links for 5 Oct 2025

Lina Khan: Activision-Blizzard buyout is ‘harming both gamers and developers’ by Andy Chalk. As dominant firms become too-big-to-care, they can make things worse for their customers without having to worry about the consequences.

A MacBook pro for $280 is unheard of — so grab one before this deal disappears on Mashable. (Lots of bargains on Intel-based Apple hardware. Not very future-proof for running Mac OS on, but it looks like people have done reasonably well at getting Linux going on these…even the touch bar.)

New California law restricts HOA fines to $100 per violation, giving homeowners a break by Nadia Lathan. (People should live in the houses they like, not in the houses that their neighbors think a future buyer might like. No one HOA could do this reform on its own, but coordinating it at the state level keeps every homeowner/future seller on the same level.)

It’s the bad deals, stupid by Bob Sullivan. The real problem is we don’t even try to measure the things that matter. And we constantly hone in on the wrong things. (as long as bigger and bigger companies need to keep extracting more and more value from each legit transaction, this will keep going. See the Lina Khan story above, also living with a bigger ad duopoly)

How to stop Google from invading your privacy and others’ when you share links by jlk. (I updated the script that checks links on this blog to make sure I don’t include any of these.)

A Point of View on AI by Alex Cassidy. We already have a pretty good idea what a colorized and restored version of this photograph would look like, and we didn’t need generative AI to do it.

The promise of an AI utopia is crumbling before our eyes by Andrew Orlowski. Generative AI is too useful to disappear, but a plateau has huge implications for OpenAI, the stock market, investors and policymakers. If AI isn’t getting rapidly better, then businesses can wait until it gets cheaper, and it will. Only fools will rush into AI now. (but none of the Big AI decision-makers want to catch the blame for crashing the USA’s stock market before the November 2026 elections, so things are just going to get wackier and wackier)