Radiohead’s “Let Down” Charts on Billboard Hot 100 After Going Viral on TikTok
“Let Down,” a song from their seminal 1997 LP OK Computer, has charted on the Billboard Hot 100 at #91 after recently going viral on TikTok.
I love how 90s Gen Z is. They’re wearing baggy clothes and listening to the stuff us millennials and Gen Xers grew up on.
I think I’m beginning to understand how my dad felt when I started wearing tight jeans and a black t-shirt, and listening to Pink Floyd back in high school.
YouTube’s Secret AI Video Enhancements Ignite Creator Backlash:
Critics argue that such alterations erode trust, especially in an era where authenticity is paramount.
I can see a silver lining in some of this. If AI keeps getting force-integrated into everything we do on these big platforms, it’s gotta cause some kind of exodus. YouTube blew up over the years because it was a place people could upload real DIY videos of their life, or things they’re interested in.
That’s the stuff I want to see. That’s why I used to prefer YouTube over watching something on cable TV. That’s why I love the indie web: it feels like one of the few places you can still get that raw authenticity in a world where everything is becoming more phony.
Perplexity’s Comet browser naively processed pages with evil instructions
Asked to summarize the page, Comet ingested the text on the page, saw the instructions, and then exfiltrated a one-time password granting access to the user’s Perplexity account.
I can think of exactly zero reasons I’d need or want a browser with built-in AI. Bums me out that even Firefox is starting to go down this bumpy road. I’m not a doomer, I just don’t want AI everything all the time.
Google’s fight against ad blockers on YouTube enters another round:
YouTube users from all over the world are starting to see new anti-ad-blocking prompts, when they try to watch YouTube videos with enabled content blocker. This looks like an exact copy of the March 2025 attempt to get ad blocking users to disable their content blockers or subscribe to YouTube Premium.
I’m a YouTube Premium subscriber, and lately I’ve noticed the page load time has slowed down significantly. Our internet plan is 1gb/s and YouTube consistently takes a solid 10+ seconds to load. I wonder if they’re throttling because I use uBlock Origin on Firefox ESR? There’s still plenty of tracking garbage it blocks, even without the ads.
Trump has no business taking a stake in Intel
How are voters raised on the glories of “manufacturing jobs” going to feel when the government has a stake in a CEO who is firing thousands of workers?
That’s what makes me cringe the most—they’ll just rationalize it and redirect to some arbitrary figures Trump makes up. It doesn’t matter what he does. These people are in a cult, and he is their beloved leader.
Real Footage Combined With AI Slop About DC Is Creating a Disinformation Mess on TikTok
In these videos, it’s only totally clear to me that the content is fake because I found the original sources. Lots of this footage is obviously fake if you’re familiar with the actual situation in DC or familiar with the geography and streets in DC. But most people are not.
TikTok is already one of the worst places for AI-generated misinformation. It started getting flooded almost immediately after Google Veo came out. It’s like a trial run for how bad the rest of the web is about to get. 😬
Still, considering that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the anti-vaxxer in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the FDA, once ate so much tuna and perch fish that it gave him mercury poisoning, it seems unlikely that the agency is going to put that much effort into warning people not to consume potentially radioactive shrimp.
Just be sure to take your iodine tablets and you can have a little radioactive shrimp, as a treat.
UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs
But the banhammer has also driven a surge in VPN use, giving children and adults alike a way around the new digital fences. That puts VPNs firmly in the commissioner’s sights.
This just keeps getting worse. I feel like that’s the ultimate goal though; to outlaw anything that could possibly give people any kind of privacy online. How do you even enforce this? Make people submit their photo ID to a service that literally exists to preserve anonymity?
Meet the First Nicotine Energy Drink
In what can only be described as a prophetic vision, more than 15 years, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! featured a skit called Cigarette Juice, about a nicotine energy drink in 2009, at a time where cigarettes were getting their taboo treatment, and as with everything in 2025, parody became reality.
One of my favorite Tim & Eric sketches. Of course absurdist comedy is becoming reality in 2025.
Ohioans will need to submit their photo ID to watch pornography online starting this fall
Moving forward in some ways and going back to the dark ages in others. Good news for VPN companies I guess.