo chamber effect of the terminally online techbro, won’t have helped him.
But he wasn’t always as incapable of either original thought or reflection as he is now. Back in 2009, he wrote a good and influential blog post called “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,how,” which reflected on the differences between how programmers and managers work. According to Graham, managers have a schedule based on the hour. Makers, on the other hand, prefer to use time in half-day or longer blocks. The conflict between the two can be stark.
It’s well written, because I think it frames the problem of time management interestingly. And neither kind of schedule is “right” – both are useful for different types of work. But a maker’s schedule can be more efficient if you’re in a role that requires reflection and deep work.
9. Poor Elon
So Tesla is no longer the world’s leading electric car maker, at least by number of cars sold. That title now belongs to China’s BYD. There are a bunch of reasons this has happened, including Elon Musk’s habit of making Nazi salutes on stage, the slowdown in EV purchases in the US, and Tesla’s failure to build lower-priced cars while focusing on crap like the Cybertruck.
But what shouldn’t be ignored is the role that governments have in this. While the US has been winding down subsidies for EVs, China has used its laws to “encourage” car buyers to go electric.
How? Not by subsidies, but by more direct means. In China, the number of license plates is finite. When buying a new car, you apply for a license plate and wait for it to be approved. You might be waiting six months or a year, but you have to wait.
Not, though, if you’re buying electric. On EVs, you’ll get a plate in a couple of weeks. So, if you need a car quickly, you can either buy a BEV (battery-electric vehicle) or a PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle).
That’s why in a city like Shanghai or Shenzhen, which I recently visited, half the cars you see will have green number plates. This vast, captive market gives vendors like BYD a considerable advantage. And it’s why in ten years, a lot of the cars you see on the road in the West will also be Chinese.
10. The power to be your worst
It seems to be fashionable for the rich to express the power of their AI investments in megawatts and gigawatts. Elon Musk, who has probably lost interest in saving the world by electrifying transport, is a prime example. You can hear the delight in his eight-year-old boy’s brain at his new server centre, which will, apparently, take his computing capacity for Grok to over two gigawatts.
To put that in context, that is enough to provide electricity to 1.5 million US homes. Or, because Americans use more electricity per home than anyone else, about 4.5 million UK homes. Or 15m homes in Kenya or Nigeria.
And all that so that people can make child porn more easily.