Crystal

Old enough to remember when this country cared about laws.

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@cathyrusson Do we have a full list of these things?

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@EdKrassen Also lets not pretend the US has been trying to get Morrocans to storm that town for years.

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@FoxTrueCrime SHE told him if he left her alone "something bad would happen".

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@MarcWeinbergWX NC

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@anishmoonka Man this has always bothered me but I didn't know all the reasoning for why it happened. Ugh.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Try to find where a picture came from today and Google hands you a shopping list. That comes out of a legal settlement. Getty Images complained to European regulators that Google was promoting piracy, the two sides made a deal in February 2018, and one term of it deleted the button that took you straight to an image's original file.

The "Search by image" button vanished the same day. Getty walked away with a licensing deal and bigger copyright notices on the page, Google walked away with Getty's photo library to use across its products, and the tool that traced a picture back to where it came from quietly lost its spot.

March 2022 finished the job. Right-clicking an image in Chrome stopped saying "Search Google for image" and started saying "Search with Google Lens." By August, uploading a picture to Google Images sent you to Lens too, with the old behavior tucked behind a small "Find image source" link.

Lens was built to answer a different question. Google says it handles close to 20 billion visual searches a month and that a fifth of those are people shopping. It compares your photo against a catalog of more than 45 billion things for sale, then shows prices, reviews, and ads. Google's search advertising made $63.3 billion in the three months ending in June, up 17% on last year. About $700 million a day.

"Where did this image come from" sells nothing. "What is this and where can I buy one" sells everything.

The haystack got bigger too. Google's own image generator has spat out more than 50 billion pictures, up from 5 billion last October. Searching for exact copies only works if a photo gets taken once and then passed around. A generated image gets made once, for one person, and plenty of them never get posted anywhere at all.

Nothing under the hood broke, which is the part I find annoying. TinEye, a Toronto outfit doing this since 2008, has more than 85 billion images on file and still finds the crops and resizes of whatever you hand it. Lens has an "exact matches" tab buried in it. Google blocks face matches for privacy, so fact-checkers and investigators keep Yandex and TinEye open next to it.

The button that answers "where did this come from" is now a tab you have to know about. The one that answers "where can I buy this" opens by itself.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Hunter Biden: “People believed there was this thing called the Biden crime family. I didn’t do a single piece of business when my dad was president. I made basically $200K a year selling paintings. Don and Eric have done over $1.3B just in contracts for underlying companies they have an ownership stake in with the DoD”

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

I dont know, after 2 failed deliveries today and now 2 refunds processing on my card I'm thinking @Walmart membership isn't worth it.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Erin Brockovich on data centers: “You’re pushing people too far at this point. You’re taking their water. Their air is jeopardized. Their land is jeopardized. Their sanctuary is jeopardized. Their wildlife is jeopardized. The trees, the rivers, the creeks, the birds, all of it”

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed” @_alexreisner @TheAtlantic

In “Generative AI is an engineering disaster” https://t.co/cm7G3yZRcL

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

Watching people rewrite Lindsay Graham's legacy is very Trump world 2026.

Not a good guy. At all.
Don't try and rewrite his life now.

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@JavierBlas @opinion This is why nobody turns to the media anymore.

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@MeghanMcCain

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@jpou91 @KathyLette Ymm who to trust...women telling you what they like in a man, or men complaining about lonliness....decisions!

[BRICS News @BRICSinfo]

JUST IN: 🇧🇷🇳🇴 Brazil officially eliminated from the FIFA World Cup after losing to Norway.

[Marc Weinberg @MarcWeinbergWX]

HAALAND is Superman!!!! It feels like every time he touches the ball it ends up in the back of the net.

[Crystal @CrystalCorbin]

@AnnaBower Watched 3 times already. Love it

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

X has suddenly banned an account documenting Trump's corrupt stock trades seemingly without explanation.

[PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes]

This guy was two years old when Obama became president