Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

NotableLinks

Pedal coast-to-coast without using a road? New program helps connect trails across the US

This is completely lovely and the kind of thing America absolutely should be doing. "O’Neil hopes the trail born from eastern Indiana’s old railroad tracks will eventually become a central cog in the proposed Great American Rail-Trail — a continuous network of walking and biking routes spanning from

25 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Elon Musk, X Fought Surveillance While Profiting Off Surveillance

"While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business." The

25 Mar 2024

What if everyone knew how much we all made?

Proposal: every product vendor must disclose the wages of the people who made it. If you buy a box of chocolate, you get to know how much the people who picked the raw ingredients made, as well as the chocolatiers downstream from them, and so on. If you buy an

25 Mar 2024

Gawking at Thom Yorke

Walking around Oxford, my hometown, I used to see Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke from time to time. He always looked miserable. At Boots the Chemist? Miserable. At the Ashmolean Museum? Miserable. Having a picnic with his family? Miserable. Walking down North Parade? Miserable. It was only years later that I

24 Mar 2024

Blog aspirationally, not opportunistically

When you find yourself writing a 3000 word essay about engineering management on your personal website, you might want to take a step back and take another look at your goals. And if you find that this isn’t quite what you want to be talking or writing about, it

24 Mar 2024

Building engineering

I’ve spent most of my career — now well over two decades of it — building things on the web. I’ve worked as a software developer, I’ve founded a couple of my own companies, and I’ve often found myself leading teams of engineers. Right now I’m the

23 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Threads has entered the fediverse

"We’re taking a phased approach to Threads’ fediverse integration to ensure we can continue to build responsibly and get valuable feedback from our users and the fediverse community." It's really great to see Meta do this and communicate well about it. However you see the

21 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Big Journalism’s hopeless myopia

"One way you know that it’s business as usual for journalists is that so many have remained on Twitter, a platform whose owner has taken right-wing trollery to extremes lately. He loudly supports people who want to install a fascist government in the United States, and it’s

20 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

The Intercept charts a new legal strategy for digital publishers suing OpenAI

A detail I hadn't noticed: while the New York Times OpenAI lawsuit rested on copyright infringement, the Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet are claiming a DMCA violation. "A study released this month by Patronus AI, a startup launched by former Meta researchers, found that GPT-4 reproduced copyrighted

20 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

AI Is Threatening My Tech and Lifestyle Content Mill

"Sure, our articles maintain a rigid SEO template that creatively resembles the kitchen at a poorly run Quiznos, and granted, all our story ideas are gleaned from better-written magazine articles from seven months ago (that we’re totally not plagiarizing), but imagine if AI wrote those articles? So much

19 Mar 2024

Building vs using the web

One thing that becomes clear when you move outside of open web groups and a certain kind of tech company is the difference between trying to build the web as a platform and trying to use the web as a platform. In the former mental model, you’re experimenting to

19 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots

"Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art." So many LLM exploits come down to finding ways to convince an engine to disregard its own programming. It's straight out of 1980s science fiction, like teaching an

18 Mar 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.