The death toll from Hurricane Helene has now reached 91 as Asheville, isolated by floods, struggles to get supplies airlifted to emergency workers. / Associated Press
Every time a climate disaster like Helene happens, insurance companies gouge customers, who complain to politicians, who claim climate disasters rarely happen. / How Things Work
Leonard Leo led the right-wing takeover of America's judiciary. Now one of his organizations is trying to block the efforts of a group that educates lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. / The Guardian
See also: Using an absurd legal basis, a Leo-funded think tank is suing the Consumer Product Safety Commission, arguing its structure is unconstitutional. / Rolling Stone
From inside Shein warehouses, gig workers—who don't have the same protections as full-time staff—are posting videos to expose grueling working conditions. / WIRED
“Perhaps this is appealing to you, but I find this revolting.” The future of your Instagram and Facebook feeds is Meta's own AI-generated content. / Pixel Envy
Why AI is like the advent of the microwave oven: It's good at certain tasks and underwhelming at others—and just try to convince its advocates otherwise. / The Atlantic
Hardly a surprise, but according to a new FTC report, social media companies are gathering data far beyond users' expectations, sometimes with thousands of attributes per user. / EFF
See also: Ireland is fining Meta $101 million for “storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.” / Ars Technica
According to a new study, “There will never be enough computing power to create AGI… because we'd run out of natural resources long before we'd even get close.” / Radboud Universiteit
When AI scores higher on an IQ test than a third of people, have we “reached peak human?” That depends on whether “more” is necessarily “better.” / VentureBeat
See also: The case for having lots of kids. / The New Yorker
Because of a legal dispute with a copyright group, a vast swath of popular music is currently blocked on YouTube. / Variety
Postcards were the memes of their day a century ago, replete with cats and everything. / BBC
How the 1937 hoax photo of a man holding a giant grasshopper—that later became a popular postcard—came to be. / Boing Boing
On Friday, the Chicago White Sox lost their 121st game of the season, the most for any Major League Baseball team in modern history. / ESPN
In a list of the world's 38 coolest neighborhoods, Marseille's Notre-Dame-du-Mont tops them all. / Time Out
Unrelated: A collaborative map for anyone interested in urban fruit harvesting. / Falling Fruit