GoKawiil
Tech News
In a thread posted to X, Pope Leo XIV argued against granting AI models legal personhood or rights, calling machines 'tools, not persons.' He warned that such status could obscure human accountability for harm caused by AI and leave victims facing a 'faceless entity' instead of a responsible party.
Threads is piloting a feature called "Threads Friends," letting users share posts privately with up to 50 selected followers, nicknamed "Thriends." The test is currently limited to Ireland, Italy and Japan, with the app suggesting frequent contacts to populate the list automatically, though users can customize it. A green bubble at the top of the feed lets users view friends-only posts shared in the past 24 hours.
X has rolled out a UI prompt that shows a large hand or arm graphic pointing at the 'promote' button while users compose posts. Numerous users posted screenshots on October 26-27, 2026 expressing surprise and annoyance at the sudden animation appearing mid-typing. X has not issued any official explanation for the feature.
A developer has published Shitter, an open-source fork of the Nitter project that acts as a privacy-focused front-end for Twitter. It strips out JavaScript and ads, routes all requests through its own backend using Twitter's unofficial API, and is distributed as a multi-architecture Docker image. The project accepts contributions only via patch files submitted on issues rather than pull requests.
Longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson posted on X that he had built an AI agent to log negative comments about him, profile the commenters, map their social connections, and find their emails. He said the agent would send a mass email detailing critics' comments to their extended social networks, before later posting that the entire thing was a joke.
A clip posted by the X account Teslaconomics shows a driver eating a large spread of food—including sushi, sausages and stew—while a Tesla, apparently a Cybertruck, drives itself on a busy road using FSD. The post went viral, drawing heavy criticism, and is part of a wider trend of Tesla drivers posting videos of themselves multitasking, including working or gaming, while the car drives. The poster later clarified they were wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses to record hands-free and that the car was using Tesla's 'FSD (Supervised)' feature.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week's three strikes on Russian company Yandex's data centers reduced bot activity across social media, saying platforms felt less divisive and less manipulated as a result. Separately, X users and tech commentators noted that Elon Musk's post engagement numbers dropped sharply in the days following the strikes, with daily like averages falling from tens of thousands to under 5,000 on some posts.
Futurism tested a viral claim that ChatGPT flatters users by estimating their intelligence percentile. Using brand-new chat sessions with no prior history, ChatGPT repeatedly told testers they ranked in the 70th-95th percentile despite acknowledging it had no real basis for the estimate. Rival chatbots including Claude, Grok, Copilot, and Gemini declined to make any such ranking, saying they lack access to other users' data.
A technology commentary argues that widespread dislike of AI reflects frustration with how companies are aggressively pushing the technology, not the technology itself. It notes that US states have proposed or passed over 2,100 AI-related bills in three years, a tenfold increase, and points to open-source alternatives to OpenAI, Google and Anthropic as giving consumers more choice than they had during the social media era.
A first-person essay dated October 2, 2026 describes the writer's feelings of sadness and hopelessness when encountering AI news, despite being well positioned to pursue AI-related jobs. The author, a teaching assistant with skills in web development, Rust, and operating systems, says peers are pursuing $500k salaries at companies like OpenAI while the writer feels such work represents a loss of craft and creativity, comparing it to Charlie Chaplin's factory scene in Modern Times.
Machine learning engineer Matt Hardy posted a joke about sandboxing AI agents by giving them Delta Airlines WiFi, which drew about 11,000 likes and a laughing-emoji reply from Elon Musk. A day later Musk posted a near-identical version of the joke on X, which gathered roughly 155,000 likes and drew accusations in the replies that he had lifted the line without attribution.
Following a Mississippi grand jury's decision not to bring charges in the death of Nolan Wells, Black users on Threads voiced outrage and accusations of a cover-up, with commentary from figures like D.L. Hughley. The reaction is cited as the latest sign that Threads has become a central hub for the kind of cultural commentary and activism once associated with Black Twitter.