Drew_Wilson 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (301)

• On the post: DHS Is Hunting Down Trump Critics. The ‘Free Speech’ Warriors Are Mighty Quiet.

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2026 @ 10:50pm

  I sometimes wonder if such users are here because they view TechDirt as their own personal erotica website. They get off getting completely owned like this. I mean, it's a possible explanation for why they keep coming back to get owned again, anyway.

• On the post: Tom Homan To Minneapolis: Look, I Warned You If You Weren’t Nice, We’d Have To Kill Again, And Look What You Made Us Do

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 30 Jan, 2026 @ 04:12pm

  Back to the padded room you go.

• On the post: TikTok Already Getting Shittier Under The Ownership Of Trump’s Billionaire Buddies

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 27 Jan, 2026 @ 04:05pm

  That is hilarious in a pretty sad way. The original moral panic about TikTok was that it was collecting personal information (even though it wasn't doing anything that was very far removed from what Facebook, Instagram, and others were doing). That and it somehow being a Chinese government mind controlling device for reasons that only makes sense to people pushing that moral panic. As the writers here have also stated, I'm also a strong advocate of broad federal privacy reform because if you are concerned about TikTok collecting personal information, the best place to start is to have a set of standards that everyone must abide by. Then, you'd have standing to go after companies that won't abide by those laws. It's a FAR stronger argument than '[insert platform here] must change the way they do things because I personally think they should!' Now that the US government is doing a big government takeover (you know, just the kind of thing Republican supporters dream of), it's now collecting even more personal information. I'm betting there are some media outlets out there that are somehow OK with that after freaking out about privacy on the platform throughout 2024 and last year.

• On the post: Shift Up’s CEO Says They Need AI Because Of The Chinese Boogeyman

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 27 Jan, 2026 @ 03:56pm

  Well, that and pathfinding and being able to react to the player to make the game seem more realistic. Opponents driving in other vehicles? That is technically AI. Enemies firing on you while taking cover? That's technically AI. The only caveat is that it's not really the same kind of AI that is involved in generative AI and glorified auto-complete chat bots. It's a much older and simpler AI we're talking about. Your point stands of course, just refining it a little for you. :)

• On the post: Shift Up’s CEO Says They Need AI Because Of The Chinese Boogeyman

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 26 Jan, 2026 @ 11:11pm

  The CEO is trying to do a weird riff off of the nonsense line of "use AI now or get left behind". It's a way of trying to justify the use of AI by getting rid all of that pesky logical thinking and common sense. That way, you don't have to think about silly things like "is AI actually capable of replacing human beings like this?" or "is the output of AI up to basic quality standards?" There are a LOT of business leaders who only think along the lines of how AI is going to replace the human workforce. They want to be the first to simply use AI to do all the work and cut out all the jobs in the process. This while still magically maintaining the high standards people expect from the products. You can explain all day that this is a wholly unrealistic expectation, but they won't care. Their heads are far too heavily polluted with AI buzzwords and talking points to see even basic level of logic or reason. So, as some of these "leaders" charge full steam ahead, I'm of the opinion of "I say let them crash" because that is the only outcome such thinking eventually leads to. Before you flip out and say "AI still has its uses!", I am fully aware that some people do use it for simple and far more mundane tasks like grammar checking and word restructuring to tighten up language. The thing is, that's not what these business leaders are talking about. They are talking about replacing humans with the mythical AI technology that can do it all better for cheaper. As you know, that technology absolutely does not exist and existing AI is not even in the same universe in terms of the capabilities that these business types are asking for. It's why I never tire of watching people crash and burn when they are too stubborn to see that and charge full steam ahead with an angry "I'll prove you all wrong" attitude. I've tried to explain on multiple occasions that AI is not sentient nor is it a magical button that will do all the work right the first time, so I'll happily point and laugh at people who are suffering from the consequences of their actions in this regard. If the CEO in this story wants to use AI to replace the human workforce with AI, I'd say "let him". I think I won't be the only one pointing and laughing when that decision inevitably blows up in his face.

• On the post: White House Push AI-Altered Images Of Arrested ICE Protesters To Manufacture Cruelty

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2026 @ 05:09pm

  I wouldn't be surprised if when they get caught submitting AI deepfakes for cases, that the response is something along the lines of, "well, that's how the ICE agent felt was going on and that's all you really need to know. Therefore, the protester in question is guilty of the terroristic threat of existing and should be sent to the foreign gulags to be tortured."

• On the post: Game Publisher Bans Working With Devs That Use Any AI, Rather Than Banning Bad Uses Of AI

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 18 Jan, 2026 @ 02:53am

  Absolutely no know is going to be able to tell the difference by the end of 2026.

  AI was going to eliminate the need to hire artists by the end of 2023. Didn't happen. AI was going to eliminate a vast majority of jobs by the end of 2024. Didn't happen. AI was going to put almost everyone out of work by the end of 2025 and no one was going to distinguish reality from AI by that point in time. Didn't happen. AI predictions like that that go down in flames are a dime a dozen.

• On the post: Game Publisher Bans Working With Devs That Use Any AI, Rather Than Banning Bad Uses Of AI

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2026 @ 06:19pm

  Anti-AI is the modern Luddite. The sweep of new AI tools is the new loom. Embrace it or be left behind, that is the reality we are in and there is no turning back.

  If AI didn't suck so bad, you might have a point. The problem is, AI sucks so hard, few people want it. AI companies have gotten to the point of desperately trying to give it away for free to encourage people to use it these days. This by cramming it literally in everything that is useful. WordPress? Shove AI into it. Microsoft Windows? Shove AI into users faces. Vehicles? Shove AI into that too. AI companies have been pressured for over a year by their investors to show that developing AI is worth the investment dollars. The problem is that it wasn't and companies are freaking out that those investment dollars are going to disappear at a faster rate if they don't show that adoption rates are as advertised in their lofty ambitious announcements.

• On the post: Game Publisher Bans Working With Devs That Use Any AI, Rather Than Banning Bad Uses Of AI

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2026 @ 06:12pm

  Holder Folder Place? (would be funny if that was actually a street name somewhere)

• On the post: Game Publisher Bans Working With Devs That Use Any AI, Rather Than Banning Bad Uses Of AI

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2026 @ 11:46pm

  I think there is a far easier way to handle placeholders. Back in the day, game developers would use a flat bright pink texture on anything that doesn't have final art as a placeholder. If a bright pink texture was found, it was very easy to say that it was not meant to be there and that the developer needs to replace that texture. It's ugly as heck, but being pretty isn't the job of a placeholder, it's to get the developers attention and remind them to replace that with something proper. As for text, it's just a case of thinking of something that can be searched for in the code that would not otherwise be found. I think Super Mario RPG did that in development by using a phrase something along the lines of "go world!" Either way, I honestly do not see why any developer would want to use AI to create placeholder assets in a game. All you are doing is making it much harder to detect and replace before the final product is released. You're just begging to get caught using AI at that point.

• On the post: Microsoft CEO Laments Criticism Of “AI Slop,” Causing The Whole Internet To Double Down On Criticism Of “Microslop”

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2026 @ 02:35pm

  I think AI has good assistive roles for making jobs easier. I think making AI as a replacement role is a huge mistake and I wish CEOs could see this. Unfortunately, the $$$ in their eyes cause blindness.

  Even that is questionable in at least some circumstances. Coincidentally, I did a write-up today covering this very topic. There was a study done to determine if AI could help speed up software development. Basically, the question was whether or not babysitting AI would make things more efficient. The people conducting this study were convinced that it would increase productivity and assumed it would increase the time to complete the various test tasks by around 24%. What they found was that using AI bloated the time to complete tasks by 19% instead. When they learned this, they started dismissing their own results and argued that it was a small study and is not indicative of the future of AI. Oops! https://www.freezenet.ca/study-ai-slowed-software-development-down-by-19/

• On the post: Tom Homan: If Democrats Don’t Stop Calling Us Murderers, We’re Just Going To Be Forced To Keep Murdering You

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2026 @ 02:15pm

  These things are why nonviolent resistance is absolutely crucial. Any violence from ‘the left’ lets them immediately feel completely vindicated and wholly justified, and would help them muddy the stark contrast between magaworld and everyone else. Trump, Miller, Vance, Bannon, more; all of them… they’d all drop to their knees and scream hallelujah to the heavens if ‘the left’ ever actually got violent. It would be exactly what they want.

  The problem is that they don't even need "the left" to show any violence at all. People in Minnesota are rightfully protesting and doing so peacefully. Trump is responding by sending more masked jackbooted thugs in with the hopes that more innocent Americans will be slaughtered on the city streets. Good did nothing that any sane person would consider violent against officials. She ended up getting shot multiple times. Source for the efforts to bring in more ICE agents: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpv7knz8e8mo

• On the post: Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 01 Jan, 2026 @ 01:02pm

  Just to reiterate, I don't hate Bluesky by any means. I think it's a great place and a welcome change from what Twitter has devolved to today. I'm still in the market to easily share content on that platform as well, so I'm open to using it more in the future. I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression of my position on the platform. I think we both agree that age verification is a terrible law. We both know the consequences of implementing such a law. I think where our opinions diverge is the response from the community to a law like this. The law demands that everyone puts users information at risk. Whether that is through people breaking into a system to swipe the data, people intercepting that information in transit, or a host of other ways that this law endangers people, the risks are unacceptable. As such, refusing to comply with such laws is a reasonable response. The reason for this is that compliance sends a signal to lawmakers that the current set of laws is reasonable and justified. It also gives them blanket permission to expand the laws to be even more unreasonable. We've seen this when age verification laws went from just blocking porn sites from youth to age verification to block people from social media in general to what we are seeing now: age verification at the device level. They are not going to stop until there is sufficient resistance.

  This is just wrong. I’m sorry. I like Mastodon. I like ActivityPub, but I can’t accept lying about it all. Age verification laws are very bad (I’ve talked about why for ages), but they mostly DO absolutely apply to every Mastodon instance. That nearly all (or maybe all!) are ignoring the law won’t help them in court down the road should anyone decide to go after them.

  I'm not sure how you think I was lying. Mastodon is not complying with age verification laws last I checked. Can law enforcement theoretically go after Mastodon instances? Sure, but that is limited to wherever the law takes affect. If law enforcement starts making demands for a US based instance, then the owner can simply notify their users that they are going to be shutting down. Those users can simply hop to another instance located elsewhere. Yeah, that instance is cooked, but then other instances simply take the place of what was loss. Decentralization at work. The same thing happened with file-sharing applications years ago. US based ones largely, one by one, began shutting down in the US. That resulted in applications being built outside of the US - a number of which were also open source. Law enforcement did take place many times over, but the networks survived that. The only threat those networks faced was people using those networks less and less as marketplaces finally evolved to accept the digital age (and even then, as streaming platforms abuse their customers, more people are returning to those file-sharing networks).

  Complain about Bluesky all you want, but using age verification for your argument makes no sense. Bluesky is abiding by laws. Most Mastodon instances are breaking the law and hoping no one decides to go after them.

  If a central authority is making a decision for the whole platform, that's an indication that the platform isn't exactly decentralized. Unless there are numerous popular instances on Bluesky where this decision only affected a small portion of the users, then I think you would have a point, but that's exactly how things are functioning at the moment. Maybe over time the platform will act more like Mastodon where users are picking and choosing which instance to be on, but at the moment, it's mostly one instance that dictates how the majority of the network operates. Bluesky has a long way to go to achieving that whereas Mastodon is already there.

  If that works the ONLY reason it will work is because the particular Mastodon instance is too unimportant to matter. I don’t see that as a benefit.

  Like I said, geography may disagree with that notion. I bring up age verification because it exposed both Bluesky's current weakness and Mastodons current strength. I think Bluesky is great. I hope it continues to see success. I think multiple ideas in the social media marketplace to improve what has been broken for a while (ala Facebook, X/Twitter) is a great thing.

• On the post: Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2025 @ 09:30pm

  I like the concept of using past failures as a learning tool for the future. Frankly, I wished more people did that. Sadly, I see government looking at past failures and, at increasing frequency, simply doubling down on those failures instead of learning from said mistakes. Right now, I'm actually seeing that with age verification laws. Australia implemented those laws, those laws wound up speedrunning their way to failure in less than a month, and other governments are looking at that failure (such as France and Ireland) and saying, "we gotta get me some of that failure!" and pushing through similar laws with no plans on changing anything. As a result, I no longer find myself reporting on the research and warnings on the impending failures of these laws, but rather, reporting on history repeating itself as these kinds of laws fail multiple times over. This as I find myself increasingly exasperated at the idiocy of these politicians screaming, "damn the consequences, we're doin' it too!"

• On the post: Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2025 @ 09:22pm

  I hate to say it, but I agree. I'm quite pessimistic about Bluesky changing much for the better outside of offering a temporary place for former Twitter users. There was a lot of pride about the platform being "decentralized", but when the US government demanded age verification for the platforms users, the "decentralized" platform acted like just another fully centralized platform, folded like a cheap lawn chair under the pressure, and implemented the system for all users appearing to be from the geographic locations affected by this law. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the platform in general, but it's not exactly the decentralized game changing platform it sells itself as. Mastodon, on the other hand, acted like a decentralized platform. When asked to implement things like age verification, the question became, "who do you complain to?" When this tech was being demanded to be implemented, the question is, "in what way?" Mastodon ended up being quite the brick wall when it came to laws demanding more surveillance among other things. Sure, in theory, you can go after owners of instances, but all users have to do is simply hop from one instance to another and carry on with business as usual. Heck, some users have already started up their own personal instance so they don't have to worry about an owner getting in trouble in some way or another. This is how decentralization should be working. I saw it with eDonkey2000 back in the day when the RIAA and MPAA went after the servers. They shut down multiple servers, pretending it made a dent in the network. All that happened was other servers popping up and users just hopping to those other servers to continue sharing. It didn't make a dent in the network at the time thanks to its nature of being decentralized. Mastodon, so far, has been doing the exact same thing, but for general social media instead of file-sharing.

• On the post: Techdirt Doesn’t Annoy You Into Paying, And That’s Worth Paying For

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2025 @ 02:44pm

  I still remember the days of bugmenot. More and more sites demanded that you sign up for an account just to read the freaking articles. It was stupid, but somehow, things have gotten worse for that. One commentator I knew insisted that the ONLY business model that is viable for news is to have a paywalled system. Anything else would run the site into the ground. The problem is that news content is a public good that should be shared for all. I don't believe that knowledge and information should be only for the already wealthy. I wish I had the privilege of being established before 2005, though. That was back in the day when quality mattered and having good quality content actually meant something. Now? Quality really doesn't matter any more and it's pretty much impossible to grow a website regardless of the business model in question. It sucks, but unless you are backed by a millionaire, your site is unlikely to take off these days no matter what you do.

• On the post: When The Internet Grew Up — And Locked Out Its Kids

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 17 Dec, 2025 @ 05:03pm

  To be sure, this is not perfect. If nothing else, the ability to circumvent all of this is pretty trivial. But this isn’t the catastrophe that you’re making it out to be.

  The technology is broken, fails to regularly detect people who re under age, already have a history of getting hacked and having people's personal identities, facial recognition scans, and government ID stolen, and makes children worse off as they are now taught to use different platforms or hide the fact that they are under age. All of this while governments around the world are increasingly morph this into an effort to track the day to day movements of every day citizens who aren't even suspected of committing a crime (re: The UKs renewed effort for a country-wide Digital ID system). How, exactly, is failing in every way imaginable and making everything significantly worse not a "catastrophe"?

  You don’t even offer any particularly good alternatives in the end, just more questions.

  That's easy: the alternative is to scrap age verification efforts altogether. No more easy access to massive troves of personal information for cyber-criminals thanks to these laws.

  To boldly declare that we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas simply isn’t good enough anymore.

  Every accusation is a confession. This is exactly what those pushing age verification laws are guilty of doing. Did they offer counselling for people dealing with problems? Nope. Did they revamp privacy laws? Nope. Are they offering information courses? Nope. Are they giving private sector tools to parents to help them protect their children online? Nope. Are they doing anything to protect LGBTQ+ communities online? Nope. Age verification lobbyists responded to what they saw and said, "we tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas, time to demand age verification laws". As you said, this "isn't good enough".

• On the post: Truly Unhinged: Trump Suggests Rob Reiner Had It Coming For Criticizing Him

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2025 @ 03:36pm

  I have to admit, it is really refreshing to see others point out just how badly so many media members are dropping the ball at basic levels of journalism. I've pointed out their flaws before and even expressed frustration with what numerous media outlets are doing and I get push back from some with them saying that I'm being mean for pointing out the flaws of their reporting and that I a "too hard on them". I'm not mad at them because I don't personally like the media, I'm mad at them for persistent failings like the one you highlighted here. In this case, this is yet another sane washing effort on the part of media outlets - the very kinds of things they have a history of denying is even a thing. Anyway, the media absolutely deserves to get called out whenever they pull stunts like this. I'm also very happy I'm not the only one doing this these days.

• On the post: Trump Pretends To Block State AI Laws; Media Pretends That’s Legal

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 12 Dec, 2025 @ 02:47pm

  Up here in Canada, the CBC threw that headline in one of their headline crawls on the bottom of the screen the other day. To be fair to the CBC, I can't exactly expect them to be experts in how law works in another country, so there is, at least, a little cover for this massive blunder. Still, it did highlight to me, yet again, that Canadian news organizations simply take a lot of news articles from US sources verbatim without questioning it and regurgitate it on their newscasts and papers.

• On the post: If Your Antitrust Case Depends On Pretending TikTok Doesn’t Exist, It’s Going To Fail

  

  Drew_Wilson ( profile ), 25 Nov, 2025 @ 02:57am

  While reading this article, I can't help but think about Google Adsense. A while ago, TechDirt wanted to move away from Adsense and find a competitor to the Adsense network. The effort ended up being fruitless because there was no actual competitor to be had that wasn't just pushing scams. I mean, if you are an independent website, trying to use a third party ad network seems to be a choice between Adsense or nothing for the most part. Yes, Facebook has advertising, but that seems to be off limits to third party websites. So, I'm confused. If there's no actual competition in something like an ad network, how is anti-trust not actually a tool to fix something like that? How is Adsense not a monopolistic power and why can't anti-trust fix that?

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