Watch me on This Week in Tech!

I got to be on TWiT — This Week in Tech — with host Iain Thomson and fellow guest Emily Dreibelbis!

We had a great conversation about the The US Navy's and Starlink, Starlink in Brazil, Elon Musk and the rise of supranational oligarchs, Telegram, The Internet Archive, AI music scams, back to office policies, Apple's AI chatbot, electric cars, Intel troubles, Boeing problems, and more!!

Go here to watch, subscribe and join Club TWiT!

Steve Jobs' superyacht crashed into Ricardo Salinas' superyacht

The collision happened off the coast of Naples on July 22. Both yachts were anchored, and Salinas' yacht arrived after Jobs' yacht, and had an anchor line that was too long, allowing the boats to come into contact. (Jobs designed and commissioned the yacht, but never got to enjoy it. It's now owned by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.) The superyacht collision wasn't super bad: just a scratch that will be expensive to fix.

Scam of the moment: "obituary content mills"

A new report from the watchdog group Check My Ads explores the disturbing trend of scammers are exploiting obituary sections to run deceptive ads. These fake obituaries are used as a cover to promote various scams, including fraudulent financial schemes and malware distribution. Usually, they take real obituaries, enshittify them through AI, then publish them to lure people into seeing ads, downloading files and other shady stuff. 

Why the public mistrusts the mainstream media

New research finds that, in general, people trust journalists who agree with false claims, and distrust journalists who show that false claims are false. 

From the abstract

"Do people trust journalists who provide fact-checks? Building upon research on negativity bias, two studies support the hypothesis that people generally trust journalists when they confirm claims as true, but are relatively distrusting of journalists when they correct false claims." 

The research also solves the mystery of why so many people distrust fact-checking sites: It's because they debunk false claims. Read all about it.

I found an AirTag missing for a year

I use a lot of AirTags. One of them, located (I believed) at my son's house in Silicon Valley, only checked in to the network every once in a while. When I would go to find the physical tag, it couldn't be found on the network. But then, when I would be in Europe or somewhere, it would randomly check in to tell me the battery was low. A few months ago, I tried to find it using the "Directions" feature of Find My, only to have it lead me down the street. I thought it was hallucinating. 

But today, I saw that it recently popped up on the network, so I used the directions app to track it. Again, the app led me down the street, then across the street. I used the "Play Sound" feature to make the AirTag beep. And I found it! It was half buried in leaves where it had been exposed to the elements for a year. 

How did it get there? Well, the best guess is that neighborhood kids were playing with it — kids whose family moved out of the neighborhood nine months ago. 

AI washing: Silicon Valley’s big new lie

The AI-washing phenomenon is built on delusion. It’s built on the delusion that people want machines creating and controlling everything, which they don’t. It’s based on the delusion that adding AI to something automatically improves it, which it doesn’t. And it’s based on the delusion that employing people represents a failure of technology, which it doesn’t.

I think I speak for all of us in the technology industry, the technology customer community, and the tech press when I say to Silicon Valley: Stop gaslighting everybody about AI. 

Read my column at Computerworld.com.

The AI robots are watching... and learning

Humans are cultural animals, which means that we learn from each other and pass that knowledge on to others. Acquiring skills — from folding laundry to cooking to boxing — involves a teacher explaining while demonstrating. We learn by observing others.

Thanks to generative AI, robots are also gaining the ability to learn the way humans do — by watching YouTube videos. Read all about it on my MACHINE SOCIETY newsletter