Disclaimer: I changed the WSJ's headline because this is the part I found the most interesting. Original headline: Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.

>Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter. > >It is part of a growing chorus of online media companies expressing frustration with the tech giant as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models. They say the search engine is no longer a reliable source of visitors, especially after Alphabet’s GOOGL Google expanded its AI search features in recent months. USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are all evaluating how, or even if, they will continue to work with Google > >Reddit struck a $60 million-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train AI models. But with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is ending soon.

Gift link to read without a subscription.

The ineptitude (that or the evilness — either/or) in both google’s implementation and initial response is infuriating.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

>In March, a developer working on a Meta data center in El Paso applied to power the site with a gas-burning plant large enough to supply electricity to 300,000 homes. > >Typically, approving a big power plant might require public hearings and months of detailed vetting. But Texas environmental regulators signed off in just 20 days. > >They approved another project in three days. And an even larger data center power plant, also gas-burning, won approval in just two days. > >All without public notice.

>In the debate over data centers that is roiling the country, water use and noise are often cited as objections by neighbors and environmentalists. Less mentioned has been the pollution from the scores of gas-burning plants that will power these data centers. > >When the El Paso facility’s power plant is complete, it could emit as much planet-warming carbon dioxide in a year as 360,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles, each driven for the average distance logged by American drivers in a year. > >With encouragement from the Trump administration, data center developers are building their own power plants, instead of plugging into an electric grid. Nationwide, at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or have been proposed to power data centers, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonpartisan research organization. Most were announced or granted permits within the past 18 months.

So my text cursor was suddenly replaced with the hand/grabber tool. I've done everything I can think of to try and get back to the text tool. I've used the "t" shortcut, I've clicked the selection tool, I've restarted Adobe, I've also tried calling it the C word, but even that hasn't worked.

I just need to do basic functions and Adobe seems to be making that impossible. Any idea how to get Adobe to function normal?

Update: thanks for the help! I opened InDesign 2026 and just started using that version, which hasn’t given me any issues (yet).

AI Pimp Blueprint teaches students not just how to generate an attractive woman, but how to create one that sells. The course treats female desirability as a commodity, one that can be extracted, studied and optimized for profit. And who, its creators believe, could be better placed to engineer women for male consumption than other men?

The first step to being a desirable woman online, apparently, is to shut the hell up.

“We are marketing a girl, right?” says one of the course instructors, Jimmy Denero in an AI Pimp Blueprint video module. “No one wants to listen to women talk. No one wants to hear that shit, so you have to have some element of sexuality in your content.”

Screen-sharing, Jimmy sketches out a line on a digital whiteboard. One one end, he writes the word ‘WHORE’. “What’s the opposite of whore?” he asks. “Uhh… not whore.”

Jimmy writes NOT WHORE at the other end of the line, along with the adjectives ‘feminine,’ ‘youthful,’ ‘passive,’ and ‘submissive.’ This, Jimmy argues, is what sells best: a young, innocent-seeming persona that contrasts with the sexual content she sells.

“If we can get a girl whose face reads passive, chill, feminine… and then we hit them with the fucking horseshit,” he says (referring to sexual content), “that’s great because [the customer] is getting psychologically confused.”

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has proposed that the federal government take small stakes in the leading artificial intelligence companies so the public can share in the industry’s financial bonanza. He has reportedly suggested giving the government a 5 percent stake in his own company, which would be worth $42.6 billion at the current market price.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont says the government should take a 50 percent stake in the leading companies, placing the shares in a state-controlled sovereign wealth fund. In addition to a share in the profits, he says ownership would give the government greater control over the development of a technology that has the potential to shake our society. [cough, cough — idiot]
⸺
Nor does the United States need boardroom seats to participate in decision-making. That is the purpose of regulation. The government has broad powers to check corporate conduct that is antithetical to the public interest.
⸺
There are big downsides to government ownership stakes. By providing insulation against market forces, state backing can make companies less competitive, less innovative and less worried about the welfare of their customers. And the history of state investment suggests that, if anything, it often makes regulation more difficult. Governments can be reluctant to enforce rules when action comes at the expense of the state, too.

We also are concerned about the specific dangers that would arise if the current administration took a stake in A.I. companies. Mr. Trump has made clear that he will use almost any tools at his disposal to enrich himself and his allies and to act against Americans whom he perceives as his enemies.
⸺
The impact on the corporation is only part of the problem. State ownership doesn’t just insulate companies from market forces. It also tends to insulate against regulation.

The public should regard Mr. Altman’s proposal with frank suspicion. It is a payment; the question is what he hopes to receive in return, and the obvious answer is that he is hoping to purchase leniency. He is hoping that the government will deal less strictly with his company if every decision to constrain its ambitions comes, in part, at the expense of the government, too. He has good reason, to judge from the historical record.

State-owned oil companies provide glaring examples. The Norwegian government is a signatory of the Paris Accords, which establish goals for reducing emissions to limit climate change. It is also the majority shareholder in Equinor, Norway's dominant oil company. Norway's petroleum wealth provides 30 percent of the government's annual revenue. Last year, the government blocked an effort by minority shareholders in the company to force Equinor to account for the company's failure to comply with the environmental policies the government itself has adopted.

Other examples abound. South Africa has legislated more lenient emissions standards for power plants owned by the state utility company, Eskom. Singapore does not require Temasek, a state-owned investment firm, to make the same financial disclosures as many privately owned investment firms. France, for years, exempted some state-owned companies from its bankruptcy laws, allowing those businesses to borrow more cheaply.

⸻
Note: I only included excerpts on the point that I personally care about the most. They do not summarize the op-ed, nor include all of the points the op-ed made, so you should read the op-ed if you want to read about how else this would affect our lives.

Steven Pruitt, who is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedia editor, has made more than six million edits to the site, and, by extension, has quietly shaped the raw material that every major A.I. chatbot was trained on.

Those exposed chats were just the latest in a seemingly endless string of AI snafus: misinformation, data leaks, cybersecurity breaches. Immediately after the launch of ChatGPT, one could charitably argue that these lapses were by-products of a new and strange technology. Altman remains fond of saying that the AI industry must learn “from contact with reality.”

But four years into the AI boom, attributing these blunders to growing pains is too convenient. The sheer volume of transgressions—many of them predictable—suggests that what’s actually happening here is widespread carelessness. The same AI executives who promise that their products will deliver human civilization to a triumphant future seemingly cannot release consumer-grade tools without face-planting.

>Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. > >Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help create memories. Similar findings have been reportedby other researchers in studies involving infants, older children and adults.