Industry News

Google posted a new policy on Friday, July 18, 2025, that immediately prohibits advertising of Daily Fantasy Sports on Google Ads within California. This is based on a new law by the California attorney general that says daily fantasy is illegal in the state.

Don’t let the clickbait title put you off. Related to my link about AI killing jobs in tech, here Cal Newport produces some compelling “both sides” receipts about how AI is helping + hurting software development. His conclusions are solid:

My advice, for the moment: Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric. Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing....

I think we’ve all seen the internal Shopify memo on requiring teams to use AI. This is a great article on what happened next. I especially love the internal tools Shopify built to make adoption easier:

Employees can use the LLM proxy to build the workflows they need. They can select from different models, which are updated with the latest versions as soon as they’re released. There’s a collection of MCPs, and all it takes is asking the proxy (or another tool like Cursor) to access them....

There are a lot of these “how to beat the AI cookie monster” posts out there right now, but this one by Benjamin Todd is well-researched and articulated, with lots of practical examples on how to do the one thing that we all need to do anyway: keep learning.

I break this down into four key categories of skills likely to increase in value: Hard for AI: data poor, messy, long-horizon tasks where a person-in-the-loop is wanted Needed for deploying AI: the skills of organising and auditing...

This is a great Xennial list. And I am glad I’m not the only one who thinks R.E.M.’s Monster is actually pretty good.

Monster is commonly regarded as the most “used CD” CD of all time. Which I think is somewhat unfair and due in large part to how conspicuous the blaze orange packaging is. I would bet that Come Away With Me or Eric Clapton’s Unplugged or my beloved New Miserable Experience are just as common. They just blend in with the pack better. Though I don’t think being the most...

Google told us the June 2025 core update completed early on Thursday, July 17th, but now, four days later, we are still seeing incredibly heated volatility, even through today. The tools and community are still experiencing significant ranking movement and instability, even today.

You know how those of us who read The Lord of the Rings before the movies came out got all weirdly and annoyingly upset about all the “new fans” and how they should have “read the books years ago”? That’s how I feel about the em dash and its AI takeover.

The real issue isn’t me—it’s you. You simply don’t read enough. If you did, you’d know I’ve been here for centuries. I’m in Austen. I’m in Baldwin. I’ve appeared in Pulitzer-winning prose, viral op-eds, and the final paragraphs of...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google's June 2025 core update finished on Thursday after running for 16 days. It was a volatile Google update for a while with some recoveries. Google AI Mode gets Gemini 2.5 Pro and Deep Search but you need to pay...

Google launched a new feature for Google Business Profiles that lets you check the status of your edits. So if you made a change and you want to see what the status of that change is for your Google local listing, now you can.