Shira Ovide
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shiraovide.bsky.social
Shira Ovide
@shiraovide.bsky.social
13K followers 1.6K following 440 posts
Washington Post technology writer. New Yorker. Bird watcher. Grumpy. Sign up for my (free) Tech Friend newsletter: https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/the-tech-friend/
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shiraovide.bsky.social
I don't know the details here, but Google ads and organic results are gamed by scammers who want to grab people looking for customer service numbers.

Truly you cannot trust a phone number that pops up from a Google search. Just don't.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/b...
From a NY Times article: David Welles, a retired lawyer, had been struggling with his new iPad for hours when he tried to call tech support. But instead of dialing Microsoft to help him connect his email, the phone number he found on Google put him in touch with cybercriminals. The smooth talking scammer who answered called himself Alex and built a rapport with Mr. Welles, assuring him that he could resolve his tech headaches. Before too long, Mr. Welles downloaded remote access software, both on his iPhone and his laptop, allowing the scammer to burrow deep inside of his devices, where he stored his username and passwords on his hard drive. “A big mistake,” said Mr. Welles, who is 87. “All of a sudden, on the laptop, I could see it going blank, and little lights flashing around.”
December 12, 2025 at 9:21 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Genuine question: What if there are giant startups that never go public. Why would they?

A private company like SpaceX and OpenAI can raise infinite money from private investors. They can arrange stock sales to cash out earlier investors/employees.

So why? www.ft.com/content/6f00...
Get ready for a spectacular IPO boom from the big beasts of Silicon Valley
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will break new ground — potentially with the scale of their losses
www.ft.com
December 12, 2025 at 8:21 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
I require a 10,000 word investigation on why this gym chain uses these weird pod tubes as gated entry.

It seems like the Rube Goldberg of doors. hellgatenyc.com/puregym-entr...
We Need to Talk About the 'Dystopian' PureGym Entry Tubes
Finally, a local gym that feels more like waiting on the TSA line.
hellgatenyc.com
December 12, 2025 at 4:19 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
We did it, grownups! We killed a fun thing for kids. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
‘Six-Seven’ Is Over
Grown-ups killed it.
www.theatlantic.com
December 12, 2025 at 3:09 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Epic Games has now (probably) forced Apple and Google to make dramatic changes to a highly profitable business that consumers can or will feel.

Did even government Big Tech antitrust actions have this big an impact?

www.theverge.com/news/843265/...
Tim Sweeney on the future of Fortnite after another win over Apple
Epic Games’s CEO talked to The Verge after appeals court judges ruled against Apple.
www.theverge.com
December 12, 2025 at 12:45 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Petty examples of serious intracompany divisions at Meta in 2025 (NYT today, left) and in 2018 (right) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/t...

www.wsj.com/articles/beh...
On Thursday, Mr. Wang plans to host his annual A.I. holiday party in San Francisco with Elad Gil, a start-up investor. (The invitation featured an A.I.-generated image of humanoid robots drinking cocktails next to a Christmas tree, according to a copy seen by The Times.) It’s unclear if any top Meta executives were invited. Some Facebook staffers considered the WhatsApp unit a mystery and sometimes poked fun at it. After WhatsApp employees hung up posters over the walls instructing hallway passersby to “please keep noise to a minimum,” some Facebook employees mocked them with chants of “Welcome to WhatsApp—Shut up!” according to people familiar with the matter. Some employees even took issue with WhatsApp’s desks, which were a holdover from the Mountain View location and larger than the standard desks in the Facebook offices. WhatsApp also negotiated for nicer bathrooms, with doors that reach the floor. WhatsApp conference rooms were off-limits to other Facebook employees.
December 10, 2025 at 3:30 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
You know, it feels notable that WhatsApp use among U.S. teens (who love their iMessage blue bubbles) went up from 17% in 2022 to 24%. www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...
WhatsApp is one platform that stands out for its growth in recent years. Today, roughly a quarter of teens say they use WhatsApp, up from 17% in 2022.
December 10, 2025 at 3:06 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
We're going to need a new mythical beast if there's a nearly trillion-dollar unicorn. www.wsj.com/business/spa...
Exclusive | SpaceX in Talks for Share Sale That Would Boost Valuation to $800 Billion
The company’s CFO told investors about the transaction in recent days, say people familiar with the matter.
www.wsj.com
December 5, 2025 at 7:41 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
What if when Uber's app launched, you had to use VERY SPECIFIC WORDS to summon a car or else it might show up 4 streets over or drive you to Albania?

I suspect we would have given up. And yet:
www.theverge.com/tech/837287/...
I tried Comet’s “find important unanswered emails” prompt in the other AI browsers. They all highlighted other previously skipped, keyword-stuffed pitches. None flagged the two emails I was interested in. So I tried even harder: Find unanswered emails in which I had previously responded with interest or feature personalized requests/feedback. Then, evaluate which ones I should respond to based on timeliness and keywords such as “embargo” featuring dates in the next two weeks. Ignore emails with multiple follow-ups to which I have not responded. This went slightly better with Comet and Dia. Both surfaced multiple relevant email threads, but only one ultimately required a response. Copilot in Edge highlighted one relevant thread and five junk pitches. Gemini in Chrome was a dud: It surfaced only a Black Friday marketing email. In Atlas, ChatGPT merely replied, “It looks like Gmail successfully returned the unread message IDs, but the actual content for those messages didn’t come back — the batch read returned empty, which means the Gmail API didn’t provide the email bodies this round.” It proceeded to ask two long-winded follow-ups. At this point, my options were to refine my prompt further or give up. I gave up.
December 4, 2025 at 12:54 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
What if A.I. companies just didn't use human metaphors like "soul" and "confessions?"
Headline of an OpenAI blog post that reads: How confessions can keep language models honest The headline of a LessWrong post about Claude that reads: Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document
December 4, 2025 at 12:37 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
I'm just a girl. Again standing in front of a megacap tech company. Asking them to stop using the word "factory" for things that are not factories.

www.geekwire.com/2025/amazon-...
Amazon unveils ‘frontier agents,’ new chips and private ‘AI factories’ in AWS re:Invent rollout
LAS VEGAS — Amazon is pitching a future where AI works while humans sleep, announcing a collection of what it calls "frontier agents" capable of handling complex, multi-day projects without needing a ...
www.geekwire.com
December 2, 2025 at 5:16 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
The only way to kill ragebait marketing is to stop paying attention to ragebait marketing. If you can.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
You might hate these companies’ ads. That’s the point.
Corporate marketers are embracing a strategy perfected by online influencers: Stoke rage and watch the attention roll in.
www.washingtonpost.com
December 2, 2025 at 12:31 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
The fed all the world's money and data into AI so it could suggest...a cozy bathrobe for mom, maybe from Victoria's Secret.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Bloomberg asked several AI bots — including Amazon’s Rufus, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Walmart Inc.’s Sparky — what to buy mom for Christmas. The top suggestion: a cozy bathrobe. Sparky recommended a pink hooded number emblazoned with “Mama Bear,” and ChatGPT suggested buying the robe from Victoria’s Secret. Perplexity Inc.’s AI bot proffered another option found on many gift guides: a $20 wooden photo frame from Etsy.
November 28, 2025 at 12:34 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
100% on board with dumping the terms "AI agents" and "agentic" (barf) with "AI assistants."

(Though I realize that could also describe Siri, Alexa etc)

..."Perplexity says its AI assistants, also called agents by other companies..." www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
Perplexity says its AI personal shopper ‘puts you first’
Ask a friend, or ask AI?
www.theverge.com
November 26, 2025 at 12:51 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Aha, the legal response: The boy using ChatGPT to plan his suicide violated the terms of service

www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
The company cited several rules within its terms of use that Raine appeared to have violated: Users under 18 years old are prohibited from using ChatGPT without consent from a parent or guardian. Users are also forbidden from using ChatGPT for “suicide” or “self-harm,” and from bypassing any of ChatGPT’s protective measures or safety mitigations. When Raine shared his suicidal ideations with ChatGPT, the bot did issue multiple messages containing the suicide hotline number, according to his family’s lawsuit. But his parents said their son would easily bypass the warnings by supplying seemingly harmless reasons for his queries, including by pretending he was just “building a character.”
November 26, 2025 at 12:43 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
"In a Venn diagram of people deeply concerned about Michelin ratings and people deeply concerned about cheesesteaks, the overlap is not large."

Nope, sorry. That overlap is me and my entire personality. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/d...
Michelin Honored the Cheesesteak. Not All Philadelphians Cheered.
www.nytimes.com
November 25, 2025 at 9:45 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Just remembering that the sale of U.S. TikTok got announced two months ago. How's that going?
November 25, 2025 at 8:16 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
I talked to researchers about Character AI’s new ban (or “ban?”) on teen users.

I don’t know if it will work. But hardly anyone is happy with current approaches to teens and tech.

So bans (see also: school phone bans and Australia) are a new experiment. wapo.st/3M3CZgf
Still, we can’t ignore the undercurrent behind Character.AI’s ban: Hardly anyone is happy with teens’ use of smartphones, social media and AI, which relies on parents and technology companies deploying often underused or ineffective child protections. That makes Character.AI, and schools with phone bans, closely watched experiments in a novel approach for the United States: trying to stop kids from using a technology at all.
November 25, 2025 at 5:33 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
AI slop is ruining tamales now.

by @davey.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Earlier this month, she posted two AI-generated tamale photos: one with sauce poured over the husks, and another showing tamales lying flat in a steamer. Both, she wrote, were obvious mistakes. The husks aren’t meant to be eaten; you remove them before adding sauce. And tamales should steam upright so the masa cooks evenly. “Little details like this are big red flags,” she told readers. “When you search for recipes, make sure they come from trusted human cooks who actually test their food.”
November 25, 2025 at 5:16 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
I said an exasperated "oof" out loud after reading the end of this great @kashhill.bsky.social & @jenvalentino.bsky.social piece. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/t...
What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality
www.nytimes.com
November 23, 2025 at 1:58 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Girl, you okay?
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...
A bar chart that shows the emojis most commonly used in ChatGPT messages. At least a quarter of the ChatGPT messages in a set of hundreds of thousands analyzed by the Washington Post contained the checkmark or brain emojis.
November 13, 2025 at 6:54 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
I know this may not FEEL surprising, but I still remember when pay TV subscriber numbers first started to go down just a bit (circa 2010?) and the fall happened very fast. www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-hou...
The cable TV industry is crossing a milestone: Only half of American households subscribe anymore.
For years, cable TV execs said they saw no evidence of cord-cutting. Not anymore.
www.businessinsider.com
November 13, 2025 at 1:11 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
This is sound public messaging to scam victims and future victims: www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...
“The most important thing that we can tell someone who becomes victimized by this is, you know, don’t be disappointed in yourself,” she added. “Don’t be upset with yourself that you fell to this kind of scam, because these people are experts. In some cases, their livelihood depends upon how much money they bring in to the scam center.”
November 13, 2025 at 1:02 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
Hi, I keep having to say that this is not a "factory" www.wsj.com/tech/ai/insi...
Exclusive | Inside Microsoft’s New AI ‘Super Factory’
The tech giant is building out huge data centers among the most advanced in the world as it rushes to meet demand for AI computing power.
www.wsj.com
November 12, 2025 at 9:51 PM
shiraovide.bsky.social
"The Post found [ChatGPT] began responses with variations on 'yes' 10 times more often than with versions of 'no.'"

Fascinating insights from an analysis of 47,000 ChatGPT chats.

wapo.st/3LzQUL2
How people really use ChatGPT, according to 47,000 conversations shared online
What do people ask the popular chatbot? We analyzed thousands of chats to identify common topics discussed by users and patterns in ChatGPT’s responses.
wapo.st
November 12, 2025 at 1:22 PM