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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

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US to get first dedicated high-speed railway – built by Network Rail

I hadn't caught that the US's first high-speed railway is going to be built by Network Rail, which runs Britain's railway infrastructure. The San Francisco to Los Angeles route will take under three hours; right now it takes nine hours and thirty minutes. I&

21 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

My grandpa was a Nazi

"His definition of strength was power, influence, money and his network of important people. [...] I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made

20 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams

"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding." This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model:

18 Jan 2024

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Search engine results are getting worse, research confirms

"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality." SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search engines

17 Jan 2024

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Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies

"Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to [Facebook]. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.

17 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends

"They just take it. Whatever they want." A poignant and infuriating reflection on generative AI, from the creator of Cat and Girl.  #AI [Link]

16 Jan 2024

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The incredible shrinking podcast industry

The entire podcast industry's numbers were juiced by a quirk of how Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps work. The actual number of listeners were far lower - as revealed when Apple Podcasts made a big update last September. "For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly

15 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

The Taliban’s curious love of SIM cards

"Global trade now means that even a pariah government like the Taliban can invest in and operate sophisticated surveillance systems, while imposing regressive policies that keep its population poor, hungry, and isolated. It’s a profound signal of how all governments will approach digital control in our era."

15 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

A Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War)

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. [...] A true revolution of values will

15 Jan 2024

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Why return-to-office mandates fail

"My advice to business leaders is this: If your “personal belief” tells you that in-office work is better, approach the question analytically. What actual, measurable problems related to your business objectives will be solved by a return to the office?" This is the crux for me: there are

14 Jan 2024

The fediverse for media organizations

Given all the talk lately of Threads, Mastodon, and ways that people can publish on their own sites, I thought it might be worth revisiting what the fediverse actually is — and why an organization might want to integrate with it. My focus is on media organizations, but remember that just

14 Jan 2024

NotableLinks

Where is all of the fediverse?

A nice investigation into who actually hosts fediverse instances. I've been in a few situations where I've had to fend off a DDoS originating from Hetzner servers, and it's just now dawning on me: what if those weren't malicious attacks but were

12 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.