Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

AI

When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind.

[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture] "ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two." The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an

22 Jul 2024

President Harris?

I didn’t post about it — what is there to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere? — but former President Trump was almost shot last week. The would-be assassin’s motive is muddy (he was a Republican), but the bullet or a sliver of glass narrowly missed him, taking a

21 Jul 2024

Notable links

Can J.D. Vance's Populist Crusade Succeed?

[Matt Stoller] "So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing

18 Jul 2024

Technology

Taboola + Apple News? No thanks

[Om Malik] "Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy." This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more

18 Jul 2024

Media

News CEOs and the Question of News Experience

[Richard J. Tofel] "I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of

18 Jul 2024

The Silicon Valley Would-Be Vice President

JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably understand each other quite well. It can’t have hurt that a bevy of tech billionaires told Trump to pick him, and it’s not unreasonable to assume

18 Jul 2024

Technology

Ethicswishing

[Robin Berjon] This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call: "If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function

17 Jul 2024

Innovation in news is an oxymoron

If you’re waiting for permission to build something, or if you want to see how well something has worked for your peers or competitors before you implement it yourself, you will never, ever innovate. That’s the trap that news media seems to be in: nobody wants to be

17 Jul 2024

Todoist is really good

I’m, uh, very bad at task management. I wouldn’t want to pathologize, but I’ve never been a particularly organized person. I’ve always aspired to be more organized, but I’ve never found a tool or a methodology that really works for me. They were either too

17 Jul 2024

15 books that made an impact

I really like Lou Plummer’s list of 15 books which made the most impact on him, which I discovered via Tracy Durnell’s own list: I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them. At

11 Jul 2024

Technology

Introducing Plausible Community Edition

[Plausible Analytics] "We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot

10 Jul 2024

Climate

‘It’s about survival’: Athens mayor focuses on getting capital through extreme heat

[Helene Smith at The Guardian] "Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already

10 Jul 2024
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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.