Please don't threaten me with a good time.
Czech Republic beat Denmark 3-1 on penalties to qualify for the 2026 World Cup 🇨🇿
The FCC chair is openly cheering the weakening of the press
In a speech, he ticked through defunded outlets, ousted journalists and looming ownership changes — then said the president is ‘winning’
Unmasking artists like Banksy and Ferrante
Prompt Catalog 2026 for Artificial Intelligence
Via LLRX – Marcus P. Zillman’s extensive bibliography covers numerous subject matter specific AI prompt resources, guides, templates, methodologies and best practices take you across applications, and leans into expert sources from LinkedIn.
A Legal Decision That Could Change Social Media
The two companies were ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages: 70 percent by Meta and 30 percent by Google. (Meta-owned Instagram played a larger role in the complaint than Google-owned YouTube, which explains the split.) This is hardly any money to either of these companies—Meta alone brought in nearly $60 billion in revenue over the last three months of 2025.
But the verdict will lead others to pursue similar cases against tech companies (thousands are already pending), and possibly result in changes to the design of social-media apps. Following the verdict’s announcement, Matthew Bergman, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers and the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, sent a lengthy statement to reporters. “This verdict carries implications far beyond this courtroom,” it read in part. “It establishes a framework for how similar cases across the country will be evaluated and demonstrates that juries are willing to hold technology companies accountable when the evidence shows foreseeable harm.”
A Meta spokesperson sent a shorter statement: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options.” And the Google spokesperson José Castañeda said that Google will appeal the verdict, adding, “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.” The plaintiff in this case, a 20-year-old named Kaley, was referred to in case documents by her initials, KGM, because the events she was suing over happened when she was a minor.
She originally filed against TikTok and Snap as well but settled with them before the trial. The core questions of the case were whether the social-media platforms had been designed to be addictive, and whether a social-media addiction could be said to have played a direct role in causing the mental-health issues that KGM experienced as a child. In her complaint, she said she had a “dangerous dependency” on the platforms and that they had contributed to her “anxiety, depression, self-harm, and body dysmorphia.”
Today’s news comes right on the heels of a verdict against Meta in another case, brought by the New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, which was announced yesterday. The jury for that trial agreed that Meta should pay a penalty of $375 million for thousands of violations of the state’s consumer-protection laws. The issue at stake there was relatively specific: The state argued that certain design and moderation choices left kids vulnerable to online predators on Meta platforms and indirectly enabled serious crimes. The facts were highly technical and, unlike the Los Angeles case, didn’t involve qualitative assessments of young people’s personal lives or thorny debates about whether social media can be addictive…”
See also WSJ Gift Article – Meta Is in Risky Legal Territory After Back-to-Back Court Losses. Social-media giants confront a potential flood of litigation challenging the design of their products…The judgments for the plaintiffs threaten to undermine long-held protections that have shielded internet companies for decades. They suggest future juries might be receptive to a product-liability argument against social media, which forms the basis of thousands of similar lawsuits waiting to be heard.
And they encourage new plaintiffs to come forward, raising the prospect of mass litigation that could stretch for years and lead to settlements or changes in the industry, akin to the legal campaign against the tobacco industry in the 1990s.
Soon owning will be impossible
Marco Lardelli – “A few weeks ago, stock prices for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies have dropped significantly. It seems that many people expect AI to be capable of writing such tools at very low cost soon. But these events could be only forerunners for much bigger things yet to come. What happens on a broad scale if intelligence becomes abundant?
It‘s maybe time to think about the theoretical limitsof the current economic system (which could surprisingly soon become very practical) To get an intuition of what could happen, let’s start with some practical examples. AI is already now able to speed up the development of new software by a factor of – maybe – ten. Current LLM based systems do this mainly by using software patterns, methods and ideas they have seen during training.
But they can be used to steal other people’s code even much more aggressively: they are capable of transpiling source code into a different programming language which, if done properly, removes in many cases enough „character“ from the code to make the generated code count as „new“: Code can be compiled into some sort of intermediate codefirst.
This preserves the functionality of the software but removes the know-how of „how to create the software“ to a large extent (comments, variable names etc.). This intermediate code can then, using knowledge about the application, decompiled into „novel“ source code in any language.
This method can be also used to create „proprietary“ source code out of open-source code. But such code would have, as everybody could do the same quickly, no value at all. Ultimately this means that soon software cannot be owned at all anymore. Anybody who gets access to the application in any form, can recreate a new version out of it which is freed from copyright. The ways how software code can get lost are manyfold:
- A lot of software is already distributed in binary form („.exe file or .app“). This can be used easily in the near future to create „new“ software.
- Employees in software companies could copy the source code, take it home and use it as the foundation for their own startup.
- Cloud hosting providers (like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud) and cloud hosters for source code (like GitHub) have access to a lot of source code too. Some already use it for training their AIs, but one can easily imagine more interesting use cases for it….
What about other forms of intellectual property? All books, illustrations, fotos and movies are already lost. In exactly the same way as described above they have been integrated into the AI models in a way which disguises their true origin and gives the copyright holders no means to claim their rights. It would be completely naive to believe that this mechanism will spare the AI model manufacturers themselves. Their products will have no value anymore very soon too. All the billions of dollars invested will be lost. It’s just a matter of time until this unfolds.
