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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

NotableLinks

P&B : Winnie Lim

A lovely interview with Winnie Lim, whose deeply human, beautifully-written blog is one of my absolute must-reads. This spoke to me, except substitute Oxford for Singapore: "I felt very alienated and lonely as a young person in the 1990s. It was incredible to discover the internet and know there

03 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

OpenAI says there’s only a small chance ChatGPT will help create bioweapons

"OpenAI’s GPT-4 only gave people a slight advantage over the regular internet when it came to researching bioweapons, according to a study the company conducted itself." Uh, great? "On top of that, the students who used GPT-4 were nearly as proficient as the expert group on

01 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Anti-scale: a response to AI in journalism

"It should be obvious that any technology prone to making up facts is a bad fit for journalism, but the Associated Press, the American Journalism Project, and Axel Springer have all inked partnerships with OpenAI." The conversation about AI at the Online News Association conference last year was

01 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

The Messenger Shuts Down—And Some Thoughts About Why It Ever Happened

Josh Marshall on The Messenger: "It really is like if you were on a parachute jump and some cocky idiot just jumped out of the plane with no chute saying he had it covered and, obviously, plummeted to the ground and died." Beyond the well-deserved snark, this is

01 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

The circular Tube map

Transport for London have redesigned the Tube map in concentric circles as part of a promotional partnership with a phone company. Just one of the many, many ways public transit is desperately grasping for funds all over the world. Here in Philly, SEPTA is working to rename stations based on

01 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Our Redesigned Byline Pages

"Research has shown that the more readers know about our reporters, the more likely they are to understand the rigors of our journalistic process and trust the results." So the NYT enhanced its journalist profiles to make them more human. People trust people, not brands. The design makes

30 Jan 2024

Stripping the web of its humanity

I tried Arc Search, the new mobile app from the Browser Company. Its central insight is that almost every mobile browsing session starts with a web search; rather than giving you the usual list of results, it prioritizes building a web page for you that contains all the information you

30 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash

A really great piece about blameless postmortems and how the psychological safety to tell the truth leads to fewer mistakes and - in the case of the aviation industry - fewer lives lost. "It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. [...] A just organizational

29 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Following lawsuit, rep admits “AI” George Carlin was human-written

Simon Willison called this, and it makes sense: the George Carlin AI special was human-written, because that's the only way it could possibly have happened. It's a parlor trick; a bit. It's also a kind of advertising for AI: even as you're

28 Jan 2024

The indieweb is for everyone

Tantek Çelik has posted a lovely encapsulation of the indieweb: The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity. This complements

27 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The War on Gaza, by Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco, the graphic journalist who wrote Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, and Safe Area Gorazde, has started a new series, The War on Gaza. It's accompanied by this statement from Fantagraphics: "We want to state clearly and emphatically that we stand with the innocent people of Gaza.

27 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

We Need Your Email Address

"In order to combat the fracturing of social media platforms, a Google discoverability crisis fueled by AI generated spam and AI-fueled SEO, and a media business environment that is in utter freefall, we need to be able to reach our readers directly using a platform that we own and

27 Jan 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.