Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

India's November 21 labor law grants legal status to millions of gig workers, but their benefits are unclear and access to social security remains elusive (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
India's November 21 labor law grants legal status to millions of gig workers, but their benefits are unclear and access to social security remains elusive  —  India has granted legal status to millions of gig and platform workers under its newly implemented labor laws, marking a milestone …

Internal memo: Amazon asks engineers to use its in-house AI coding assistant Kiro over third-party tools like Cursor, aiming to gather feedback for improvement (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Greg Bensinger / Reuters:
Internal memo: Amazon asks engineers to use its in-house AI coding assistant Kiro over third-party tools like Cursor, aiming to gather feedback for improvement  —  Amazon suggested its engineers eschew AI code generation tools from third-party companies in favor of its own …

Google is starting to bridge OpenAI's product moat, like with Gemini's "dynamic view" option, which converts a text answer into an interactive, visual output (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Google is starting to bridge OpenAI's product moat, like with Gemini's “dynamic view” option, which converts a text answer into an interactive, visual output  —  I have a simple method for my own AI rankings: product delight.  That is, when I use the various services from the players in AI …

Character.ai is cutting off access to ongoing chats for users under 18 over mental-health concerns, after adding a two-hour daily limit on October 29 (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal)

Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal:
Character.ai is cutting off access to ongoing chats for users under 18 over mental-health concerns, after adding a two-hour daily limit on October 29  —  Chatbot maker Character.AI is cutting off access, citing mental-health concerns.  Teens are distraught: ‘I cried over it for days.’

Simple Rule of Thumb: AI Systems Shouldn’t Pretend to Be Human

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.