The US economy is pumped up on tech-bro vanity. I f AI did not change your life in 2025, next year it will. That is one of few forecasts that can be made with confidence in unpredictable times. This is not an invitation to believe the hype about what the technology can do today, or may one day achieve. The hype doesn't need your credence.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. My trouble with the app that runs my life began this May. In 2020, after losing a full-time job, I became a freelancer. The next year, while continuing to freelance, I started my own small business, in the honorable field of podcasting. Scattered Apple Notes could no longer keep track of my affairs.

James Harden scored 7 points during the Los Angeles Clippers' Game 7 loss to the Denver Nuggets. Nick Wright and Kevin Wildes discuss Harden's history of choking in the playoffs. NBA fans' viewing experience will look different later this year, but there will also be a touch of nostalgia. Last summer, Comcast/NBC Universal closed an 11-year agreement for the rights to regular and postseason NBA and WNBA games. Those games will be presented across the network's linear and streaming platforms beginning with the 2025-26 season.

Last month, nothing short of an earthquake-level upheaval struck the professional music industry. On Aug. 26, the president of the Colorado-based tech company MakeMusic announced that the firm would be making "no further updates" to Finale, the pioneering and popular music-notation app that the firm had been selling and updating for 35 years. "Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale's millions of lines of code add up," MakeMusic's Greg Dell'Era wrote in his first (and likely last) contribution to the company's Finale-centric blog. "Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we've made the decision to end its development." In other words: A key computer program for digitizing and expediting the arduous process of writing and formatting the types of sheet music used by musicians and ensembles everywhere--orchestras, schoolkids, the theater world, session instrumentalists, pop producers--would be phased out by the following year, with no hopes for revival.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts' expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of 1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results. Alphabet's CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company's investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns. "Our strong performance this quarter highlights ongoing strength in Search and momentum in Cloud. We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack," Pichai stated in the earnings report. "Our longstanding infrastructure leadership and in-house research teams position us well as technology evolves and as we pursue the many opportunities ahead."

This article contains descriptions of sex trafficking and abuse. For years, nonconsensual deepfake pornography has been used to harass, silence, shame, and abuse women. Celebrities and influencers have their faces implanted into existing adult videos; men have used the technology to place "friends" into explicit videos; and boys have allegedly created "nude" images of their female classmates. However, among the ever growing harassment and abuse, deepfake creators have now, arguably, hit a new low: using videos of sex trafficking victims as the basis of the nonconsensual videos. Over the past two months, an account on the largest deepfake sexual abuse website has posted 12 celebrity videos that are based on footage from GirlsDoPorn, a now-defunct sex trafficking operation that the US Department of Justice says its operators used to conspire and commit sex trafficking through "force, fraud, and coercion," tricking five women--and allegedly hundreds more-- into making sex videos that were subsequently posted online.

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld gives his take on Deadspin laying off all of its staff on'Gutfeld!' I love every one of you. All right, let's get started. Dylan Mulvaney is trying to switch from transgender influencer to stand-up comic. After the Budweiser fiasco, you got to admit, that takes balls.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote a letter to Alphabet, Google's parent company, on Saturday, demanding the company explain what influence the Biden administration may have had on its controversial Gemini AI program. The Judiciary Committee asked for documents on the creation and deployment of the artificial intelligence chatbot. "The Committee is investigating how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced or colluded with Big Tech and other intermediaries to censor Americans' speech," the House Judiciary Committee said in a Saturday news release. Gemini has faced backlash after it reportedly showed historical figures like George Washington appearing wrongfully as Black and a search for a "pope" prompting a Black woman in Vatican garb. White Supremacist Nazis also were not White.

Every day, what's left of the once-mighty ranks of reporters across this country tap out stories meant to inform, entertain and expose. Sometimes they are the work of minutes, the first bits of knowledge on breaking news such as fires, storms or even elections. Sometimes they are investigations that have taken years. Inevitably, as soon as we publish, rich dudes with algorithms come in and sweep this work away for their own profit, like deodorant off a Target shelf. Retail theft is causing a civic meltdown and inspiring a ballot measure to incarcerate repeat toothpaste thieves.

Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams as part of cost-cutting measures. The cuts come as Google looks towards "responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead", the company said in a statement. "Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally," it said. Google earlier said it was eliminating a few hundred roles across engineering, hardware and the Assistant teams, though most of the impact hit the company's augmented reality hardware division. The cuts follow pledges by executives of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, to reduce costs.