This describes using Meta’s Muse not as a personal assistant but as a brute-force web-scraping workhorse to find and vet concert videos for a side project called fullsets.fm, which aggregates professionally recorded performances and extracts tracklists. The scraper pipeline uses Luna and Gemini 3.8 (via Gemini Studio) to cheaply assess audio/video quality and content, but discovery across many small YouTube channels and Reddit required a different tool. Muse can be instructed to scan thousands of videos or iterate artist-by-artist, running many parallel browser processes on a managed VM with Chrome to hunt down rare uploads and produce candidate lists; it also helps with artist matching, reviewing Luna/Gemini outputs, and final accept/reject decisions.
Practical findings: a month of Muse cost $80 and the system consumed billions of tokens per week, often seeming not to count usage; Muse Spark 1.3 is mediocre at general writing and coding but handles this large-scale, Gemini-Flash-style workload well, effectively offering near-unlimited tokens and cloud CPU/bandwidth. Downsides include job freezes, clunky multi-job UI, occasional frustrating model communication, and an obvious abuse vector that has already led to blocks (Amazon), raising concerns about future site defenses. A referral code (69WSDQ) was offered for signup bonuses.
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A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that police using Flock's automated license plate reader system without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. The decision highlights concerns about the system's potential for indiscriminate mass surveillance, with over 100,000 warrantless searches conducted monthly. (404media.co)
ICE stored photos, license plates, and other data of protesters in a Palantir-built database called the Investigative Case Management system. Court filings reveal DHS agents used this database to track and intimidate observers during enforcement operations in Maine. (wired.com)
Apple will require explicit user actions for Mac apps to access full disk data, aiming to reduce security risks. This change comes as AI agents are deemed to substantially increase potential security vulnerabilities. (theverge.com)
Two vessels heading to the United States have been reportedly compromised by hackers. US officials are investigating the incidents involving these ships' cybersecurity breaches. (reuters.com)
A California tech executive has been arrested for allegedly smuggling $300 million worth of Nvidia chips to China. The case involves violations of export controls and sanctions related to the transfer of advanced semiconductor technology. (qz.com)
GrapheneOS fixed a major performance regression caused by Android 17 QPR1, which caused lag and freezes on Pixels. Google has been slow to release fixes for such issues, but GrapheneOS addressed it promptly and plans further improvements. (discuss.grapheneos.org)
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