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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

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Poll Shows 74 Percent of Republicans Like Donald Trump’s Dictator Plan

"Only 44 percent of adults completely rebelled at the notion of giving the former president — who is currently facing 91 felony charges — dictatorial authority, calling it “definitely bad” for America." In case anyone was still wondering what the stakes are this election season.  #Democracy [Link]

07 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Apple releases 'MGIE', a revolutionary AI model for instruction-based image editing

"Computer - enhance!" I like the approach in this release from Apple: an open source AI model that can edit images based on natural language instructions. In other words, a human can tell the engine what to do to an image, and it goes and does it. Rather

07 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Want to sell a book or release an album? Better start a TikTok.

"You’ve got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are. [...] The commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security." In the new economy, every artist

06 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice

"In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice." What's interesting

06 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

New study says the world blew past 1.5 degrees of warming four years ago

"Limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels has been the gold standard for climate action since at least the 2015 Paris Agreement. A new scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, however, suggests that the world

05 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way

"If your position is that public money will irrevocably taint journalism but the biggest companies in America buying ads will not, I submit that you have not thought about this issue very deeply." I don't know how I feel about a publicly-funded media, although I couldn&

05 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Semafor reporters are going to curate the news with AI

"As social traffic collapses and Google makes ominous AI-powered sounds about search, publishers across the board have started to reemphasize their websites as destinations, and that means there are a lot of new ideas about what makes websites valuable again." A lot of which look like blogging. Semafor

05 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Book: The Future, by Naomi Alderman

"The only way to predict the future is to control it." An interesting idea that powers a book that has a lot to say about 21st century oligarchy and our relationship to technology. There's one conclusion that hits home particularly hard; I can't describe

05 Feb 2024

Three variations on Omelas

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin: They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of

04 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Zuckerberg's Going to Use Your Instagram Photos to Train His AI Machines

During Meta's earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Instagram data is used to train the company's AI models. “On Facebook and Instagram, there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos, which we estimate is greater than

04 Feb 2024

The four phases

This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival, in which Manuel Moreale prompts us to think about the various facets of digital relationships. Our relationship to digital technology has been through a few different phases. One: the census In the first, computers were the realm of government and big

03 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

‘The Messenger’ Implosion Once Again Shows The Real Problem With U.S. Journalism Is Shitty Management By Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

"If you’ve spent any time in journalism, it’s completely wild to think about what a small team of smart, hungry journalists and editors could do with $50 million. It’s enough to staff a team of hard-nosed ProPublica-esque journalists for the better part of the next decade.

03 Feb 2024
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Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.