Sadly, it might actually pass this time.

“Senator Blackburn and I made a promise to parents and young people when we started fighting together for the Kids Online Safety Act – we will make this bill law. There’s undeniable awareness of the destructive harms caused by Big Tech’s exploitive, addictive algorithms, and inescapable momentum for reform,” said Senator Blumenthal. “I am grateful to Senators Thune and Schumer for their leadership and to our Senate colleagues for their overwhelming bipartisan support. KOSA is an idea whose time has come – in fact, it’s urgently overdue – and even tech companies like X and Apple are realizing that the status quo is unsustainable. Our coalition is bigger and stronger than ever before, and we are committed to seeing this measure protecting children on the internet signed into law.”

“Big Tech platforms have shown time and time again they will always prioritize their bottom line over the safety of our children, and I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories to count from parents who have lost a child because these companies have refused to make their platforms safer by default,” said Senator Blackburn. “We would never allow our children to be exposed to pornography, sexual exploitation, drugs, alcohol, and traffickers in the physical space, but these platforms are allowing this every single day in the virtual space. Congress must not cave to the wills and whims of Big Tech, and we must not be bullied into submission. Now is the time to stand up and protect future generations from harm by passing KOSA.”

“I have been a longtime advocate for holding Big Tech accountable for its manipulative algorithms,” said Majority Leader Thune. “Consumers deserve more transparency about how these platforms amplify and suppress content, which is why I’m proud to support the Kids Online Safety Act. Senator Blackburn has done a tremendous amount of work to deliver a bill that takes real steps to empower families and mitigate the harm social media can do to children, and I’m grateful for her leadership on the issue.”

“I am proud to support this bipartisan legislation which provides necessary guardrails to protect our kids. Too many kids have had their personal data collected and used nefariously. Too many families have lost kids after they took their own lives because of what happened to them on social media. I thank these brave parents and families for sharing their stories. Keeping our kids safe from online threats should not be a partisan issue, I thank my Senate colleagues for championing these bills and I look forward to swift passage,” said Minority Leader Schumer.

• Robot chefs are replacing humans at some South Korean highway restaurants.
• Tech companies say robots can help solve labor shortage in an aging nation.
• Workers say their roles have been downgraded from chefs to cleaning staff.

• The new class of vulnerabilities in Intel processors arises from speculative technologies that anticipate individual computing steps.
• Openings enable gradual reading of entire privilege memory contents of shared processor (CPU).
• All Intel processors from the last 6 years are affected, from PCs to servers in data centres.

OpenAI has released a new benchmark for testing AI systems in healthcare. Called HealthBench, it's designed to evaluate how well language models handle realistic medical conversations. According to OpenAI, its latest models outperform doctors on the test.

This is a very low-information announcement here but if this is taken to the extreme, it means that DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and many other so-called "alternative" search engines are going to either have to look for a new provider of results, or die.

"Obviously, the great contradistinction here is Europe, where, you know, it's like people have given up, and we — I really hope that turns around in Europe," he added.

Europe is giving up by having ethical, human focused, and probably open source AI/and not firing all their scientists and researchers? Meanwhile the GOP is literally trying to sneak language into a spending bill banning regulation for a decade?

What a pizza shit.

I modified the title to make it more descriptive

I also think it's time for the open source and/or fediverse Trakt alternatives to get some love.

The price change is listed as going from $30 a year to $60 a year, and they're also changing everyone to that price:

Starting May 20, 2025, all VIP renewals will move to a standardized price. This means that any legacy, promotional, or grandfathered pricing will no longer apply to renewals processed on or after that date. Instead, all VIP memberships will renew at the new standard rate going forward.

People are not happy on their forum:

https://forums.trakt.tv/t/upcoming-vip-renewal-pricing-changes/56676

This user poll suggests that around 97% of respondents (at the time of making this post) will not renew

https://forums.trakt.tv/t/poll-will-you-keep-your-vip-membership-at-60/56923