Gm. I went to a Lana Del Rey concert in London yesterday. It was the best concert I’ve ever been to, except for the fact that I was surrounded by girls with braces and my lower back was sore from all the standing. Getting old stinks.

— Stephen Flanders

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🏠 SOCIAL MEDIA

Reddit’s Final Warning

The Reddit protests have been going on for a month now, and it’s been full of twists and turns. There have been blackouts, a hack and a ransom, threats, and an apparent victory by CEO Steve Huffman’s side.

But, victories in war are rarely won cleanly. There are always a few holdouts continuing the cause.

In Reddit’s case, these are the mods who are labeling their subreddits as NSFW.

An Effective Protest

While the blackout protests are dead, there are still a good amount of mods who continue the fight by keeping their subreddit NSFW, including r/PICs, r/Military, and r/JustNoMil.

This is an effective protest because it age-gates the subreddit and makes it ineligible for advertising.

Basically, it lowers users who can use the channel and kills any monetization efforts. So, the two things that Reddit absolutely does not want.

And they are fed up.

NSFW Is An Abstract Idea

Typically, the NSFW label is reserved for subreddits with a lot of adult content (aka porn subreddits). Obviously, r/PICs, r/Military, and r/JustNoMil are not porn subreddits.

Couple that with the fact that the NSFW labels are hurting Reddit’s business, and you can see why they want the mods to take down the labels.

And not only do they want it, they are demanding it, saying that if the mods refuse, they will lose their positions.

It’s a drastic measure, but it’s also nothing out of the ordinary in this increasingly brutal fight.

Now we’ll just have to see if the mods yield, or if they fight to the death.

The Bottom Line: Reddit is holding no punches.

Mobile-first apps = iPhone. AI-first apps = ??

Wispr is building the next leap in personal computing – the consumer hardware platform for AI-first applications.

They’re a rare company building in the AI space today with a hardware angle. Their belief is that while software & AI has evolved with LLMs, the input devices like keyboards have stayed the same. To redesign input interfaces, they’ve raised close to 15M from NEA and 8VC in addition to Stanford AI professors like Chris Manning & Richard Socher’s fund AIX ventures.

A big revolution is coming. And it’s going to be spearheaded by innovation throughout the stack.

Wispr was also recognized as one of the top 100 AI companies by CBInsights in their most recent report. They were placed in the “AI assistants & HMIs” category along with Anthropic, Inflection, and Adept AI.

Although Wispr is still in stealth, you can learn more about Wispr here.

🏠 CRYPTO

Gemini Is Fed Up

Billionaire beefs are the best kind of beefs. We got it with Elon and Zuck. Now, we’re getting it with the Winklevoss Twins and Barry Silbert.

To get you up to speed: the Winklevoss Twins own the crypto exchange Gemini, while Barry Silbert owns the crypto conglomerate DCG.

Gemini offered users a program where they can earn an interest rate on their crypto. In order to provide this yield, they deposited $1.2B of crypto into the lending platform Genesis, which is owned by DCG. Genesis would then pass the earnings to Gemini, who would then use it to pay users.

Unfortunately, Genesis went bankrupt. Which means that Gemini has a crap ton of money stuck in Genesis.

Like everyone else with money stuck in bankrupt crypto platforms, the Winklevoss Twins are not happy. Also like everyone else, they are taking to Twitter and lawsuits to voice their frustrations.

DCG says all of the yelling about fraud from Gemini is a big nothing-burger, and that they will be repaid when the bankruptcy case is closed.

For the sake of all of the customers with funds stuck in Genesis, let’s hope they are right.

The Big Picture: It’s going to be difficult for crypto to go mainstream with drama like this happening so frequently.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

What else is going on?

• GPT-4 is now generally available.

• The good version of TweetDeck is back.

• The FDA green-lighted the first drug shown to slow Alzheimer’s.

• The Vision Pro will initially be available by appointment only.

Stat: 100M: Threads now has 100M users, and in getting there in less than a week they are the fastest app to ever reach the milestone, easily beating ChatGPT’s previous record of 2 months.

Rabbit hole: Superrational (Skunk Ledger)

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47 years. Damn.