Journalist @404Media.co Signal: jason.404 // email: jason@404media.co
52,310 followers 1,192 following 2,418 posts
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The inevitable has happened: Disconnect is back on Ghost after trying Substack again. I didn’t just ditch another US tech platform; I learned the Substack network isn’t as helpful as it used to be, and certainly doesn’t justify putting up with the platform’s support for Nazis.
he heard this
at least he is walking more ://///
I am still very optimistic Jackson Holliday will figure it out and know he is still incredibly young but it’s pretty concerning that he can’t hit, can’t field, and can’t run. Not ideal
I never commented until recently and it’s like a good place to basically anonymously (or you know, like low key), make a joke and then never think about it again. A+ beans comment
lol we truly truly don't
instead of sometimes drunk posting on bluesky I’ve started drunk commenting on tiktoks and it feels so much lower stakes. big fan, is def the move
as in i'm sure some people are interested in Chinese brands but not "most"
there's no way this is actually true lol
Trump take Canada's LEGO
Trump take LEGO www.404media.co/lego-stops-s...
yes please let me know
Trump's latest tariff changes, including the loss of de minimis exemptions, take effect today. Several small press tabletop designers are trying to anticipate the impending chaos.
Buying anything from overseas is about to get more expensive, more logistically complicated, slower, and overall more annoying. Film photography community, retro games community, people into skincare already seeing chaos on eBay. eBay sellers locking US buyers out. www.404media.co/trump-tariff...
NEW — My chat with @chriswarcraft.bsky.social about his run for California State Assembly:
With something like this, where the work of at least tens of thousands and possibly millions of people is implicated, the law should not be "the people who felt like suing first get to decide what happens"
we'll see because the terms haven't been released yet. but i would bet almost anything that's the case
in a case like this, with the specifics being what they are (millions of people impacted), a court should not allow the plaintiffs to settle
www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-500-bill...
A handful of writers will get some money, fuck everyone else
It is deeply selfish to settle this case, as surely most of the AI copyright lawsuits are going to be settled. The fact that the vast majority of lawsuits in this country are settled before tech giants face any real or consequences is such a travesty www.wired.com/story/anthro...
Yes the orioles got swept and scored a total of 7 runs in four games, but yesterday Coby Mayo fouled a few pitches off Aroldis Chapman and you can’t discount how important that’s going to be in 2026. Way more important than wins and losses or things like “scoring runs”
the hitting approach is just horrible up and down the lineup. beavers (beavers!), gunnar, and jeremiah jackson are the only ones at this moment who look like they have any idea what they're doing
in addition to batting him leadoff no matter what for months even when he's struggling, the thing Mansolino has talked about where he's like "let's be aggressive out there" have led to so many popups, groundouts to second, and starters going into the 7th inning with like 80 pitches
if you have a link pls share
jackson holliday in august
New: An app developer has restored functionality to popular Echelon exercise bikes after the company made them all-but-useless unless you have a subscription. But he can't legally release the software: www.404media.co/developer-un...
this is wild, ty
well I think it’s a mix from what I’ve seen. Some have found ways to ship to US but don’t want to deal with the hassle, others are dealing with the problem you describe
lol lol lol
LOL what is the tariff on Timothy
also really enjoy how functional the harmonization tariff schedule website is. typing t-shirt brought up "sugar beets"
ALSO: If you are a small business owner, have a hobby, or a side hustle and this has already affected you, please get in touch. I will be compiling stories at some point. My email is: jason@404media.co and my signal is: @jason.404
I don't know how this is going to go in the long term, but I suspect that the rough edges of this process for Americans are going to eventually be smoothed over, meaning it will just be a logistical nightmare for the small businesses / individuals overseas. But everything will be more expensive:
ALSO: If you are a small business owner, or have a hobby, or a side hustle and this has already affected you, please get in touch. I will be compiling stories at some point. My email is: jason@404media.co and my signal is: @jason.404
Vinyl. TCG's. All of it. We've completely fucked ourselves when it comes to global shipping. I've had 4 orders cancelled this week. If it's not already here, you're probably screwed.
fair, will replace link with the OG. thank you!
it might, and will probably (imo) end up being this way. But with it being so new it seems like every company / shipper / ebay seller is handling it differently. i put this at the end of the article:
This is a absolute nightmare for the music community. Getting small parts from Europe is not possible atm and ordering from Japan is already expensive 🤬
this is on top of whatever other additional fees there are. it will also have to clear customs which could be fast or could be slow. could take days, who knows. if you are just buying them from a store here then it's simply going to cost more but logistics of buying them prob won't change
if you're ordering direct from someone in portugal it probably means that rather than the package of fish just coming to your house you are going to get an email from FedEx or UPS asking you to login to your FedEx account to pay 15% through their website before they will deliver it
that's realism :)
so, yes, that. but then also if you're into photography or specific games or whatever the only place you're able to get some of these things is from other countries. i am already seeing nightmare stories and it hasn't even started yet
How will the tariffs affect you? totally easy to figure it out. From eBay:
This is bc of the end of de minimis, which meant you didn't have to pay tariffs on anything under $800. I know I am personally excited to familiarize myself with harmonization tables, deal more with FedEx, and learn the difference between various acronyms. My new hobby is tariffs logistics
Buying anything from overseas is about to get more expensive, more logistically complicated, slower, and overall more annoying. Film photography community, retro games community, people into skincare already seeing chaos on eBay. eBay sellers locking US buyers out. www.404media.co/trump-tariff...
I have wasted so much podcast or book on tape time this year watching ground balls to second base. The MLB At Bat app sucks shit too please fix this and also make the orioles good
Orioles have many “good young players” and not one of them is remotely as annoying as Duran, who comes up and you know is going to find a way on, then steal second. Team full of highly drafted dorks who bounce to second base on the first pitch or take two strikes then swing at a pitch in the dirt
couldn’t possibly be any more evergreen
evergreen
the Baltimore Beavers
another inspiring offensive performance by the Baltimore Orioles
i know DK isnt intended to be a hardcore platformer or anything, but i think some of the fun of astrobot and all platformers is like "you've failed at this task a couple times, try again and get slightly further, or try another way" and there are SO MANY ways to succeed in DK u basically never fail
so i actually played astrobot for the first time with my friend's kid the other day and that made me be like "wow, now we're platforming, this is cool!" i really need to get it
collecting the bananas is basically pointless unless you're a completionist. the game is extremely extremely easy. the "story" is like "purple stuff has taken over this level. now it's taken over another level. punch it to make it go away"
ive been playing donkey kong bananza off and on since it came out and it's a beautiful game that plays nicely but it's like what am i doing. i'm going up and down up and down following the exclamation point punching stuff til i win. honestly don't think it's that fun which is maybe sacrilege but idk
New: An app developer has restored functionality to popular Echelon exercise bikes after the company made them all-but-useless unless you have a subscription. But he can't legally release the software: www.404media.co/developer-un...
Heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point www.404media.co/4chan-and-ki...
get his ass
yup!
Breaking: 4chan and Kiwi Farms have sued the United Kingdom over the Online Safety Act: www.404media.co/4chan-and-ki...
Small towns rubber stamping whatever the police or the loudest NIMBYs want with no pushback got us here. When city councils learn what this technology actually is and actually does and is actually used for, they often have lots of questions and they sometimes ban it
Access to this network is then sold back to the police and regularly accessed by the feds for all sorts of things. So much of politics is nationalized now but your local governments matter. Your local elections matter. People need to inform their city councils what this tech is and what it does
We've been writing about Flock a lot, but this is one of the largest, most invasive surveillance networks ever built. And it was built quickly w/ the help of small towns and HOAs all over the country. Our local leaders have willingly helped a private company build a nationwide surveillance dragnet
Flock seeks to add data from private car dashcams to its massive surveillance network. At minimum it seems like data from random cars driving around is going to be added to their system www.404media.co/flock-wants-...
New: Flock, the ALPR company in thousands of U.S. communities and which ICE taps into, wants to partner with a firm that sells dashcams to ordinary drivers. Nexar gets "trillions" of images a month from the dashcams. Could turn cars into roaming surveillance devices www.404media.co/flock-wants-...
Baltimore Orioles world champions of grounding to second
I love Kyle Bradish
to be turned into a boomer
SCOOP: CBP has had access to more than 80,000 Flock cameras nationwide. Cops said they didn’t understand they were sharing with CBP. Flock has just cut off access: www.404media.co/cbp-had-acce...
anyways Zuckerberg's Horizon Worlds Metaverse is a horrific failure but he has sort of accidentally accomplished the same thing on Instagram by first not doing anything about AI slop, then by promoting it and building the tools to make it
80s nostalgia AI slop: A niche like any other, reverse engineered by 20-something digital nomads in Bali to boomerfy the masses as they astral project to a fake past in service of making fractions of a cent per view on Zuckerberg's cultish algorithmic slop machine www.404media.co/80s-nostalgi...
I want narcan for jalapeños great idea
A lot of what we write about is bleak but we think it's impactful, and it has changed policy in meaningful ways. That is a reason for optimism. The fact that an outlet like ours can exist—which only can happen because people read, share, subscribe—is reason for optimism
the tldr of our second year anniversary post is that things are going well. the business model of "try our absolute best to do good journalism and ask people to pay for it" is working. people are willing to support this type of work and it has allowed us to become more ambitious about what we do
We had a party to celebrate last night in Brooklyn and I think 300 people came? We spend our time sitting at our computers in our apartments and so seeing our readers IRL and their support of our work and of independent journalism in general is amazing. Don't even know what to say, it's incredible
Today is the two year anniversary of 404 Media, which is hard to fathom. We wrote about how it's going, what we've done, what we're going to do, and what we've learned. We cannot do this without the support of our subscribers and for that we are endlessly thankful: www.404media.co/two-years-40...
Since 2023, translators and interpreters have seen work dry up, rates plummet and their jobs reduced to editing AI-generated output. Some are leaving the field, others are considering bankruptcy. All despite any major upgrade in translation quality. This is how AI is killing translation work:
People have created add-ons to the Flipper Zero that allow the user to break into cars with the click of a button. Inside a very fascinating community by @josephcox.bsky.social www.404media.co/inside-the-u...
Jimmy Wales is into the idea of AI for Wikipedia. Thankfully the governance structure of the site he started is resilient enough to call him out on this bullshit and resist it: www.404media.co/jimmy-wales-...
Tells them they can volunteer to work at ICE facilities but that they may have to work under "austere conditions"
NEW: The Department of Defense has asked its civilian employees if they want to work for ICE: www.404media.co/pentagon-ask...
this is what a military machine does when it meets a civilian SUV
I can just feel the apolitcal military professionalism coursing through my veins as I crush an SUV with an MRAP
I think that unfortunately the idea of always on “virtual human” AI livestreaming salespeople is probably very appealing to companies and therefore is going to be on every social media platform you can think of before too long: www.404media.co/chinese-live...
if the orioles could marry “walking the first guy in the bottom of the 9th in a save situation then giving up a home run immediately,” they would
BLOOD IN THE MACHINE was given early access to survey data pulled from interviews with 1,400 Californians on their thoughts about AI. Among the findings: -59% think AI will primarily benefit corporations and the wealthy -55% are more concerned than excited -*70%* want strong AI laws
putting out a bat signal - does anyone in NYC have a DNP printer or similar that we can rent / borrow for our party on Thursday? ask your friends in the Photo Booth business I beg you
just checking in with one of the most influential philosophers alive today
Also in this story: - A third, previously unreported Tea vulnerability we discovered while reporting - A rap about Salesforce - Venmoing people for their attention - A "Chief Female Officer"
For at least some period of time, Sean Cook used the persona "Tara" on the app; women on the app would have had no idea they were talking to a man and the founder of the app
Sean Cook's ex-fiancée tried to recruit the founder of the very popular Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups to be the "face" of the company. When she didn't respond, a series of sockpuppets on hijacked FB accounts began spamming the groups directing women to Tea. Tea set up competing groups
Incredible, must-read investigation by @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social into how Tea's founder got women to join the app, how its founding story changed, how it spammed Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, how it hired an influencer marketing firm to promote it www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...
This is the inside story of how Tea's male founder convinced millions of women to share their most intimate secrets on his app, then exposed those secrets in devastating security breaches www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...
This is about to sell out - we did not want to restrict RSVPs but it is getting to the point where we will need to so if you're on the fence please get your ticket now: www.404media.co/404-media-se...
TikTok did the absolute bare minimum when @rosiejt62.bsky.social reached out to them - they deleted the several videos we sent them but of course left the product up as well as dozens of other videos also marketing it for abuse. Not clear they have much of any system in place to stop this at scale
TikTok Shop is selling 'Silent' GPS trackers that are marketed to stalkers and domestic abusers. Many of the videos have millions of views and at least 100,000 of them have been sold. TikTok's algorithm endlessly puts these in front of you if you fall into the algo: www.404media.co/tiktok-shop-...
yea no two factor
Cate T 