Digg is dead, again. The former front page of the internet wanted to stage a come back, but the beta collapsed under a flood of bots. Votes, comments, and engagement couldn’t be trusted. Founder Kevin Rose is back for another reboot, but the team is gutted. Meanwhile Yahoo is launching a ranked, real-time front page, minus the community.
I'm a journalist who builds stuff. At SPIEGEL, I launched podcasts, led teams, and shaped platform strategies. Now I'm into AI.
Can you tell which passage was written by AI? This New York Times quiz is humbling either way. (Kevin Roose and Stuart A. Thompson)
Grammarly “cloned” Julia Angwin, Stephen King, and Neil deGrasse Tyson as AI editors, without asking. Angwin is now suing. The feature is gone, the apology is filed, and the AI Julia apparently gave bad advice. (Miles Klee, Wired)
Hear from the experts
Three Questions with Alba Mora Roca, AJ+
Three Questions with Rignam Wangkhang, CBC
Three Questions with Shuwei Fang, Harvard-Fellow
Three Questions with Cecilia Rikap, University College London
Three Questions with Kemal Görgülü, Arte
Three Questions with Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots
Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla, Journalist and Advisor
Three Questions with Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal
Three Questions with Rubina Fillion, New York Times
34 projects, 24 contributors, 65 minutes: Hacks/Hackers held a vibe coding show & tell, and journalists shipped fact-checkers, salary surveys, power grid monitors, and a Discord clone.
Instant voice cloning, on a MacBook Air, for free, no Elevenlabs
Chinese e‑commerce giant Alibaba has released new Qwen models for generating and cloning voices earlier this year. Which means: With only a couple of seconds of recorded material, we can generate a cloned voice recording. On a four year old MacBook Air. Instantly. At no cost. This used to be the domain of Elevenlabs. The...
Vibecoding
Not coding, but telling a chatbot what an app should do. It throws an error? Ask AI to fix it. Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe code” in early February 2025: “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” By month’s end, the New York Times had covered it. Backlash followed: vibecoded apps exposed...
An editor gets a promising pitch, starts googling, and finds a byline that exists everywhere and nowhere. A podcast episode about a scammer – and that some sources didn’t care about being faked. (Question Everything)
A young reader got so frustrated with the FT’s news product that she built her own using Claude Code. She’s paying for a subscription, she wants personalized news, and she couldn’t figure out how to get it. (Jodie Hopperton, INMA)
The information ecosystem has four new rules: production is cheap, machines are the audience, content is liquid, and intention beats attention. Shuwei Fang buries the current publishing model, and somehow ends up optimistic: journalism needs to stop protecting the article and start selling the process. (Reuters Institute)
tropes.md is a one-file blacklist of AI writing tells for your system prompt.
Contrastive negation used to be a rhetorical device, now it screams “I used ChatGPT”
This is the future, not a newsletter. When you define something by saying what it's not, it's called "contrastive negation." Nowadays, it's a telltale of AI writing. You can see it all over Threads and LinkedIn. At the same time, the bros are feeding chatbots the Wikipedia definition of "AI writing" and telling them to...
The vibe is Palantir cosplay: World Monitor by Elie Habib is a real-time “situational awareness” dashboard with threat feeds, geopolitical maps, and a three-stage AI classification pipeline. He calls it a “weekend hack.”
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
