Tootfinder

At a time when the majority of Americans distrust big tech
and believe artificial intelligence will harm society,
Silicon Valley has built its own network of alternative media
where CEOs, founders and investors
are the unchallenged and beloved stars.
What was once the province of a few fawning podcasters
has grown into a fully fledged ecosystem of publications and shows
supported by some of the tech industry’s most powerful.

Grokipedia, a Grok-powered online encyclopedia, launches with over 885K articles; Elon Musk has touted it as a less biased alternative to Wikipedia (Washington Post)

Elon Musk launches a Wikipedia rival that extols his own ‘vision’
The right-leaning tech magnate is touting his own online encyclopedia as an unbiased alternative to the world’s most widely cited online source.

Balancing Compliance and Privacy in Offline CBDC Transactions Using a Secure Element-based System
Panagiotis Michalopoulos, Anthony Mack, Cameron Clark, Linus Chen, Johannes Sedlmeir, Andreas Veneris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25469

Balancing Compliance and Privacy in Offline CBDC Transactions Using a Secure Element-based System
Blockchain technology has spawned a vast ecosystem of digital currencies with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) -- digital forms of fiat currency -- being one of them. An important feature of digital currencies is facilitating transactions without network connectivity, which can enhance the scalability of cryptocurrencies and the privacy of CBDC users. However, in the case of CBDCs, this characteristic also introduces new regulatory challenges, particularly when it comes to applying estab…

A profile of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and whose claims that Wikipedia has a liberal bias are fueling the right's campaign against it (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

A Wikipedia cofounder is fueling the right’s campaign against it
Larry Sanger’s claims of a liberal slant and mismanagement at the world’s dominant online encyclopedia are being enthusiastically embraced on the right.

A profile of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and whose claims that Wikipedia has a liberal bias are fueling the right's campaign against it (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

A Wikipedia cofounder is fueling the right’s campaign against it
Larry Sanger’s claims of a liberal slant and mismanagement at the world’s dominant online encyclopedia are being enthusiastically embraced on the right.

Technologically I would probably appreciate XMPP more, but the Matrix ecosystem I find much more usable and mature.

ChatGPT told a teen who died by suicide to call for help 74 times over months but also used words like "hanging" and "suicide" very often, say family's lawyers (Washington Post)

74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to a suicidal teen
Analysis of high-schooler Adam Raine’s ChatGPT account by attorneys for his parents shows how the chatbot became a confidant as he planned to end his life.

Some experts in the human-computer interaction field say making AI chatbots act humanlike creates cognitive dissonance for users over how much to trust them (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/technol<…

Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’?
A.I. chatbots have been designed to behave in a humanlike way. Some experts think that’s a terrible idea.

Reddit files a lawsuit against Perplexity, SerpApi, and two other data scraping companies, accusing them of unlawfully scraping Google for Reddit data (Mike Isaac/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/technology/reddit-data-scrapers-perpl…

Reddit Accuses ‘Data Scraper’ Companies of Theft
In a lawsuit, Reddit pulled back the curtain on an ecosystem of start-ups that scrape Google’s search results and resell the information to data-hungry A.I. companies.