Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

A new museum and clinic will honor the enslaved “Mothers of Gynecology”

“At that site, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, along with other enslaved women and girls whose names have been lost to history, shed blood for the creation of American gynecology, despite their inability to consent. It is also where they labored to run the “Negro hospital” and tend to the family

08 Dec 2022

A Matter of Necessity

“Today, The 19th’s staff reflects that broadened aim: the newsroom is 65 percent women of color, with 28 percent identifying as LGBTQ+; 16 percent are people living with disabilities. “We pledged to build the most representative newsroom in America,” Ramshaw told me. “I think we are pretty close to

07 Dec 2022

A Creator of ActivityPub on What’s Next for the Fediverse

“As well as technical improvements he’d like to see, Prodromou has thoughts on what the fediverse can ultimately become. He thinks it will take some time for people to “detox from their Twitter experience” and realize that their social media world is no longer subject to corporate manipulation.”  #Technology

07 Dec 2022

Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden’s Laptop

“Now, apparently more files are going to be published, so something may change, but so far it’s been a whole lot of utter nonsense. But when I say that both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I keep seeing a few very, very wrong arguments being made. So, let’

07 Dec 2022

A year of new avenues

“The platforms of the last decade are done. […] This is … tremendously exciting! Some of you reading this were users and/or developers of the internet in the period from 2002 to perhaps 2012. For those of you who were not, I want to tell you that it was exciting and

07 Dec 2022

The Grift Brothers

“Over lunch, MacAskill encouraged SBF to pursue the EA life strategy called “earn to give,” whereby one strives to — quoting a Sequoia profile on SBF—“get filthy rich, for charity’s sake,” even if this means working for what MacAskill himself calls “immoral organization[s].” Although the means may be

06 Dec 2022

I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language

“I am writing this blog post as a public record of this incredibly impressive (and a little scary) capability. I know I just posted yesterday, but I am so blown away that I had to write this down while it was still fresh in my mind. Congratulations OpenAI. This is

06 Dec 2022

What if failure is the plan?

“For an anchor point, consider the collapse of local news journalism. The myth that this was caused by Craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a

05 Dec 2022

Work I'm proud of

One of the most meaningful pieces of work I’ve been a part of this year was The 19th’s dashboard of what abortion laws look like in every state right now, which has been updated for seven months and counting. The genesis of the idea came from The 19th’

05 Dec 2022

Oxford Word of the Year 2022

“‘Goblin mode’ – a slang term, often used in the expressions ‘in goblin mode’ or ‘to go goblin mode’ – is ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.’”  #Culture [Link]

05 Dec 2022

Fingerprinting AI to prevent spam

Lots of people have been worried about deepfakes for a while, but I think the bigger, more pressing concern is detecting AI-generated text. I’d love to be proven wrong on this hypothesis: the only real market for long-form AI text generation on the web is to generate spam. There

05 Dec 2022

Linked: Lack of trust in journalism and knowledge of news practices

“The researchers said both the survey and focus groups showed that while several factors influence trust - such as someone’s willingness to trust other institutions in society - when audiences understand how news works they are more likely to trust it.”  #Media [Link]

05 Dec 2022
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community.

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Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.