Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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"Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps in 2023 than the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces." Quietly, the way we heat our homes is changing - and it has the potential to make a big impact. Because heat pumps use around a quarter of the energy
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"We are professional editors, with extensive experience in the Australian book publishing industry, who wanted to know how ChatGPT would perform when compared to a human editor. To find out, we decided to ask it to edit a short story that had already been worked on by human editors
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"We need people with a service mindset, who understand how to run a business, but a business with a mission that’s more important than ever. We need leaders who embrace new revenue models, run toward chaos, and are excited to build new structures from the ground up. We
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"On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after
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"My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’
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"A trove of leaked emails shows how administrators of one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction censored themselves because the awards ceremony was being held in China." What's remarkable here is that they weren't censored by the government - instead this trove of
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It's hard to read this without feeling like the social contract of the web is falling apart. And when social agreements fall apart, that's when we start having to talk about more rigid, enforced contracts instead. As the piece notes: "There are people on both
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Catnip for me: the first post in a new blog that tells the story of building Slack from the ground up, by two of its former employees. This was surprising to me, although I guess I don't really know why: "We used the tried and true LAMP
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"[The ACLU] publicly challenged the school district in a statement to media outlets stating that it has filed a public records request seeking more information about the district’s decision to [a firm] to track student attendance and tardiness by having students place their fingers on a biometric scanner.
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The BBC extends its Mastodon experiment for another six months: "We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse." The BBC's approach has been great: transparent, realistic,
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"Local news publishers, [VP Platforms at The Boston Globe] Karolian told Engadget, almost entirely depend on selling ads and subscriptions to readers who visit their websites to survive. “When tech platforms come along and disintermediate that experience without any regard for the impact it could have, it is deeply
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"A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with. [...] Some of us enjoy fiction. And color." Amen. I'm firmly on team fiction. A brilliant novel can teach you more about