Ben Werdmuller

Monday was hottest day for global average temperature on record, as climate crisis bites

And it will just keep coming. #Climate [Link]

CJEU ruling on Meta referral could close the chapter on surveillance capitalism

The impact of legislation like GDPR goes far beyond their jurisdictions, because it's hard to segment a data architecture for just some users. This ruling that Meta must provide its service to users who do not consent to tracking and processing of their personal data is potentially seismic.

Getting AI to build you up and break you down

Christian Heilmann writes: One thing I am not good at is write in superlatives about myself. That’s a good thing, I think? But often you are asked to big yourself up for some official publication or marketing materials. So I thought I give ChatGPT a go to turn a

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

I think this is a legal challenge waiting to happen. While people who publish publicly online have a reasonable expectation that anyone can read their content, they don't have a similar expectation about content being modeled and analyzed. There's no de facto license to do this.

Some website redesigns

I mildly redesigned my homepage today, in order to do a better job of what this site is and what you might read on it. I’d hoped to use the Internet Archive to go back and look at all my blogs — I started my first personal website in 1994

Work

How I’ve defied labels and enlisted the help of others to create my value proposition

A lovely conversation with my friend Roxann Stafford, who has inspired and taught me so much.  #Work [Link]

You (Yes, You) Should Start a Mailing List

If you own your relationships with your community, you'll never be locked into any platform. Start a blog, start a mailing list - get out of the algorithmic content game. This is even more important if you make a living from your work. Parker is right on the

'Environment is burning', warns UN rights chief

Plenty of people argue that the climate crisis is overblown. I think they're wrong. If anything, we need to be screaming about this more - and, I agree, calling out the deniers and green-washers. Billions of people will starve. Entire nations will become uninhabitable. It's not

Licensing site content using a text file

Dare Obasanjo, over on Mastodon: Robots.txt needs an update for the 2020s. Instead of just saying what content can be indexed, it should also grant rights. Like crawl my site only to provide search results not train your LLM. Call it license.txt. The robots.txt standard allows a

View of 'man as hunter, woman as gatherer' upended by new study

So much of gender essentialism is self-feeding: the idea that men are born to be aggressive hunters was conducted by men who made assumptions based on contemporary societal sexism. Of course women hunted. Of course grandmothers hunted. There's so much value in re-examining the prejudiced assumptions of the

Eigg Electric

This seems like what a part of the future looks like: the island of Eigg has its own power, generated by renewable energy. Members of the community are trained and paid to maintain it. A power grid is not a bad thing for resiliency (see Texas), but I can imagine

A Teenage Girl Is a Funhouse Mirror

I love this kind of short story: small, personal, revelatory. I wish I could write like this.  #Culture [Link]