Yesterday, just 24 hours after Nigeria tried to ride the EU’s coattails to an easy quarter billy with another stupid fine against Meta, Mark Zuckerberg nuked 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts involved in ‘sextortion’ scams. While it was pretty clear to me the company would probably not just hand a bunch of money over in the shakedown, especially with demands of this kind growing in frequency around the world, I’ve got to say the escalation here was unexpected. When the froggy looking European regulator targeted AI developers, Meta just said “fine, build your own digital supergod,” and walked away. But in this case Zuck wasn’t satisfied with a simple “get bent.” He instead chose to remind the famously scam-happy nation of Nigeria that large segments of their economy depended on his platform. Mob boss shit, and frankly I love it. Man got a new haircut and said “I’m the Nigerian Prince, now. Fine me again, I dare you.”

Following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision, which scrapped the “right” to public camping made up a decade ago by the ACLU, Governor Newsom is directing all California officials to begin dismantling homeless encampments statewide. Rhetorically, this is obviously a great first step away from “free tents for the unhoused.” But will this actually make a difference, on the ground? I’m skeptical. Newsom can’t force officials to clear the camps, and even if they do, current policy would require California taxpayers indefinitely fund housing for random methheads ‘displaced unhoused folk.’ A better solution? Clear the tents, figure out where the people living there are actually from, then give them all an EBT card and a one-way ticket home. The program’s called “Homeward Bound,” and it worked for years until we scrapped it.

In the wake of CrowdStrike’s role in last week’s catastrophic global tech outage, the cybersecurity firm is reportedly looking to make amends with their partners affected by the blackout… by sending them $10 gift cards to Uber Eats. Obviously, this is clearly the wrong move, an apology Chick-fil-A sandwich hardly makes up for a reported loss of $5.4 billion. But my real gripe here? They shouldn’t be spending money on an apology at all. According to Microsoft’s Chief Communications Officer, the reason Windows was so vulnerable to the outage is a 2009 agreement with the EU, which mandated security software be given the same level of access to Windows as Microsoft itself. In other words, this is Europe’s fault. It’s time for reparations, which we’ll accept in real (American) dollars only. If this makes the Brussels Bugman uncomfortable, just call it “regulation” and he’ll feel right at home.

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last year, sanjana illustrated how mainstream reporting on sf and california homelessness is based on two reports afflicted by methodological flaws and ideological bias

also last year, sanjana gave a detailed primer on san francisco's homeless crisis, showing how the majority of the city's homelessness budget goes toward keeping people in no-contingency housing units, permanently. what happens when the city can't pay the bill?

dan hendrycks, an executive at a firm that co-sponsored scott wiener's ai bill, co-founded an ai safety compliance company that launched on tuesday

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