URLs. Fresh hot URLs.

Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up [Ashley Belanger/Wired] – Air Canada’s chatbot gave a customer incorrect information about bereavement fare policies, and a court held the airline accountable. Unclear whether the chatbot was truly LLM powered – or by whom – but it’s a fun piece of case law now (at least in Canada) for GPT hallucinations.

The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada’s policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully attempted to follow the chatbot’s advice and request a refund but was shocked that the request was rejected.

The best founders don’t care if an investor is “founder friendly” [Harry Glaser/Modelbit] – Repeat founder Harry Glaser wants a few things from his VCs but “founder friendly” ain’t one of them [disclosure: we’re investors in his ML deployment startup ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ].

Founders want to win so badly they put themselves in an all-in position. The traits an investor can demonstrate that make them irresistible to founders are: (1) A track record of winning, (2) a deeply-held, thoughtfully-justified belief that this business will be a winner, and (3) an unbroken history of high-integrity behavior when the chips are down.

An old-school Las Vegas bookie takes on a new era of sports betting [Danny Funt/WaPo] – Always love a ‘these guys are still doing it the way it used to be’ piece. South Point, one of the last family run hotels in Las Vegas, does 3/4 of its sports betting business IRL and still takes more action than any other institution in the state.

Asked about some national sportsbooks profiting as much as $30 for every $100 wagered while the South Point holds about $5 for every $100, Gaughan told a story from early in his career. Many riverboat passengers, he noticed, spent much of the trip sitting around glumly after going bust on slots. Gaughan lowered slot hold percentages so customers only ran out of money as their boat was docking.

The death (again) of the internet as we know it [Noah Smith/Noahpinion] – Feeds, enshittification, AI slop and disinformation is making the consumer web a mess. But maybe the modern internet needs to die? Or at least transform itself.

So the internet as we know it — social media sites and the Web — is becoming a generally worse place to hang out. Wading through oceans of advertisements, algorithmic randomness antisemitic Russian bots, Tiktok-poisoned shouters, AI slop, and deepfakes is just not a fun way to spend anyone’s precious limited lifetime.

Better, perhaps, to simply withdraw from the public internet — to spend one’s time chatting directly with friends and in small groups, having fun offline, and maybe watching TV or reading a book or a Substack. That sort of human interaction worked fine before the internet, and it will probably work just fine today. Which is why despite the fact that all of the trends I mentioned are negative, I’m optimistic about the future of our digital communications and our media diet. Maybe someday historians will look back on the era when we lived our lives on social networking sites as a brief anomaly.

An Investor’s Perspective on the Value of Regular Check-Ins [Charles Hudson/Precursor Ventures] – Going beyond the one:many email update for why quick but ongoing conversations can be mutually helpful.

As an investor, I don’t know, ex-ante, which of the 10-12 meetings per year with a given company will be impactful. My experience is that neither I nor the company can evaluate the value of any of those meetings in real time; the value is often only known after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. Usually, 2 or 3 meetings each year will address decisions material to the company’s outcome. The other meetings allow us to get to know each other and (hopefully) build mutual trust and a shared understanding of the problem the founders are tackling.