Mike Masnick

Techdirt guy. Writes about social media, copyright, free speech, content moderation, civil liberties and stuff like that. Once wrote a paper that may have helped inspire this service & now I'm on its board: https://bit.ly/protocolnotplatform

Articles & links

Mike Masnick reposted
@billcorbett.bsky.social

Evil, fascist, arguably insane, but lets not leave out: really fucking dumb www.cnn.com/2026/07/02/u...

Peter Thiel: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’ by criticizing AI | CNN cnn.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Peter Thiel said Pope Leo XIV is 'working for the Chinese Communists' by calling for international AI regulation.
  • Leo's May encyclical 'Magnifica Humanitas' declared that artificial intelligence 'must be disarmed' and pressed for stronger international oversight.
  • Thiel spoke on a nonrecorded panel with political scientist Francis Fukuyama; the audience reportedly received the characterization with laughter.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky →
Mike Masnick reposted
kate conger @kateconger.com

Instagram saw all the nonconsensual imagery generated by Grok earlier this year and still decided to opt in all of its adult users to having their photos "remixed" by AI www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/t...

nytimes.com View on Bluesky →

How do you put this sentence in an article about the Trump administration literally banning a frontier model for unknown/unclear reasons? www.cnn.com/2026/06/21/t...

cnn.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 253 ↻ 29 ↩ 15 · 24d ago

Recent commentary

Another agentic coding success. There's a little utility that I've relied on for work for years, but which has gotten flakey over the last year or so. It also had code/feature bloat I didn't need. Used claude code (fable 5) to see if I could recreate it in a way that worked for me and... bam. Works.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 299 ↻ 11 ↩ 14 · 10d ago

*sigh* Another day where I finish writing an article, begin the edit, and spot a "it's not x, it's y" rhetorical point and cringe, because it sounds like an LLM, even though it's straight from my brain. *sigh*

View on Bluesky · ♥ 179 ↻ 3 ↩ 19 · 63d ago

Meanwhile, have spent my Friday night & Saturday getting my agentic setup to mostly use local models (Gemma 4 31B and Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B) to see if I can manage much more of my inference locally... Just testing so far... but... um, local models are really good these days.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 84 ↻ 6 ↩ 13 · 47d ago

So each time I try to use up the Fable 5 allotment before @anthropic.com pulls it out of the subscription plans... and then right before the deadline they say that it'll stay in the plan for a few more days...? I'm happy to still have access (Fable 5 is great), but a bit annoying for planning.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 60 ↻ 0 ↩ 7 · 4d ago

Okay, on the latest #taskmaster @alexhorne.bsky.social holds up this puzzle, telling people to solve it before continuing the show. I gave up after about 10 minutes, but for fun... I gave it to Claude, Gemini, & ChatGPT... Only one of them figured it out.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 43 ↻ 2 ↩ 12 · 56d ago

Random fun use of agentic coding: there's a stupid silly card game that I sometimes play on my phone as a time waster. There are a bunch of versions available but all have incredibly intrusive and annoying ads and or tracking. I even looked to see if there was a version I could pay a couple bucks...

View on Bluesky · ♥ 49 ↻ 3 ↩ 4 · 33d ago

My AI editing tool mumbling to itself as it reviews my latest...

View on Bluesky · ♥ 48 ↻ 1 ↩ 4 · 3h ago

In my home grown writing tool I added a writing activity tracker, a la the Github code contribution tracker, but just let the AI determine the thresholds, which were so low that basically any time I wrote, it would show up as the darkest version. Finally looked at the thresholds & 900 words was top.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 2d ago

In Mike Masnick's orbit

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