Jason Koebler
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jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Jason Koebler
@jasonkoebler.bsky.social
55K followers 1.2K following 2.7K posts
Journalist @404Media.co

Signal: jason.404 // email: [email protected]
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jasonkoebler.bsky.social
saving for posterity: my first successful print on this machine…a copy of an urgent care bill I have not paid yet. beautiful, amazing
November 11, 2025 at 5:34 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
here is how far I have gotten which is actually great progress
November 8, 2025 at 9:04 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
sir a second nano banana email has hit your inbox
November 6, 2025 at 9:16 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
yes sir, i made the illustrations for this investor dek in nano banana
Bring your vision to life with advanced image editing Instantly edit images with Nano Banana, the viral new image editor in the Gemini app. Generate high-quality visuals for presentations, social posts, or mock-ups faster than ever.
November 6, 2025 at 8:59 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
these actually are all-time numbers tho. first ballot hall of famer:

Nancy Pelosi portfolio gains over last decade: 816 percent
S&P 500: 229 percent

goes crazy
The numbers put up by Pelosi in her Hall of Fame career are undeniable. Over the last decade, Pelosi’s portfolio returned an incredible 816 percent, according to public disclosure records. The S&P 500, meanwhile, has returned roughly 229 percent. Awe-inspired fans and analysts theorized that her almost omniscient ability to make correct, seemingly high-risk stock decisions may have stemmed from decades spent analyzing and perhaps even predicting decisions that would be made by the federal government that could impact companies’ stock prices. For example, Paul Pelosi sold $500,000 worth of Visa stock in July, weeks before the U.S. government announced a civil lawsuit against the company, causing its stock price to decrease.
November 6, 2025 at 8:24 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Am obviously not anywhere near the first person to point this out, but I think it's a pretty useful framework. AI is also a nuts-and-bolts logistical nightmare for a workforce that is constantly being harassed, threatened, and forced to defend their work. They are fixing/fending off AI bullshit
“The last five years of library work, of public service work has been a nightmare, with ongoing harassment and censorship efforts that you’re either experiencing directly or that you’re hearing from your other colleagues,” Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told me in a phone interview. “And then in the last year-and-a-half or so, you add to it this enormous push for the AIfication of your library, and the enormous demands on your time. Now you have these already overworked public servants who are being expected to do even more because there’s an expectation to use AI, or that AI will do it for you. But they’re dealing with things like the influx of AI-generated books and other materials that are being pushed by vendors.”
November 6, 2025 at 4:51 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc
The future being pushed by both AI boosters and educational censors is one where access to information is tightly controlled. Children will not be allowed to read certain books or learn certain narratives. “Research” will be performed only through one of a select few artificial intelligence tools owned by AI giants which are uniformly aligned behind the Trump administration and which have gone to the ends of the earth to prevent their black box machines from spitting out “woke” answers lest they catch the ire of the administration. School boards and library boards, forced to comply with increasingly restrictive laws, funding cuts, and the threat of being defunded entirely, leap at the chance to be considered forward looking by embracing AI tools, or apply for grants from government groups like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which is increasingly giving out grants specifically to AI projects.
November 6, 2025 at 4:48 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
I talked to librarians, authors who have had their books banned, and groups that support them for this article. The glee with which schools, libraries, governments, and companies are replacing human workers and nuance with AI would not be possible w/o the successful war on schools and libraries
“One thing that I try to make clear any time I talk about book bans is that it’s not about the books, it’s about deputizing bigots to do the ugly work of defunding all of our public institutions of learning,” Maggie Tokuda-Hall, a cofounder of Authors Against Book Bans, told me. “The current proliferation of AI that we see particularly in the library and education spaces would be possible at the speed and scale that is happening without the precedent of book bans leading into it. They are very comfortable bedfellows because once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.” Justin, a cohost of the podcast librarypunk, told me that the project of offloading cognitive capacity to AI continues apace: “Part of a fascist project to offload the work of thinking, especially the reflective kind of thinking that reading, study, and community engagement provide,” Justin said. “That kind of thinking cultivates empathy and challenges your assumptions. It's also something you have to practice. If we can offload that cognitive work, it's far too easy to become reflexive and hateful, while having a robot cheerleader telling you that you were right about everything all along.”
November 6, 2025 at 4:45 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Going to go ship a bunch of merch orders right now. Orders placed in the next ~hour will go out today. We have a bunch of new designs! And old favs!

404media.myshopify.com?srsltid=AfmB...
November 5, 2025 at 5:32 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
www.thebanner.com/sports/oriol...
November 5, 2025 at 5:01 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
some film pics I took there
a person surfing on the river wave
November 5, 2025 at 2:48 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
I obviously don't think that this is good, but I think it's hard to say that it's not going to be effective. Advertiser spend is up, cost per ad is up, advertisers are using these tools. From a revenue side, it pains me to say that this appears to be working

s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/fi...
In Q3, the total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 14%. Impression growth was healthy across all regions, driven by engagement and user growth, particularly on video surfaces. The average price per ad increased 10% year-over-year, benefiting from increased advertiser demand, largely driven by improved ad performance. This was partially offset by impression growth, particularly from lower-monetizing regions and surfaces Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, our AI recommendation systems are delivering higher quality and more relevant content, which led to 5% more time spent on Facebook in Q3 and 10% on Threads. Video is a particular bright spot, with video time spent on Instagram up more than 30% since last year. As video continues to grow across our apps, Reels now has an annual run rate of over $50 billion. Improvements in our recommendation systems will also become even more leveraged as the volume of AI-created content grows. Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we're going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those. Recommendation systems that understand all of this content more deeply and can show you the right content to help you achieve your goals are going to be increasingly valuable. Our ads business continues to perform very well, largely due to improvements in our AI ranking systems as well. This quarter, we saw meaningful advances from unifying different models into simpler, more general models -- which drive both better performance and efficiency. And now the annual run-rate going through our completely end-to-end AI-powered ad tools has passed $60 billion. Within our ads products, we’re seeing continued momentum with Advantage+. In Q3, we completed the roll out of our streamlined campaign creation flow for Advantage+ Lead campaigns, so now advertisers running sales, app or lead campaigns have end-to-end automation turned on from the beginning, allowing our systems to look across our platform to optimize performance by automatically choosing criteria like who to show the ads to and where to show them. The annual run-rate of revenue running through our end-to-end automated solutions has now reached $60 billion following the implementation of the new streamlined creation flow as we continue to see more advertisers leverage the performance benefits of our solutions. Within our Advantage+ creative suite, the number of advertisers using at least one of our video generation features was up 20% versus the prior quarter as adoption of image animation and video expansion continues to scale. We’ve also added more generative AI features to make it easier for advertisers to optimize their ad creatives and drive increased performance. In Q3, we introduced AI-generated music so advertisers can have music generated for their ad that aligns with the tone and message of the creative.
November 3, 2025 at 3:32 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Meta's consumer-facing AI products SUCK, but its advertiser-facing AI products are better, especially with targeting and surveillance. This is obvious from their earnings calls; every advertiser spend metric is up

The ads are performing better so companies are spending more
- Less money on creative means more budget for spend, and more varieties of ads: I’ve written about this before, but a big trend in advertising right now is AI-powered ad creative trial and error. Using AI, it is now possible to make an essentially endless number of different variations of a single ad that uses slightly different language, slightly different images, slightly different calls to actions, and different links. AI targeting also means that “successful” variations of ads will essentially automatically find the audience that they’re supposed to. This means that companies can just flood social media with zillions of variations of low-effort AI ads, put their “spend” (their ad budget) into the versions that perform best, and let the targeting algorithms do the rest. AI in this case is a scaling tactic. There is no need to spend tons of time, money, and human resources refining ad copy and designing thoughtful, clever, funny, charming, or eye-catching ads. You can simply publish tons of different versions of low-effort bullshit, and largely people will only see the ones that perform well.
November 3, 2025 at 3:22 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
This is where I've thought our slop hell is going for a while and it's now Meta's stated objective. We are seeing the beginnings of it now. Do you want to go see [the big game] to support [your favorite team]?

Ticketmaster is running this on Facebook now:
four different ads with AI generated people for different football team tickets
November 3, 2025 at 3:18 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
AI is awesome
October 31, 2025 at 5:39 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Excited to talk with teachers about gen AI in classrooms at 7 eastern today with PBS News Hour classroom!

us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
October 30, 2025 at 9:39 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
bro why please leave me alone
A slack menu that says "Trick or treat..." "Make slack spooky"
October 29, 2025 at 9:10 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
This is so bleak:

www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...
Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. a16z’s Speedrun is also backing: Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.” Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop. Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.” Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says. Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.” Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.” First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.” Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”
October 28, 2025 at 6:26 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
the diagram
A figure outlining the first enteral ventilation trial in humans. Image: Fujii, Tasuku et al.
October 23, 2025 at 4:44 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
Made a short doc about a man in LA who still makes neon signs. He calls it “the lost and found art.” Check out the full thing on YouTube: youtu.be/SSNfDodj674?...
October 20, 2025 at 4:00 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
damn what does it mean
October 17, 2025 at 11:08 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
orioles mentioned
October 15, 2025 at 2:08 AM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
yes it’s available. my used blanket that I’m asking the MSRP for
October 10, 2025 at 2:21 AM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
We need and want your help: If you know of specific book bans/orgs/local groups pushing for book bans and trying to get teachers fired etc, please let me know so I can request docs about what's going on / investigate further
From our proposal: “Book banning and educational censorship (the banning of LGBTQIA+ studies, the study of slavery and systemic racism, the war on “DEI” and trans people) has become a political cudgel and core rallying point for the current administration. These bans have been pushed through by organized groups such as Moms for Liberty and high-profile politicians, and impact the daily lives, careers, and future prospects of students, their families, and teachers, while simultaneously managing to become a core part of the culture war. These documents about censorship are themselves difficult to obtain and are at risk of being memory holed and forgotten about without a systematic effort to obtain, publish, and archive them. This project will show how censorship works and will shed light on the sheer scale of these censorship efforts, at a time when public trust in the government is at an all-time low.” Over the next few weeks, we will be filing hundreds of public records requests with state, local, and federal governments and school districts with the hope of unearthing more information about the groups, politicians, and monied interests that have been pushing book bans and educational censorship on American public schools and libraries. As we get these documents back over the course of the next few months, we will be making them available to the public through Document Cloud, with the hopes of creating an enduring archive of public records about educational censorship in the United States. We will also, of course, be reporting on the documents we get back and will be turning them into articles that you can read on 404 Media.
October 9, 2025 at 2:39 PM
jasonkoebler.bsky.social
oooookaaaayyyyy
October 7, 2025 at 1:51 PM