An AI-generated country song has reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, sparking backlash across the music industry. As Whiskey Riff’s Aaron Ryan reported, “Walk My Walk” by the fictitious artist Breaking Rust, created by someone under the alias Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, has surpassed real artists like Ella Langley and Charley Crockett in sales and streams. Despite Billboard acknowledging that Breaking Rust’s music is entirely AI-generated, it continues to list the song without distinction from human work. The “artist” now boasts 1.8 million monthly Spotify listeners and 30,000 Instagram followers, though Ryan suggests much of the traction could be artificial. Critics warn that platforms and charts legitimizing such content “reward AI slop” while undermining musicianship, rights, and compensation. Without clearer labeling or regulation, AI-generated hits may increasingly crowd out real creators and redefine what counts as popular music.
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Jeff Yass, billionaire founder of Susquehanna International Group, is donating $100 million to the University of Austin (UATX), making it the largest gift in the school’s history and enabling it to permanently eliminate tuition and government funding. Writing in The Free Press, Yass argued that “the incentive structure of higher education is broken,” noting that universities are “paid regardless of students’ outcomes.” UATX, founded in 2021, aims to tie its financial survival directly to graduates’ real-world success, aligning institutional performance with student achievement. The donation establishes a self-reinforcing model in which successful alumni sustain future classes. By rejecting federal money and endowment-driven complacency, UATX intends to “invest in students, not charge them,” Yass said, positioning the experiment as a test case for restoring accountability and rigor to American higher education, a system he says has drifted toward prestige over purpose.
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Mummolin Inc. announced that its subsidiary OCEAN, the world’s first fully transparent and permissionless Bitcoin mining pool, has achieved SOC 2 Type 1 attestation, marking a significant milestone in enterprise-grade security for digital asset infrastructure. The audit, conducted by AARC-360 under the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) standards, verified OCEAN’s controls for security and availability. “Security and reliability are foundational to everything we build,” said OCEAN President Mark Artymko, calling the months-long examination proof of the company’s operational integrity. Backed by Jack Dorsey and led by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr, OCEAN aims to set compliance benchmarks for institutional miners. Chief Legal Officer Ian Northon emphasized that the certification confirms the platform is “secure by design.” The company will enter its SOC 2 Type 2 observation period next, with results expected in Q2 2026.
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Visa and Mastercard’s settlement with merchants could usher in tiered pricing and surcharges, Imani Moise reports. Merchants would be able to accept some types of cards within a network and levy different fees, say 2.5% for basic cards and 3% for rewards, pending court approval. Networks would add visual markers to cards to identify categories, a change analysts say could take years. The deal also phases in an average 0.1 percentage-point reduction in interchange over five years. Consumer behavior may shift: “People have gotten accustomed to being able to pay … without really thinking too hard about which card to use,” NerdWallet’s Sara Rathner said. Analysts don’t expect broad cuts to rewards or sharp fee hikes, but they foresee more steering to cheaper payments and intensified competition for high-spending customers if merchants adopt surcharges and selective acceptance.
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For 1 AI "winner", there are innumerable hours of musical slop dirtying up lobbies, elevators, cafes and more. My assaulted ears cry out "enough already".