I got back to Los Angeles last night after a great week of business and pleasure in New York City.

I had a 2-day offsite with my CNET Group colleagues, attended the obligatory gay booster shot Broadway play, and popped in at the HarperCollins offices.

This was my first IRL meeting with several of the people who'll be working on the launch of my first book, Money Proud, later this year (they read this - hi! 👋🏼). It was very exciting!

I had several takeaways from the conversation that I'm excited to share with you. But it'll have to wait until next week -- ya boy's tired.

Still rounded up some hot links, though -- browse below. See you next week!

--Nick

Hot links

Economy and entrepreneurship

​Facebook bought Instagram purposely to hold it back. ​That's the takeaway from six hours of testimony from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom during the Meta antitrust trial this past week. (Cecilia Kang / The New York Times)

​Instagram launched Edits, an app to compete with ByteDance's CapCut​. (Dominic Preston / The Verge)

​Etsy has erased its pandemic-era gains, but eBay has held up better.​ Both are positioned well, as tariffs threaten to short-circuit Temu and other e-commerce juggernauts that rely on global supply chains. (Hyunsoo Rim / Sherwood News)

​Why It's Legal to Pay U.S. Workers with Disabilities as Little as 25 Cents an Hour.​ (Josh Eidelson / Bloomberg Businessweek) (7-day friend link)

​PrEP manufacturer Gilead's earnings came in better than expected, but missed Wall Street expectations.​ Gilead produces Truvada, Descovy, and Biktarvy (an HIV treatment drug). Analysts are bullish on the year, however, because Gilead's injectable PrEP alternative, lenacapavir, is on track for FDA approval in the coming months. (J. Edward Moreno / Sherwood News)

AI and future tech

​New AI term: ‘Frontier Firms’.​ Microsoft believes fractional “AI coworker on tap” agencies will be how many companies end up using artificial intelligence, and that many people's future jobs will be to manage this. I don't disagree. (Jessica Bursztynsky / Fast Company)

​Adobe releases ‘created without generative AI’ tag to label human-generated art. ​This comes as Adobe announced new integrations with companies like OpenAI. (Mark Wilson / Fast Company)

​YouTube is testing AI Overviews in search results.​ (Shannon Connellan / Mashable)

​Llama, Meta's AI model, is under fire for recommending conversion therapy.​ Some believe the company's effort to tilt its AI models rightward is a move to curry favor with the Trump administration. (Donald Padgett / The Advocate)

​The anti-Cybertruck: Bezos-backed Slate unveils a bare-bones EV truck under $20,000.​ (Rani Molla / Sherwood News)

​The Apple Watch turns 10.​ When Apple pivoted the positioning away from fashion and more toward function, it took off. (Adrienne So / WIRED)

Media literacy and dystopia

​Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment.​ And per a March ruling, using bot farms to support a pump-and-dump scheme isn't considered securities fraud because it's categorized as enthusiasm. If you only read one hot link this week, read this one. (Eric Schwartzman / Fast Company)

​A 45-year-old man in Los Angeles was arrested yesterday on suspicion of felony vandalism for allegedly taking a chainsaw to several trees in downtown LA.​ He's been linked to over a dozen felled trees across five locations so far. (Associated Press)

​“Panic is my muse.” “Deadlines crowd out doubt.” “It always gets done.”​ Three mantras from Mary Schmich, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and former Chicago Tribune columnist of three decades, in an interview with Nieman. (Marina Leigh / Nieman Storyboard)

Social media and pop culture

​Pope Francis died.​Recent f-word gaffes aside, he was controversial for relaxing Catholicism's stance toward queer people, saying homosexuality was a sin, but not a crime. Good contextual summary here from Bay Area Reporter, the nation's longest continuously-running LGBTQ news source. (John Ferrannini, Bay Area Reporter)

​Forty-eight percent of teens say social media is bad for people their age, up from 32 percent in 2022, new Pew research found.​ But 74 percent said social media helps them feel more connected to their friends. (Pew Research Center)

​How to Remove Malware From Your Mac.​ (Emily Long / Lifehacker)

Opinions expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not represent the views of Ziff Davis (CNET Group) or equalpride (Out magazine).