Hello world!

Happy to see you again.

I’ve been wanting to get back into newsletter writing for a while—which means its time to revive KYLIEBYTES.

When I first started this Substack, I had just moved from my college's student publication, where I initially wrote the KYLIEBYTES column, to my first real journalism job at Insider. Balancing my senior year as an information systems major and being told to write five to six stories a week was overwhelming, leaving little room for a regular newsletter. Now, after two and a half years in this industry, I feel better prepared to reconnect with my own audience!

I get into the earnest semantics of why I’m interested in starting a newsletter here. TL;DR, I enjoy engaging with people this way. I’ve done a few editions of Fortune’s Datasheet newsletter, and I like how candid I can be about this beat in newsletter form. I wrote about naked Alf on Bluesky, people being fucking obsessed with Sam Altman, and poked some fun at SXSW attendees during the SVB collapse. Those are times when I’m most unfiltered, unedited, and with newsletters, I tend to get emails from people with their thoughts about what I wrote. It feels good, I like connecting with humans, and I like writing.

I’m not sure what this newsletter is going to look like yet, which might not convince you to subscribe, that’s okay—it’ll be free anyways! I’m hoping to write about my thoughts as they come along, for instance, I have opinions about Meta’s not-so-open-source arguments surfacing online. Also, have you guys been on Bluesky lately? As Marie Kondo says, I love mess, so we’ll get into it.

So, I’ll start each Substack with some words about whatever current tech thing I feel the need to expound on. Then, at the bottom, I’ll link my recent stories and some other stories I’ve read recently that I think you’d all enjoy. Also, going to tinker with songs recommendations, because that’s my second love after writing. For now, I’m really making this up as I go. This is more for fun than anything else.

I'm all ears for your thoughts too. Let's chat about what you're building, your passions, feedback for my newsletter, or anything else that floats your boat. If you want to reach me, the best way is via Signal at 415-735-6829, email kylierobison@protonmail.com, Twitter @kyliebytes, or any of my other social medias here.

Last but not least, I want to say thank you to those who subscribed back in December 2020 when I was still figuring this career out. I have no shortage of gratefulness for the audience that has followed me this long, which is why I’m rebooting this in the first place. I hope to make it worthwhile!

Stay tuned for more words from me soon.

— Kylie Robison

OTHER BYTES:

• Meta’s new A.I. is an open-source breakthrough with fine print to freeze out competitors — Fortune

• Twitter’s Surge in Harmful Content a Barrier to Advertiser Return — Bloomberg

• Google’s Darkest Days: After Three Deaths, a Workforce Reckons with a Changed Company — The Information

• The Last Social Network: How Facebook's IPO was the beginning of the rot in social media — Ed Zitron

• Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles — The New York Times

• As Many As 700,000 Turkish TikTok Accounts Were Hacked Before The Country’s Presidential Election — Forbes

SOUND BYTES:

• Figure in the Field — The Brazen Youth

• In The Yuma — Chris Lake, Aatig

• Lamb’s Wool — Foster The People