404 Media

9 stories

404 MediaVoicesWorld of Warcraft: Forever Is Already Overrun with AI Slop World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imaginging of the legendary MMO, comes out Wednesday. The idea is to recapture the feeling of discovery and wonder players had when adventuring across its world for…

11.03

404 MediaVoicesVibe Coded AO3 Clone Site Down After Fanfic Authors Buried It With 2,000 Takedown Notices in a Single Day A vibe-coded site that scraped Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction works, reuploaded them and charged for audiobook versions is down now after the creator said they received over 2,000 takedown…

11.03

404 MediaVoicesVoting in 2026 Is Getting an AI Slop 'I Voted' Sticker It’s a small pleasure, but receiving an “I Voted” sticker after casting my ballot is one of my favorite parts of the whole voting process.

11.02

404 MediaVoicesReaping and sowing, CEO edition It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for…

11.02

404 MediaVoicesScientists Analyzed Thousands of Psychedelic Trips. They Found Something Disturbing Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever…

10.30

404 MediaVoicesProton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’ On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they…

10.30

404 MediaVoicesApple Is Entering Its Slop Era My ears perked up when I heard Apple’s new foldable phones were cracking . I licked my lips when the company announced it’s releasing a touch-screen laptop .

10.30

404 MediaVoicesManifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it…

10.29

404 MediaVoicesSenators Demand Meta Answer for 'Pervert Glasses' Following 404 Media Investigation Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company answer for the privacy concerns its smart glasses pose to the public.

10.29

The name is the button.

An agent writes the code now, and a human thumb hovers over Accept all a hundred times a day. The honest question of this decade is what, exactly, you just accepted. So I read the diff.

Eight years as a backend engineer in Stockholm, back in Tokyo since 2023, and I still ship something small most nights, usually badly. My one rule: the only real review of a model is the thing you built with it. That is why there is no leaderboard on this site.

Around a hundred and forty sources come through — the labs' own posts, the papers, the tools, the runtimes and languages nobody is watching yet, the chip under the demo, and the newsletters people actually forward. What is moving gets counted so the week reads at a glance, and every few days I explain one mechanism in plain words.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one image and the link to whoever wrote it. We never reproduce the post; the images belong to their authors. A post written in Japanese appears in Japanese, exactly as it was published, and the link goes to the original.

— Yuki Halvorsen, Tokyo