Trump reportedly complained to Bezos about Amazon’s tariff plan

President Donald Trump called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to complain after a Punchbowl News report suggested the online marketplace planned on displaying the cost of tariffs next to product prices. White House officials told CNN that Trump called Bezos “shortly after” receiving information about the report. Before Amazon publicly commented on the report, White House…

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Reddit bans researchers who used AI bots to manipulate commenters

Commenters on the popular subreddit r/changemymind found out last weekend that they’ve been majorly duped for months. University of Zurich researchers set out to “investigate the persuasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural online environments” by unleashing bots pretending to be a trauma counselor, a “Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter,” and a…

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Amazon has no choice but to display tariffs on prices now

Here’s some dumb stuff that just happened: Punchbowl News, a new-ish DC publication which has an excellent record of political scoops but hasn’t done much tech reporting, published a single-sourced rumor that Amazon would soon begin showing tariffs next to prices. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked about this at a White House briefing. White…

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Google’s AI podcast maker is now available in over 50 languages

Audio Overviews, the AI tool that turns your research into podcast-like conversations in Google’s NotebookLM app, is expanding beyond English. Now you can generate and listen to Audio Overviews in more than 50 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Hindi, Turkish, Korean, and Chinese. You switch to a different language by heading to NotebookLM, selecting your…

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The Slate Truck is a whole new kind of car

The generally accepted way to launch your new car company is by building something fancy and expensive. Call it Founder’s Edition or name it after a precious metal, hope people pay for the privilege of exclusivity, and go from there. Slate Auto is doing… the opposite. The three-year-old company just announced its first vehicle, and…

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Whatever happened to the Kids Online Safety Act?

2024 was shaping up to be the year Congress regulated how kids engage with social media, particularly through one bill, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). A debate about its risks to free expression still raged, but the voices of the bill’s advocates seemed to ring loudest in senators’ ears. The momentum was there. The…

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MAGA’s next wave of influencers saved TikTok

The death knell for American TikTok should have been on March 13th, 2024, when Congress voted on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis to force its parent company to sell the app or face an outright ban. Rarely do you ever see Republicans and Democrats in agreement over anything, but both sides saw the app as a…

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