Suzanne Smalley reporting for The Record:

Social media giant LinkedIn on Thursday filed a lawsuit against a company which it says operates a network of millions of fake accounts used to scrape data from LinkedIn members before selling the information to third parties without permission.

ProAPIs, a software company, and its CEO Rahmat Alam allegedly run an operation which LinkedIn says charges customers up to $15,000 per month for scraped user data taken from the social media platform.

Millions.

I drop in to LinkedIn sometimes, and it often feels like bots talking to bots or people using bot-generated “content” to fill the void. I wonder how much data ProAPIs scraped was bot-generated, which was then flipped for a monthly fee so that other bots can push more “content” into the LinkedIn machine. That seems like a terrible feedback loop to get stuck in.

The administration cut $500 million of aid to U.S. food banks earlier this year, which amounts to 94 million pounds in 4,300 deliveries. This is based on data from the Department of Agriculture. For ProPublica, Ruth Talbot and Nicole Santa Cruz illustrated each canceled delivery with a truck.

The data is itemized down to pounds of food and where it would’ve gone, so each truck represents something tangible. A counter on the top shows how many cancellations you’ve scrolled through.

As we descend towards slop-based social media, where the videos are fake and the people are bots, we might be rounding up our time with algorithmically generated feeds. For Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch shows time spent on social media over the past decade.

The key signal seems to be in young people’s usage. It looks like usage plateaued for 16- to 24-year-olds and has been inching its way down. Although usage over two and a half hours per day is still a lot. Also when broken out by continent, North American usage still looks like it’s going up.

So I guess we’ll see. Bookmarked for later.

Pew Research surveyed U.S. adults about news consumption on social media and found a steep increase for TikTok users.

When looking at adult TikTok users specifically, news consumption has also increased sharply in recent years. More than half of TikTok users (55%) now say they regularly get news on the platform, up from 22% in 2020. TikTok is now on par with several other social media sites – including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Truth Social – in the share of its adult users who regularly get news there.

From 22% to 55% is indeed a big jump. I wonder how much of that jump is from TikTok users’ shifting preferences and how much is from a shifting TikTok feed algorithm.

Earlier this year, the administration halted USAID shipments of antimalarial and HIV medical supplies. Medicine already paid for just sat in warehouses. The Washington Post charted the timeline for the disrupted supply chain.

A Post analysis of internal data from the first half of the year shows that supplies valued at more than $190 million were scheduled to arrive at distribution warehouses by the end of June. Instead, the analysis found, shipments worth nearly $76 million were not delivered, including the majority of medication needed to combat severe malaria. Some medicines never left the places where they were manufactured, and others were stranded in ports or customs facilities near the cities and villages where they were needed.

One part of the larger piece is a set of circles that represent shipments. Circles are sized by value and colored by shipment status during a given month. Position represents shipment location and changes as you scroll.

The mechanics remind me of the 2019 piece on school diversity, also by the Post.

Hi everyone. Nathan here. I write to you from the United States, where…

Merriam-Webster is about to release the next edition of their large language model in November. No hallucinations, hundreds of thousands of well-defined parameters. I’m excited.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

[image or embed]

— Merriam-Webster (@merriam-webster.com) October 1, 2025 at 7:38 AM

Due to the government shutdown, parts of the Census Bureau site, where you should be able to access data, are currently offline.

The government shutdown of 2025 begins. Here is a quick table by Nigel Chiwaya for NBC News showing the congressional parties and the length of the funding gaps. Not all gaps include shutdowns and furloughs for federal employees, but the last six have, and the last shutdown in 2018 was the longest.

As one might expect, Congress is having trouble figuring out how to fund the government, which is likely headed towards a shutdown. For the New York Times, Lazaro Gamio charted the history of funding, lapses, and shutdowns.

Congress is supposed to pass 12 spending bills every year before October 1, and they’ve only been able to do it five times since the rule began in the 1970s. They don’t seem to be getting better at it.

For Quanta Magazine, Joseph Howlett and Mark Belan explain the mechanics of how greenhouse gases lead to a hotter planet.

Earth will eventually settle into a new, hotter equilibrium, but only if its atmosphere stops changing. As long as we keep adding more greenhouse gases, the planet will keep getting hotter, chasing an equilibrium it can never reach.

Simulations and interactive animations throughout the piece keep things spicy.

You can find rhythms and patterns when you look closely at the activities of daily life. Cars move across a freeway, a ping pong ball hits back and forth, and clouds float across the sky. Matthew Wilcock translates these rhythms to music and ambient sounds. It is surprisingly calming.
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Most of the H-1B attention has been on companies, but many visa holders are at research institutions studying topics that might be of use to society. From Alex Ip for The Xylom:

The Xylom’s analysis of data from the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) identified more than 13,000 H-1B workers who have joined over 200 four-year or postgraduate-only land-grant, sea-grant, and R1: Very High Spending and Doctorate Production institutions so far this fiscal year.

The wildfires keep coming, and the smoke pollution keeps filling the air. It seems to be getting worse. For the Washington Post, Shannon Osaka, John Muyskens, and Daniel Wolfe have the charts and map to show the increases.

This is quite a visual story from Reuters. In a comic format, they illustrate and describe the story of travelers tricked at the airport in Thailand. The travelers are abducted and forced into scamming others out of savings, or face consequences.

Here are tools you can use, datasets to poke at, and resources to learn from.

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab studied posts to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI on Reddit. While using AI chatbots for relationship stand-ins is still niche, interest seems to be growing. On the reported benefits:

Reported benefits centered on addressing social isolation and emotional needs. Users frequently cited reduced loneliness (12.2%) and always-available support (11.9%) as primary advantages, emphasizing the temporal accessibility that distinguishes AI from human relationships. The provision of a safe space for emotional expression (9.9%) and non-judgmental interaction (5.0%) highlighted the psychological safety users experienced. Mental health improvements were explicitly reported by 6.2% of users, with 4.2% crediting AI companions with helping them through crises. Additionally, 6.0% reported better self-understanding through AI interactions, suggesting these relationships facilitate introspection and personal growth. These findings indicate that companion AI systems serve complex psychological and social functions, often addressing unmet needs in users’ human relationships while providing unique affordances unavailable in traditional social contexts.

I’m not sure what to make of this. If the alternative is loneliness, then maybe it’s okay as a temporary band-aid, but marrying a large language model can’t be good long-term, right?

From Gyana Swain for Computerworld on how “hallucinations” a.k.a. computer errors are inevitable with LLMs:

“Unlike human intelligence, it lacks the humility to acknowledge uncertainty,” said Neil Shah, VP for research and partner at Counterpoint Technologies. “When unsure, it doesn’t defer to deeper research or human oversight; instead, it often presents estimates as facts.”

The OpenAI research identified three mathematical factors that made hallucinations inevitable: epistemic uncertainty when information appeared rarely in training data, model limitations where tasks exceeded current architectures’ representational capacity, and computational intractability where even superintelligent systems could not solve cryptographically hard problems.

LLMs function under data with uncertainty attached. For general purpose, in the human world, that will always be the case. This is problematic when you have chatbots spouting sure things all the time.

For Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré highlights the role of ChatGPT between divorced couples.

“Empathy and validation are important components of any kind of mental health treatment or mental health intervention, but it can’t stop with empathy and validation,” she said. “You can’t just continually tell somebody you know who’s looking for emotional support that their way is the right way, and their worldview is the only correct worldview.”

The “role of a good therapist,” said Lembke, “is to make people recognize their blind spots — the ways in which they’re contributing to the problem, encouraging them to see the other person’s perspective, giving them linguistic tools to de-escalate conflicts with partners and to try to find their way through conflict by using language to communicate more effectively.”

Most of the couples interviewed had existing issues, but when one or both spouses start turning to a hype man with encyclopedic knowledge, you’re going to run into trouble.