Media
[Henry Blodget] Henry Blodget, former co-founder of Business Insider, has started a new, "AI-native" newsroom. It's not, in my opinion, a positive use of AI, but it does indicate how some people are thinking about using the technology. This apparently includes harassing your newly-created virtual employees:
Culture
[Ani DiFranco interviewed by Kate Hutchinson in The Guardian] Ani DiFranco, the artist I've seen live more than any other, answered my question as part of this Guardian Q&A. It's about a sobering topic, but still, this made me very happy. Here's
Notable Links
[Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott at WIRED] The Holocaust was organized on IBM punch cards. Hitler gave the head of IBM, Watson, a medal for his services; they met in person so that Watson could receive the award. Later, they named their AI tech after him. Anyway, in unrelated news:
This is the second part in a three-part series. Part one was about Bluesky. To make sure you get part three, make sure you’re subscribed. In 2011, I sat on a panel at SXSW Interactive with Blaine Cook, the former Twitter CTO who had demonstrated an decentralized integration with
Notable Links
[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica] The statistics that help us navigate our world are under thread: "Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of
I realized I misspoke in today’s piece about Bluesky product strategy. In it, I said this: I’m generally not bullish about creator economy services. What I meant to say is that I’m generally not bullish about venture-funded creative economy services. It’s the need for venture scale
A lifetime or two ago, Biz Stone was showing me and my co-founder around South Park in San Francisco. The Twitter office was sat there, a weird building with glass bricks across the road from what would later be the Instagram office. We grabbed a coffee at Caffe Centro and
A quick aside: I now believe it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better (if it gets better). I’m not going to enumerate what’s been going on; you’re either paying attention or you’re not, but we’re less than one hundred days
Technology
[Tony Stubblebine on The Medium Blog] In the midst of some challenging cultural times, Tony Stubblebine and Medium are doing the right thing: "Over the past several months, I’ve gotten questions from the Medium community asking if we’re planning to change our policies in reaction to recent
Fediverse
[Sean Tilley] Sean has been integrating We Distribute with the fediverse for years. It's been hard - particularly at the beginning, which is the plight of the very early adopter. This rundown is incredibly useful for anyone who wants to integrate their own publication with the network, and
AI
[Simon Willison] Prompt injection attacks have been one of the bugbears for modern AI models: it's an unsolved problem that has meant that it can be quite dangerous to expose LLMs to direct user input, among other things. A lot of people have worked on the problem, but
Notable Links
[Andy Bounds in the Financial Times] The last few months have radically changed the risk assessment for people traveling to the US from abroad - as well as Americans who plan to cross the US border. In this case, it's European Commission staff: "The European Commission is
