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Bluesky plans to release a public web interface around the end of November and launch federation in early 2024, and says it crossed 2M users

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

 

 

—  Bluesky, the company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X, announced Thursday,  it has hit 2 million users — up by another million since September, despite remaining an invite-only app.

 

It also revealed its timeframe regarding other key goals, indicating that it planned to have a public web interface go live by the end of the month and would launch federation by early next year.

 

The latter is one of the most important differentiating factors between Bluesky and X, as it would allow Bluesky to function as a more open social network.

 

This means it will work more like Mastodon where users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will. This is what Bluesky today says makes it “billionaire-proof” —  a swipe at Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now called X.

 

“You’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms,” a company blog post explained.

 

“And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too,” it noted.

 

Similar to the decentralized service Mastodon, federation would anyone to run their own service and connect to any other service also running the same protocol. In Bluesky’s case, this would be done via the AT Protocol that the company is also developing alongside its consumer-facing service and mobile app. However, the other major decentralized social network, Mastodon, uses a well-established protocol, ActivityPub, which has gained greater traction in the months since Musk’s Twitter acquisition.

 

Since then, other companies including Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent) have embraced ActivityPub and Mastodon. That could pose a challenge with regard to Bluesky’s eventual reach unless it makes a move to allow the AT Protocol and ActivityPub to somehow interoperate. Bridging the two may be technically possible, but it’s likely something that would take place further down the road, rather than in the near term.

 

In the meantime, Bluesky is working to make its own service more accessible, which includes launching a public web interface later this month. This will allow anyone to view the posts on Bluesky, even if they don’t have an account. That could make the network more promising in terms of being a true X rival for breaking news and conversations but could also expose Bluesky users’ posts to the outside world in ways they’re unprepared for. (The app doesn’t currently offer an option to set profiles to “private,” as Twitter/X does. Some users are not happyabout this).

 

Despite its growth, Bluesky’s hesitancy to drop its invite-only status and open its network to more users has allowed other X competitors to gain a foothold. Last month, for example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his X alternative, Instagram Threads, has just under 100 million monthly active users. He believes it could reach a billion users in the next few years. And Threads intends to interoperate with ActivityPub in the future.

 

Bluesky’s announcement follows Threads’ rapid-fire release of features to make its app more competitive with X, including things like a chronological feed, support for viewing your likes, search, a (free) edit button, a web version, polls and GIF support, topic tags, and soon, a developer API. Mastodon has also capitalized on the opportunity Twitter’s acquisition presented, and launched an easier-to-use version of its service this September. But Mastodn currently has 1.6 million monthly active users, making it still much smaller than Threads.

 

Alongside today’s news, Bluesky also noted other recently launched features, including mobile push notifications, shareable user lists, email verification, advanced feed and thread preferences for sorting and filtering posts, a media tab on user profiles, a Likes tab on your own user profile, suggested follows, and various accessibility improvements.

 

Though Bluesky began its life as a Twitter project under Jack Dorsey, the company was spun out from Twitter with $13 million to get started on R&D. Dorsey sits on its board. This year, the company raised an $8 million seed round led by Neo to further its development, and converted from being a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corp.

 

 

— Techmeme

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AACCNJ, McGraw Hill Publishers, and Trenton, NJ Public Schools join forces to launch innovative reading intervention pilot program

TRENTON, N.J. –  The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey (AACCNJ), in partnership with McGraw Hill Publishers (AACCNJ President’s Club member) and Trenton, N.J. Public Schools, is proud to announce a groundbreaking collaboration aimed at enhancing the academic success of local students.

This initiative, known as the “Reading Acceleration for Success” program, will focus on Daylight High School students and utilize McGraw Hill’s acclaimed Achieve 3000 platform to accelerate reading growth and increase the number of students performing at or above grade level.

The “Reading Acceleration for Success” program is a testament to the commitment of AACCNJ, McGraw Hill Publishers, and Trenton, N.J. Public Schools to support educational equity and foster positive learning outcomes among African American students and students of color.

By leveraging the power of Achieve 3000, an adaptive literacy program renowned for its effectiveness in improving reading skills, this collaboration aims to make a significant impact on the academic achievements of Daylight High School students.

Key highlights of the collaboration include:

Targeted Reading Intervention: The program will provide targeted reading interventions tailored to the specific needs of Daylight High School students. It will focus on improving reading comprehension, vocabulary, and critical thinking skills.

Access to Achieve 3000: Students will have access to McGraw Hill’s Achieve 3000, a research-based platform that personalizes instruction to each student’s reading level and interests, ensuring a customized learning experience.

Professional Development: Educators at Trenton, N.J. Public Schools will receive specialized training in implementing Achieve 3000 effectively, enabling them to better support their students’ literacy development.

Community Engagement: AACCNJ will actively engage with the local community to ensure that families are aware of and involved in this initiative, promoting a holistic approach to student success.

Data-Driven Progress Monitoring: The program will employ data analytics to track and assess student progress, allowing for adjustments and improvements to maximize the impact of the intervention.

John E. Harmon Sr. IOM, Founder, President, and CEO of AACCNJ, expressed his enthusiasm for the collaboration, stating, “We believe that education is the cornerstone of economic empowerment and social advancement. The ‘Reading Acceleration for Success’ program aligns perfectly with our mission to promote educational excellence and equal opportunities for African American students. We are excited to fund the pilot and to partner with McGraw Hill Publishers and Trenton, N.J. Public Schools to make a meaningful difference in the lives of these young learners.”

In addition to the organizations’ efforts, McGraw Hill Publishers will provide ongoing support, resources, and technical expertise to ensure the program’s success. The collaboration reflects the commitment of all parties involved to creating a brighter future for students in the Trenton, N.J. community.

James Earle, Superintendent of Trenton, N.J. Public Schools, stated, “This partnership exemplifies our dedication to providing our students with the best tools and resources to succeed academically. We believe that the ‘Reading Acceleration for Success’ program will help our students build the strong literacy skills necessary for lifelong success.”

Over the coming months, it will be closely monitored and evaluated to assess its impact on student achievement and reading proficiency.

“Literacy is the key that unlocks the gate blocking the path to an unbounded future. The earlier we can equip young minds with that key, the better. We are proud to partner with The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey to help more students gain the confidence to overcome obstacles and pursue a future of their own design, regardless of circumstances.” – Mr. Sean Ryan, President, McGraw Hill School.

 

About the African American Chamber of Commerce of NJ 

The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey (AACCNJ) performs an essential role in the economic viability of New Jersey. While providing a platform for New Jersey’s African American business leaders, to speak with a collective voice, the AACCNJ advocates and promotes economic diversity fostering a climate of business growth through major initiatives centering on education and public policy. The Chamber serves as a proactive advocacy group with a 501(c) 3 tax exemption, which is shared by the National Black Chamber of Commerce.

 

About McGraw Hill Publishers

McGraw Hill is a leading learning science company that delivers personalized learning experiences that help students, parents, educators, and professionals drive results. McGraw Hill has offices across North America, India, China, Europe, the Middle East, and South America and makes its learning solutions for PreK-12, higher education, professionals, and others available in more than 135 countries.

 

About Trenton, NJ Public Schools

Trenton Public Schools is a diverse, urban school district that serves a wide range of students from preschool through high school. The district is committed to providing high-quality education and ensuring equitable opportunities for all students, regardless of background or circumstance.

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‘The Hunger Games’ prequel cast guide: Meet the ‘Songbirds and Snakes’ characters and the actors playing them

Welcome back to Panem! “The Hunger Games” franchise is officially revived with the release of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” a prequel film set many years before the rise of Katniss Everdeen.

 

Based on the Suzanne Collins novel of the same name, the prequel centers on a young Coriolanus Snow as his experience mentoring District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird in the 10th Hunger Games shapes him into the villain fans of the franchise know well.

 

The original “Hunger Games” movies  – “The Hunger Games” (2012), “Catching Fire” (2013), “Mockingjay – Part 1” (2014) and “Mockingjay – Part 2” (2015) – made global stars out of its cast, most notably Jennifer Lawrence. She was joined by the likes of Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci and Donald Sutherland. Similar to that ensemble, the prequel cast includes a mix of heavyweight actors such as Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage, rising stars like Rachel Zegler and Hunter Schafer and newcomers set to break big like Tom Blyth and Josh Andrés Rivera.

 

With “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” set to conquer the box office this holiday movie season, check out a rundown of the cast and the main characters below.

 

Tom Blyth as Coriolanus ‘Coryo’ Snow

Tom Blyth as Coriolanus ‘Coryo’ Snow THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, from left: Tom Blythe, Rachel Zegler, 2023. ph: Murray Close /© Lionsgate /Courtesy Everett Collection Photo : ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Hunger Games” fans know Coriolanus Snow as the viscous and diabolical president of Panem (played by Donald Sutherland in the original four movies), but in “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” he is a young man being slowly corrupted by government forces. A war has left his family in financial ruin, which makes the prospect of winning the 10th Hunger Games enticing. He becomes a mentor to Lucy Gray Baird and their relationship complicates his plan.

 

Snow in “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is played by English actor Tom Blyth, best known until now for roles in films such as “Scott and Sid” (2018) and “Benediction”(2021). He also plays the title character in Epix’s Western series “Billy the Kid,” which is currently airing its second season.

“It’s very easy to kind of paint [Snow] as the baddie because he definitely is — I mean baddie in the bad way, not the good way — not the Instagram baddie, he’s a real baddie with a capital B,” Blyth told Variety at the film’s London premiere. “But I think for me, the exciting part is getting to answer those questions that I think we all had when we watched the original films, which is ‘How did he get like this?’ And maybe look at his humanity and dig into it a little bit.”

 

 Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, Rachel Zegler (center), 2023. ph: Murray Close /© Lionsgate /Courtesy Everett Collection Photo : ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

Lucy Gray Baird is the female tribute from District 12 in the 10th Hunger Games. She is a member of a traveling musician group known as the Covey, and her blossoming connection to mentor Coriolanus Snow complicates her time in the games. She is a singer who is the original writer of “The Hanging Tree” within the franchise’s universe.

 

“We channeled a bunch of people: Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton and Joan Baez, to name a few,” Zegler toldVariety at the film’s premiere about constructing her character. “That was really the voice that we were trying to find. But getting to sing live is my bread and butter, that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life and so it was really nice to get to bring that skill to my peers on set.”

 

Zegler is best known for her starring role as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” which won her a Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture musical or comedy. She had a supporting role earlier this year in Warner Bros. comic book tentpole “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” and she’s starring in the title role of Disney’s 2025 live-action “Snow White” movie.

 

 

Read more: 

https://variety.com/lists/hunger-games-prequel-cast-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes/tom-blyth-coriolanus-snow/

 

 

 

— Variety

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NJHMFA approves Foreclosure Intervention Program for residential properties

TRENTON, N.J. —  The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency (NJHMFA) approved the Residential Foreclosure Intervention Program (FIP) at its Oct. 19 board meeting.

The FIP will enable qualified non-profits to rehabilitate vacant or abandoned residential properties and sell them to low-, moderate-, or middle-income households.

“Vacant and abandoned homes are often purchased by institutional investors to rent back to the community or left to depreciate, adversely impacting neighboring properties,” said Executive Director Melanie R. Walter.

“This program is a testament to the state’s commitment to finding innovative solutions to difficult problems. Instead of allowing those to be the only two potential outcomes, we are going to rehabilitate these properties and get them back into the hands of residents as ownership opportunities.”

In conjunction with the Emergency Rescue Mortgage Assistance Program (ERMA), which has already delivered more than $110 million in relief to prevent foreclosures, the FIP is part of NJHMFA’s efforts to offer communities a wide range of solutions to combat foreclosure contagion and increase the stock of available homes for purchase by low-to-moderate income families.

The FIP is financed by fees collected during sheriff sales and supplemented with $25 million from the state’s allocation of the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund. From these funds, nonprofit community development organizations are eligible for up to $400,000 per property in grants to use for the acquisition and rehabilitation of single-family homes, townhomes, or condominiums.

After these properties are rehabilitated by nonprofit community development organizations, they will be sold to low-, moderate-, or middle-income households. To help these eligible families complete home purchases, NJHMFA offers up to $22,000 in down payment and closing cost assistance through its successful Down Payment Assistance (DPA) Program.

NJHMFA’s share of the proceeds will be deposited back into the Foreclosure Intervention Fund to ensure that the program grows with its successes. Grantee applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, with the program’s initial round of financing expected to benefit 60 properties.

Interested non-profits seeking to rehabilitate properties through the FIP are encouraged to visit https://www.nj.gov/dca/hmfa/consumers/nonprofits/ or reach out to FIP@njhmfa.gov for more information.

 

About Us: The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency (NJHMFA) advances the quality of life for residents of and communities throughout New Jersey by investing in, financing, and facilitating access to affordable rental housing and homeownership opportunities for low and moderate-income families, older adults, and individuals with specialized housing needs. To learn more about NJHMFA, visit: https://NJHousing.gov/

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Companies that provide Microsoft, Google, and others with AI data-labeling services often hire minors, which can be traumatic

 

Niamh Rowe / Wired:

 

 

Like most kids his age, 15-year-old Hassan spent a lot of time online. Before the pandemic, he liked playing football with local kids in his hometown of Burewala in the Punjab region of Pakistan. But Covid lockdowns made him something of a recluse, attached to his mobile phone.

 

“I just got out of my room when I had to eat something,” says Hassan, now 18, who asked to be identified under a pseudonym because he was afraid of legal action.

 

But unlike most teenagers, he wasn’t scrolling TikTok or gaming. From his childhood bedroom, the high schooler was working in the global artificial intelligence supply chain, uploading and labeling data to train algorithms for some of the world’s largest AI companies.

 

The raw data used to train machine-learning algorithms is first labeled by humans, and human verification is also needed to evaluate their accuracy. This data-labeling ranges from the simple—identifying images of street lamps, say, or comparing similar ecommerce products—to the deeply complex, such as content moderation, where workers classify harmful content within data scraped from all corners of the internet. These tasks are often outsourced to gig workers, via online crowdsourcing platforms such as Toloka, which was where Hassan started his career.

 

A friend put him on to the site, which promised work anytime, from anywhere. He found that an hour’s labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time. His mother is a homemaker, and his dad is a mechanical laborer.

 

“You can say I belong to a poor family,” he says.

 

When the pandemic hit, he needed work more than ever. Confined to his home, online and restless, he did some digging, and found that Toloka was just the tip of the iceberg.

“AI is presented as a magical box that can do everything,” says Saiph Savage, director of Northeastern University’s Civic AI Lab.

 

“People just simply don’t know that there are human workers behind the scenes.”

 

At least some of those human workers are children. Platforms require that workers be over 18, but Hassan simply entered a relative’s details and used a corresponding payment method to bypass the checks—and he wasn’t alone in doing so. WIRED spoke to three other workers in Pakistan and Kenya who said they had also joined platforms as minors, and found evidence that the practice is widespread.

“When I was still in secondary school, so many teens discussed online jobs and how they joined using their parents’ ID,” says one worker who joined Appen at 16 in Kenya, who asked to remain anonymous.

 

After school, he and his friends would log on to complete annotation tasks late into the night, often for eight hours or more.

 

Read more here:

Companies that provide Microsoft, Google, and others with AI data-labeling services are inadvertently hiring minors, often exposing them to traumatic content

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Porno for Pyros share ‘Agua,’ first new song in 26 years

Porno for Pyros are back with ‘Agua,’ their first new song in 26 years.

 

Inspired by close encounters with dolphins the band members had while surfing in the ’90s, the song is set to appear on an EP that will come out next year.

 

The band – Perry Farrell, Stephen Perkins, Peter DiStefano, and Peter DiStefano – recently announced the rescheduled dates of their 2024 tour, which is now billed as a farewell tour.

 

“Now we’re here, and that same heart, that same desire to make music together, has returned,” frontman Perry Farrell said in a statement.

 

“Getting together with these guys has been some of the most fun, the happiest times in my life.”

 

 

Listen to it below:

The post Porno for Pyros Share ‘Agua’, First New Song in 26 Years appeared first on Our Culture.

 

 

— Our Culture

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Experts: Terrorists utilize generative AI tools to evade hashing algorithms techs use to remove extremist content

—  Experts are finding thousands of examples of AI-created content every week that could allow terrorist groups and other violent extremists to bypass automated detection systems.

 

David Gilbert / Wired:

 

 

EXTREMIST GROUPS HAVE begun to experiment with artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, in order to create a flood of new propaganda. Experts now fear the growing use of generative AI tools by these groups will overturn the work Big Tech has done in recent years to keep their content off the internet.

 

 

“Our biggest concern is that if terrorists start using gen AI to manipulate imagery at scale, this could well destroy hash-sharing as a solution,” Adam Hadley, the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED. “This is a massive risk.”

 

For years, Big Tech platforms have worked hard to create databases of known violent extremist content, known as hashing databases, which are shared across platforms to quickly and automatically remove such content from the internet. But according to Hadley, his colleagues are now picking up around 5,000 examples of AI-generated content each week. This includes images shared in recent weeks by groups linked to Hezbollah and Hamas that appear designed to influence the narrative around the Israel-Hamas war.

 

“Give it six months or so, the possibility that [they] are manipulating imagery to break hashing is really concerning,” Hadley says. “The tech sector has done so well to build automated technology, terrorists could well start using gen AI to evade what’s already been done.”

 

Other examples that researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have uncovered in recent months have included a neo-Nazi messaging channel sharing AI-generated imagery created using racist and antisemitic prompts pasted into an app available on the Google Play store; far-right figures producing a “guide to memetic warfare” advising others on how to use AI-generated image tools to create extremist memes; the Islamic State publishing a tech support guide on how to securely use generative AI tools; a pro-IS user of an archiving service claiming to have used an AI-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to transcribe Arabic language IS propaganda; and a pro-al-Qaeda outlet publishing several posters with images highly likely to have been created using a generative AI platform.

 

Beyond detailing the threat posed by generative AI tools that can tweak images, Tech Against Terrorism has published a new report citing other ways in which gen AI tools can be used to help extremist groups. These include the use of autotranslation tools that can quickly and easily convert propaganda into multiple languages, or the ability to create personalized messages at scale to facilitate recruitment efforts online. But Hadley believes that AI also provides an opportunity to get ahead of extremist groups and use the technology to preempt what they will use it for.

 

“We’re going to partner with Microsoft to figure out if there are ways using our archive of material to create a sort of gen AI detection system in order to counter the emerging threat that gen AI will be used for terrorist content at scale,” Hadley says. “We’re confident that gen AI can be used to defend against hostile uses of gen AI.”

The partnership was announced today, on the eve of the Christchurch Call Leaders’ Summit, a movement designed to eradicate terrorism and extremist content from the internet, to be held in Paris.

“The use of digital platforms to spread violent extremist content is an urgent issue with real-world consequences,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft said in a statement. “By combining Tech Against Terrorism’s capabilities with AI, we hope to help create a safer world both online and off.”

 

While companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all have their own AI research divisions and are likely already deploying their own resources to combat this issue, the new initiative will ultimately aid those companies that can’t combat these efforts on their own.

“This will be particularly important for smaller platforms that don’t have their own AI research centers,” Hadley says. “Even now, with the hashing databases, smaller platforms can just become overwhelmed by this content.”

 

The threat of AI generative content is not limited to extremist groups. Last month, the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit that works to eradicate child exploitation content from the internet, published a report that detailed the growing presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created by AI tools on the dark web.

 

The researchers found over 20,000 AI-generated images posted to one dark web CSAM forum over the course of just one month, with 11,108 of these images judged most likely to be criminal by the IWF researchers. As the IWF researchers wrote in their report, “These AI images can be so convincing that they are indistinguishable from real images.”

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Timothée Chalamet flashes butt on ‘SNL’ as ‘gay famous’ pop star Troye Sivan

Timothée Chalamet embraced his inner-twink while hosting the Nov. 11 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” in a sketch in which the Oscar-nominated actor played openly gay Australian pop star Troye Sivan.

 

The sketch involved a woman (played by cast member Sarah Sherman) complaining to her doctor (played by cast member Bowen Yang) that she’s been seeing a mysterious figure in her sleep every night. When the doctor uses a new therapy to conjure the image while the woman is awake, Chalamet appears in a white tank-top, baggy blue pants and wavy blond hair.

 

He then breaks into a version of the choreography from Sivan’s recent hit “Got Me Started,” in which the singer at one point flashes his red briefs to the camera while — there’s no other way to report this — wiggling his butt.

 

“What are you? Are you a demon?!” the woman asks her vision.

 

“Not quite, girly,” Chalamet as Sivan responds. “I’m Australian YouTube twink turned indie pop star and model turned HBO actor Troye Sivan being played by an American actor who can’t do an Australian accent.” Sivan recently co-starred on the HBO series “The Idol,” but anyone on TikTok will best recognize him from his recent spate of deeply queer music videos with some iconically memorable dancing.

 

Yang explains that Sivan has started to haunt the dreams of more and more women “now that this boy is sneaking his way into the mainstream.”

 

“Isn’t he kind of famous?” she asks.

 

“He’s gay famous,” the doctor replies. “It’s different!”

 

After Chalamet dances again, the woman’s confusion only grow stronger. “Why does he have my psyche in a choke hold?” she exclaims. Chalamet-as-Sivan responds: “Isn’t it obvious, homie? I look like a moisturized Machine Gun Kelly, and I’m the most iconic blouse ever. Bye, diva!”

 

“Why did he call himself a blouse?!” she asks, her desperation rising.

 

This time, the doctor responds: “A blouse is a fem top!”

 

By the end of the sketch, Sivan’s hold on the woman’s mind has grown so strong, he begins to multiply, at which point musical guest Boygenius — the indie supergroup consisting of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus — appear in identical Troye Sivan drag. Yang’s doctor joins them, and, yes, more red undies are wiggled at the camera.

 

UPDATE: On Sunday morning, Sivan responded to the sketch on TikTok by evoking the sketch itself. “The only way I can describe this is like it’s a weird fucking dream,” he said. “Like, imagine: Timothée Chalamet was in my dream, but he was me, and he was wearing my clothes…”

Check out the sketch below, and the mesmerizing Troye Sivan music video that inspired it.

Troye Sivan music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjLcVqjIkLo

 

 

— Variety

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Alibaba and JD.com reported YoY sales increases for Singles Day, but this year also, neither company provided overall revenue figures

  • Analysts estimate the leaders chalked up single-digit gains
  • Newer platforms like PDD and Douyin may have far outpaced them

 

 

Sarah Zheng / Bloomberg:

 

—  China’s Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com reported sales increases for Singles’ Day, after the e-commerce giants offered steep discounts 

 

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. reported sales increases during China’s most important shopping festival, yet likely lagged newer entrants from social media platforms like ByteDance Ltd.’s     Douyin during a muted year for consumer spending.

Analysts scrambled for clues after China’s two e-commerce leaders again failed to disclose overall revenue numbers during Singles’ Day, the annual bargains extravaganza built around a Nov. 11 event that Alibaba popularized over a decade ago. Historically a barometer for Chinese consumer sentiment, it’s become much harder to parse since companies stopped providing precise figures during the turmoil of the Covid era.

 

Online transactions across the three largest platforms — Alibaba’s Tmall, JD.com’s main portal and PDD Holdings Inc.’s China-only Pinduoduo service — likely slipped about 1% to 923.5 billion yuan ($127 billion) during the festival, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ada Li estimated, calculating based on retail channel data tracked by Syntun. While a smaller piece of the pie, streaming platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou Technology grew transactions by 19%, according to Li’s analysis.

Others painted a slightly rosier picture. Alibaba and JD likely managed 1% to 3% growth in gross merchandise value over the three- to four-week period leading up to Nov. 11, when merchants embarked on their discounting spree, Goldman Sachs estimated. PDD, which targets lower-income and rural markets, racked up growth of 20%, analyst Ronald Keung estimated.

Alibaba and JD.com report earnings this week and should offer more insight into whether domestic consumption has recovered.

“The slowing growth shows we need to roll out large-scale economic stimulus measures that are strong enough to lift market confidence and drive up the economy,” Ren Zeping, a well-known economist who was formerly a researcher at the State Council’s Development Research Center, wrote Monday.

“Consumers are becoming more mature and rational as they go after high value for money. Their perception of brands is also changing, and domestic brands with high value for money are rising.”

 

 

Read more here:

Alibaba and JD.com reported YoY sales increases for Singles Day, but neither company provided overall revenue figures for the event for the second straight year

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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‘SNL’ hosts auditions for Britney Spears’ memoir with Timothée Chalamet, Jada Pinkett Smith, Julia Fox and more

The news that multiple Oscar nominee Michelle Williams was the reader for the audiobook of Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me” was too delightful for “Saturday Night Live” to pass up.

 

In a pre-taped sketch for the Nov. 11 episode hosted by Timothée Chalamet, Chloe Fineman as Spears introduced a cavalcade of celebrities (or, rather, celebrity impressions) auditioning to be the reader of Britney’s book.

 

Fineman was everywhere in the sketch: She also played idiosyncratic actress and model Julia Fox, and a manic, borderline illiterate version of Chalamet, while the actor himself played Martin Scorsese (who recently directed Chalamet in a perfume commercial for Blue de Chanel).

 

Other highlights included Sarah Sherman as comedian John Mulaney, referencing his most recent stand-up special, “Baby J,” about his drug addiction (but in a funny way); Molly Kearney as actor Kevin James, but instead of reading from the memoir, Kearney just recreates the ubiquitous meme of James striking an aw-shucks pose; James Austin Johnson breaking out his Werner Herzog impression, remarking after reading some of Spears’ prose, “I am entranced by this Floridian vernacular;” and Ego Nwodim playing Jada Pinkett Smith, but instead of reading from Spears’ book, she reads from her own memoir, before yelling out, “Tupac has alopecia!”

 

Allison Janney, Steve-O, Fred Schneider from the B-52s, Ice Spice, Dame Maggie Smith, Bill Hader and Neil deGrasse Tyson all made appearances during the sketch as well. None of them, however, came close to the perfection of Williams’ reading of Spears’ memoir.

 

 

— Variety