Meta settled with a coalition of state attorneys general for roughly $17 billion, ending the first trial to test whether a social platform is liable for engineering compulsive use in minors. The deal lands mid-trial, before a jury verdict that would have set precedent.
Thompson reads yesterday's Mac Studio and Mac mini refresh alongside OpenAI's Jalapeño accelerator announcement and argues both are, in different ways, pressure on Nvidia — Apple by making local inference a desktop-class default, OpenAI by building its own silicon rather than buying Blackwell.
X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters to the maintainers of Nitter and XCancel, the open-source front-ends that let people read X without an account. The notices arrived as GitHub issues on the projects themselves, which is how the news broke.
Parton died Tuesday at 80. NPR's appreciation makes the case that her real legacy is as a songwriter — a body of work that traced the country's own story, not just country music's.