No. 1Media
Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery is now official
Paramount closed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, after a judge cleared it in late September. Netflix had agreed in December to buy only the studios and streaming for $82.7 billion. Paramount came back in late February with an offer for everything, including HBO, CNN and HGTV, and Netflix declined to match it. The article cites both $108 billion and $111 billion for that bid. The DOJ approved the deal in June, and a 12-state lawsuit led by California briefly paused it. The new company takes on about $33 billion of WBD's debt and expects almost $70 billion in annual revenue. Ellison has warned of job cuts, and the streaming services are to be merged eventually.
Why it mattersYou should expect fewer streaming options, possible price changes, and layoffs across the combined company.
Full story at TechCrunch →No. 2Consumer
New York City's 'Click to Cancel' rule takes effect October 1
New York City now has a rule saying that if you can sign up for a subscription with a click, you must be able to cancel just as easily. The city calls it the first municipal rule of its kind in the nation. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection enforces it. Violators face civil penalties starting at $525 and may have to refund the customer. Anyone who hits a cancellation maze can file a complaint with the department, by mail or by fax. The source doesn't mention an online filing option.
Why it mattersYou can now file a complaint and possibly get a refund if a business makes cancelling harder than signing up.
Full story at Hacker News →No. 3AI
A Verge reviewer's first weeks running AI agents locally
The Verge's reviewer is testing local AI on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB of memory. He runs the free, open-source Hermes Agent with a 125-billion-parameter Qwen model that takes about 105GB. So far it has produced a daily briefing from his email and calendar, and sorted more than 400 Steam games into categories. It has also crunched financial records and built a laptop spec sheet, both jobs he wouldn't hand to a cloud service. He calls the briefing modest, and notes you don't need a $12,000 machine for it. A benchmark-automation script is still unfinished. The piece is the start of a series, and our excerpt cuts off mid-sentence.
Why it mattersYou get an honest look at what local AI does well today, and privacy is the main reason to go local.
Full story at The Verge →