By Adam Bumas

Today’s guest writer is Adam Bumas, who is an outstanding internet culture writer and a regular contributor to Garbage Day, one of my favorite newsletters. Have a great weekend!

Once And Future Emoji

This week, the Unicode Consortium began the beta review period for Unicode 16.0, the newest update to the standard catalog of characters used by virtually all digital programs. The latest version boasts 5,185 new characters, including 3,995 ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. If you absolutely need your pictograms hot off the presses, then don’t fret: They’ve also added seven new emoji. Once the beta ends on July 2, you’ll have a wealth of new ways to communicate. For example, if you’re feeling sleepy, you can take your pick between Hieroglyph 13C2A (“classifier lying, sleeping, spending the night”) and the new “tired” emoji. 

Unicode, Inc.

For Sale, Never Worn

Humane is a tech start-up founded by former Apple employees which was valued at $850 million last year. Based on that figure, it makes sense that the company is reportedly seeking a sale for between $750 million and $1 billion. But it may be hard for Humane to find buyers at that price, considering just a month ago they released their first consumer product, the AI Pin, to disastrous public reception. Users found the functionality badly limited — as a computer, as an AI tool, and even as a pin (the battery regularly got uncomfortably hot). A pin you can’t wear doesn’t bode well for a 10-figure buyout.

Liana Baker, Mark Gurman, Shirin Ghaffary, and Katie Roof, Bloomberg

Satoshi

The creator of Bitcoin was completely anonymous, and used the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.” It’s still unknown who Satoshi is, but as of Monday, the London High Court has officially determined who he isn’t. Craig Wright, a computer scientist who has claimed to be Satoshi for years, was ruled by Judge James Mellor to have had no involvement with the creation of Bitcoin. The judge also ruled that Wright committed extensive forgery and fraud pretending otherwise. Wright’s motives for the decade of lies are clear, since whoever Satoshi really is would have a claim on over 1.1 million bitcoins, currently worth roughly $77 billion — or if you go by the rates of the first-ever bitcoin transaction in 2010, 220 Papa John’s pizzas.

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge

Unclogged

Belle Delphine, a model and social media provocateur, created an internet sensation in July 2019 when she started selling jars of her bathwater for $35 apiece. Delphine, who’s credited with codifying the “e-girl” style, sold out multiple tubs’ worth. However, Delphine revealed earlier this month that she never saw a penny of the bathwater money. Since the bathwater violated Paypal’s terms of service, every single jar carried a $2,500 penalty, and so Paypal closed her account and confiscated $90,000 of revenue. Lucky for her, Paypal’s rules have changed since then, and after her comments drew attention the service restored Delphine’s account and access to the money. At press time, Craig Wright has not made any claims of being Belle Delphine.

Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider

Link Rot

Chances are you’ve been given the advice, “Anything you put on the internet lasts forever.” Unfortunately, entropy comes for us all, online or offline. A study released last week estimates that 38 percent of all web pages from 2013 are inaccessible today. That number drops for more recent years, but the researchers weren’t able to access 8 percent of web pages and 18 percent of tweets from 2023 (back when they were still called tweets). Efforts like the Internet Archive help mitigate these losses, but they can’t get everything: Belle Delphine’s online store is gone, never to return.

Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero, Pew Research Center

AI Tunes

Suno is a platform for creating and sharing AI-generated music tracks. This week, they announced they’ve received $125 million in funding, the highest figure for any AI audio company since people started using the term “AI.” So where’s all that money going? Mostly the same jokes you’d expect with any new internet-based toy. The most popular track on all of Suno, with over 900,000 streams, is a “Shape of You”-esque dance track called “Cat,” where the lyrics are the word “cat” repeated over and over. Other popular tracks include “Capybara” – a similar idea but with the bold creative decision of throwing in “capy, capy, bara, bara.” 

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day

Carbon

However impressive an AI song might be, under the hood, all AI software is still computers operating the same way they have for decades, and that means data centers. Microsoft, the single largest investor in AI technologies, has been building dozens of those centers. Their latest sustainability report shows that carbon emissions from these investments have increased by 30.9 percent year over year. Microsoft has announced several plans for how to get back on track to their goal of being carbon negative by 2030, including a resolution to “accelerate technology breakthroughs through investments and AI capabilities” — which sounds like it’s saying that a sage, carbon-spewing neural network will be better equipped to figure out how exactly that one’s supposed to work.

Steven Downes, Sustainability Magazine

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