Anthony Ha

@anthonyha.bsky.social

4496 Followers 950 Following

Writer, @TechCrunch.com weekend editor, Original Content co-host, loud karaoke singer

Question: Do you see yourself as a Democrat or a democratic socialist? Because you said “our party,” and obviously you ran as a Democrat. Answer: I am both. I’m a Democrat and I’m democratic socialist. So much of what makes me proud to be a Democrat is looking at what our party used to stand for. You think about the Four Freedoms, you think F.D.R., you think the New Deal. Those are at the core of what our party’s identity is, and yet it feels like to experience it, you have to read about it. You can’t see it around you anymore. And that isn’t something that I’m willing to accept, and I know that many feel similarly.
LinkedIn message offering me "FREE Professional Teeth Whitening" that's supposedly only offered to "a small number of TechCrunch employees in NYC"
Pitch email for TechCrunch that reads, "Thought of you because Anthony Ha is publicly listed on TechCrunch's current team page, making this a verified editorial contact path."
A still from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Question: I love that the book is so rooted in personal experience and in sensory experience. But as someone who’s 43 and had a lot of these feelings, I start to get a little suspicious of myself. Am I just an old fart longing for [the experiences of my youth]? How do you think about these things in a way that’s not just about romanticizing the way things were? Answer: It is very, very easy to slip into nostalgia, and I think there’s a current strain of desire that’s oriented toward so-called analog culture. Like, “I’m gonna get a Walkman again and that’s going to solve my problems.” I have a few thoughts about it. First, I make this argument pretty clearly in the book: We’re not going back. You live in the present, into the future, and we don’t live in the past.
Internet quiz results that claim I’m 83% woke, 62% nep-ludditr, 59% hope-pilled and 88% Davos. As a result, my closest match is Zohran Mamdani
An ad for Kalshi showing odds for the NY-13 Democratic congressional primary, with Adriano Espaillat (who lost) showing a 70% chance of victory, while Darializa Avila Chevalier (who won) supposedly had a 30% chance
Variety understands that, prior to being dropped by Amazon, “Artificial” already had several test screenings, which went down very positively, and screened for other studios on Thursday. According to an insider who has seen the movie, the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would “like the least.” It’s also understood that Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script, before Guadagnino boarded the project.
video of a street on the upper west side as everyone cheers the knicks’ victory
It started as a writing assistant. Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the stablecoin company Circle, trained an A.I. agent to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications. He called it the “Jeremy Allaire skill.” The bot helped him compose drafts. And Allaire was impressed by how well the artificial intelligence captured the way he thinks and writes. So impressed that he decided to let the bot talk to his more than 1,000 employees. Because while Allaire can’t meet with everyone, he realized that the A.I. version of him can. “People can interact with the Jeremy Allaire skill on their own before they actually, you know, bring something to me,” he told DealBook, adding, “It’s available to everyone in the company who wants to have a dialogue with me.”
Interview with China Miéville, interviewer asks: "A big part of my response when I see something like that is to think, “You guys are bad readers, and you’re just fixated on the gadgets, as opposed to the more interesting or radical political or social notions.” But on some level, I also think, “Are they just subscribing to this ur-narrative that a lot of science fiction sells: Won’t it be great when we go to Mars? Won’t it be great to expand outward and colonize forever?” And I guess I’m wondering to what extent that should spur science-fiction writers to try to tell different kinds of narratives. Miéville responds: I mean, I’m not the cop. People can tell any kind of story they want. I reserve the right to criticize them and critique them. I should say, by the way, I completely agree with you about bad reading, but I also just think that writers and critics, no matter how brilliant we may be, we don’t own the books. They are always a collaboration. And all books, particularly the most interesting fiction, [are] always going to have contradictory threads.
a disgusting, nearly empty cheesecake container (disgusting because i’ve smeared crumbs and frosting everywhere), with a label reading ,”strawberry cheese pie”
The document has a particularly American appeal. Leo specifically references the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — the only national conference to get a callout — in a section about caring for young people facing job insecurity. He quotes J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Return of the King,” a novel beloved by many in America, particularly young men.
screenshot of bluesky’s muted words menu, the name “briahna joy gray” is being muted
Screenshot of the final paragraph of a newsletter: “That’s why the students are booing, I think. They’re experiencing AI in realtime as a forecloser of futures; as the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism, as the prime agent moving a world that’s become a deck stacked against them.”
Infamous passage from Rex Reed's review of Oldboy: "What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?"
In a November conversation at the Urban Consulate in Detroit, the great writer and thinker Tressie McMillan Cottom was asked by host Orlando P. Bailey, “Do you have a daring idea for us to ponder and sit with for our collective future?” McMillan Cottom replied with this: “When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that this promise of an artificial intelligent future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled—AI is already here, the end is already here—then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse.” Today, I refuse.
Title: The Weirdest Asteroid in Space panel of Jimmy Olsen and a scientist looking at a sperm whale Jimmy: Wow! Your life-sized replicas pf the *world’s biggest beasts* are great, Professor Burton! I’ll give you a good write-up in the *Daily Planet*!
Photo from Buffalo’s Pierce-Arrow Museum of the front of a golden hippo car.
Marketing email from a "personal brand studio" that reads: You've spent 15+ years covering the biggest tech stories in the world — TechCrunch, Adweek, VentureBeat, Eniac Ventures, and now back as Weekend Editor at TechCrunch. You've launched Sight Tech Global, you co-host a podcast, and you understand the tech industry better than most people in it. And yet — 815 Threads followers. A Twitter/X presence that barely reflects the depth of your expertise. Journalists who build strong personal brands online today don't just break stories — they become the story. They get inbound from founders, investors, and PR teams before anything is public. They build audiences that follow them across platforms, not just publications. You have the credibility. The network. The writing. What's missing is the distribution strategy and the visual identity that makes people stop scrolling. I run a personal brand studio — video editing, graphic design, content systems, full pipeline. We've helped media professionals and journalists turn their expertise into audiences that compound.
A Resume.org survey of 1,000 hiring managers found that 59% say they emphasize AI’s role in layoffs because it “is viewed more favorably by stakeholders than saying layoffs or hiring freezes are driven by financial constraints.” Only 9% said AI had fully replaced any roles. This is not a technology story; it’s a management honesty story that happens to involve technology.
Screenshot of a Hacker News discussion linking to a "how to delete your account" page for OpenAI. First comment: Posting it here as a top-level comment as many people asked why boycott just openAi: ----- openAI is the least trustworthy of the Big LLM providers. See S(c)am Altman's track record, especially his early comments in senate hearings where: * he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs. * also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies. Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago. While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists - not marketing guys. At least for me, that brings me some confidence in their intentions as, as scientists we often seek knowledge, not power for power's sake.
“Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow,” Mr. Altman said at an A.I. conference this month. Jensen Huang, chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, is worried. The tech industry hype may seem omnipresent, but Mr. Huang feels “the battle of narratives” is being won by the critics. “It’s extremely hurtful, frankly,” Mr. Huang said in a podcast interview last month. “A lot of damage” has been done by “very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative.”
Unionization of the work force: Unless you believe that the US government is capable of independently solving these problems (while being in the industry’s pocket), it is clear that there must be some entities that exist for the sole purpose of protecting the workers who are exposed to having their livelihoods destroyed by AI. Those entities are unions. Union contracts, not laws, are the very front lines of AI regulation. Even if the biggest thing that union contracts accomplish is managing the reduction in jobs in a way that doesn’t utterly screw workers, that is significant. Right now, less than 10% of American workers have unions, meaning that most workers are exposed to unilateral damage from AI with no safety net. Policies like reforming labor law to make organizing easier and funding more union organizing are not old-timey things—they are, in fact, necessary policies to address our AI future. Also, as a practical matter, we are going to need the political influence of strong unions to counteract the political influence of the rich, which will be fighting against the other items on this policy list. Including, A stronger social safety net, including higher unemployment benefits, public health care, free higher education, and other common sense measures necessary to get a large number of newly unemployed people through the hard times and into whatever comes next. And,
The transition hasn’t been smooth everywhere. When I spoke with UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts in October, he described a spectrum — some faculty “leaning forward” with AI, others with “their heads in the sand.” Roberts, a former finance executive who arrived from outside academia, was pushing hard for AI integration despite faculty resistance. A week earlier, UNC had announced it would merge two schools to create an AI-focused entity — a decision that drew faculty pushback. Roberts had also appointed a vice provost specifically for AI. “No one’s going to say to students after they graduate, ‘Do the best job you can, but if you use AI, you’ll be in trouble,’” Roberts told me. “Yet we have faculty members effectively saying that right now.”
pop up message in Venmo urging users to “Fund your Kalshi account with Venmo”
I remember something Alan Moore told me: “It is so important to reenchant these places that we live in, to actually give back the energies that have been bled out of them. An empowered landscape creates empowered people, and the reverse is also true. A disempowered landscape, stripped of its history, stripped of its meaning, will produce people who are stripped of their history, of their meaning. So yes, if magic is anything, it has to be political.”
Dokoupil, his MS Now anchor wife Katy Tur, and their two children live in a three-story townhouse in one of Brooklyn’s most exclusive enclaves. Dokoupil, a former Daily Beast reporter, attended a $53,000 prep school in Florida, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University, where he enrolled in a PhD program but did not complete it.
my 2026 word is “potato”
From Nick Kroll’s Wikipedia page: Kroll was born in Rye, New York, on June 5, 1978, to Lynn and Jules Kroll. His father is a billionaire businessman who founded the corporate investigations and risk consulting firm Kroll Inc.
photo of james carville followed by text message that begins, “Folks, it’s James Carville. Believe me when I tell you: This ain’t good.”
“I know people in New York hate AI, and things like AI companionship and wearables, probably more than anywhere else in the country,” Schiffmann said. “So I bought more ads than anyone has ever done with a lot of white space so that they would socially comment on the topic.”
The result is a movie thinned out almost to the point of total insubstantiality—as close to a non-experience as I’ve had at the movies in a while. Once, after I’d panned a movie, a friend asked whether I was suggesting that she not see it; I said no, I was suggesting that she not enjoy it. Almost always, a movie worth critiquing at length, even negatively, is one worth seeing. Not “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey”; if the movie theatre had an ejector seat like James Bond’s Aston Martin, I’d have pressed the button. At least in this regard, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is an exceptional movie.
Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes Amazon-backed firm Showrunner, led by Edward Saatchi, is using the film as a test case for how Hollywood can overhaul production. The results won't be commercialized — the tech giant hasn't obtained rights from Warner Bros.
sidewalk note that reads: “Columbia Vichy on the Hudson”
Legacy studios such as Sony Pictures have attempted to buy a stake in A24; instead, the company has opted to take Wall Street money, preferring not to be drawn into what one executive called Hollywood’s “hundred years of doing things a certain way.” But emphasizing innovation comes with other hazards. Thrive Capital, which helped to secure A24’s $3.5-billion valuation, is also a major backer of OpenAI, and A24 courted the firm specifically for its artificial-intelligence connections. Scott Belsky, the head of A24 Labs, the studio’s tech initiative, has embarked on a listening tour, speaking with filmmakers about how they might benefit from such advances.
Ms. Greco’s lawyer, Steven Brill, said that it is common in Chinese culture to give cash to reporters “in a gesture of friendship and gratitude.” “I grant you this looks odd,” Mr. Brill said. “But I assure you that Winnie’s intent was purely innocent.”
This is what Baldwin was getting at when spoke of the “spiritual state” of America. “The political institutions of any nation,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time, “are always menaced and controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.” What he meant, I think, was that every time a person contests or defends a political situation, they are also contesting or defending the intellectual terms on which that contest is conducted. You cannot fight without fighting about how you fight. That is why Williams cares so desperately about what the summer of 2020 made us think, even if the protests manifestly failed to achieve their objective goals; it is also why liberal institutions were so eager to snatch up these ideas and exhaust their potential before tossing us back the husks. What [Zohran] Mamdani’s win suggests, however, is that they did not get them all.
Aster, the 39-year-old auteur who made the relentlessly unsettling films “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid,” has a long list of realities that his brain registers as mortifying or terrifying. “In a way, ‘Beau Is Afraid’ — that’s him,” says Lars Knudsen, laughing. He would know, as the person who has produced all of Aster’s films. “He’s afraid of everything,” Knudsen says. There’s having a body, obviously: Aster doesn’t like to wear shorts, lest people discover he has legs.
text message reading “I’ve already saved you a seay, and there’s going to be amazing food and cake. Don’t be late!”
Splash page from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen Number 49, showing a comically obese Jimmy Olsen trapped in a manhole. Art by Curt Swan.
Anthony's top 10 movies since 2000: In the Mood for Love, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Royal Tenenbaums, Sweeney Todd, Sunshine, Speed Racer, Up, Melancholia, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hereditary
My lawyer, for example, he thinks within two or three years, Marvel Comics will replace artists with AI. You won’t even have to pay any artists. And I think that’s completely conceivable. I think storyboarding for film can easily be replaced with AI. Animatics, which you need to do for a lot of films, can be replaced. Eventually, comic book artists can be replaced. Almost every job can be replaced.
It’s a good question. In fact, I was asking AI before our talk today — I think the best thing is to go to the source — “compare unlicensed art usage [for] AI-generated imagery with torrenting of MP3s in the ‘90s.” And AI said that there’s definitely some similarities, because you’re using work that’s already been produced and created without compensating the artist. But in the case of AI, you can add elements to it that make it different. It’s not like [when] somebody stole Guns N’ Roses’ record, ”Chinese Democracy,” and put it online. That’s different from sitting down with an emulator for music with AI [and saying,] “I want to write a song in the style of Guns N’ Roses, and I want the guitar solo to sound like Slash.”
Anybody who has had the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of two facts: First, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts.
anthony eats a sesame pancake sandwich while a bird sits on his backpack, staring hungrily
Marvel’s solution has been to specialize in superheroes—blatantly suit-clad beings who zoom around and kick people—who also, ha-ha, think that superheroes are dumb. The M.C.U. is designed to provide fan service, but it has also tried to give mainstream viewers—who might be, at once, tempted by and skeptical of superhero movies—a subtly shimmering force field of plausible deniability to crouch behind.
After this article was published, a TechCrunch reader argued that given the extensive workflows involved in updating system prompts, it's "quite literally impossible for a rogue actor to make that change in isolation," suggesting that "a team at xAI intentionally modified that system prompt in a specifically harmful manner OR xAI has no security in place at all."
photo of a chinatown sign that reads BLUE SKY HAIR SALON
screenshot showing a 1489 day streak in duolingo
They matched wits. Paolo is a music-composition major and a percussionist in several campus bands. He pressed ChatGPT-4 on its understanding of musical beauty. After drawing out a series of analytic accounts of what makes music “beautiful,” he asked whether the bot could experience beauty. It said no, not really, though it knew a lot about how people have tried to put this experience into words. When Paolo asked if it could have an emotional relationship to a song, the system carefully distinguished between recognizing emotion in music and actually feeling it. It said it lacked a body, and that this absence barred it from certain ways of knowing music. Paolo asked it to write a song that would make him cry. It tried. Paolo sent me a note: “The system failed the test.” But I was crying, there on the couch, reading.
Let me offer a dispatch from the impact zone. When I first asked a class of thirty Princeton undergraduates—spanning twelve majors—whether any had used A.I., not a single hand went up. Same with my graduate students. Even after some enthusiastic prodding (“Hey! I use these tools! They’re incredible! Let’s talk about this!”), I got nowhere.
On the contrary, staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular.
Because I’m a historian of science and technology, part of my terrain is the evolving role of the university—from its medieval, clerical origins to the entrepreneurial R. & D. engines of today. I teach among the humanists, and my courses are anchored in the traditional program of the liberal arts, in the hope of giving shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom. But my subject is the rise of a techno-scientific understanding of the world, and of ourselves in it. And, if that is what you care about, the White House’s chain-jerk mugging feels, frankly, like a sideshow. The juggernaut actually barrelling down the quad is A.I., coming at us with shocking speed.
Interviewer: I wonder if there are examples of gatekeeping now that are productive or helpful? Because my mind naturally wanders back to this collectors’ edition of “Perdido Street Station.” There are so many ways people get ahold of the book, but to preserve the specialness of it, we have this beautiful artifact [which costs $600]. Not that you can solve this in an interview, but are there ways to do that that aren’t just price gated? China Miéville: I honestly don't know. I would like to think so. You’re right, of course — this is a collector's edition. And if one was putting out this edition and one was also saying all other editions of “Perdido Street Station” have been withdrawn from circulation, that would be a dick move. So this is for a specific set of people who, yes, have to be willing to spend a certain amount on this edition, in the way that some people might be willing to spend that money on a PlayStation, or a car, or a particular pen or something. I mean, gatekeeping is a really an intrinsically negative term, I think, so maybe there's some way we could think in terms of curation, and not make it financially driven. But as you say, I'm really open to suggestions because at the moment, what you've got is Martin Shkreli buying the f—-ing Wu Tang album, and that’s about as bad a model as you can get.
We'd be quiet too if we were them because it’s such a humiliating self own. Maybe, like many other pundits, they thought that Trump was just bluffing about tariffs. Maybe they thought they could push him in a direction that was purely beneficial to their industry. He might still back down. But at least for now, what the accelerationists did here by backing Trump is not just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, but methodically blow off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
Quote from China Miéville: "None of this means that I’m not interested in books that do tell interesting stories and untold stories and radical stories and so on. I absolutely am, and if people come to them and are radicalized by them, great. But that, I think, is fundamentally not something we can hope for. "I would like us to be writing more interesting stories as a function of the fact that the world was getting better. I do not think that by us writing different stories, we’re going to make the world better. I just don’t think that’s the line of causality. There are simply too many layers of mediation from a book up into the social system."
Passage from a profile of Graydon Carter: “Dinner with her at a restaurant is like something a McKinsey efficiency expert would admire,” he writes. “Seated at 8:00. No need to see a menu. Steak, rare. Not sure if she drinks. I think not. And when there are Vogue staff involved, the moment Anna has eaten the last piece of steak, there is a call for the check. Her dinner mates might be mid-bite. More often than not, after a meal with her, I’ve stopped off on the way home to get something to eat.”
screenshot from Paradise, two characters walking down a hall and one saying, “It’s a Die Hard reference, ma’am.”
The agents proceeded to tell Khalil’s wife that if she did not leave her husband and go to their apartment, they would arrest her too. The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card. “He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.” Meanwhile, Khalil had been on the phone with his attorney, who was trying to intervene, asking why he was being detained, if they had a warrant, and explaining that Khalil was a green card holder. The attorney had circled back to demanding to see a warrant when the agents apparently instead hung up the phone.