Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
I’ve been struggling a little bit to re-find my creative rhythm and balance it with the needs of having and supporting a family. My day — every day — looks like this: * Woken up by baby * Get baby ready for daycare (breakfast, clothes, etc) * Walk to daycare and back * Eat breakfast
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Well, of course. Brexit was a massive own goal at the hands of regressive nationalism. As a European citizen who grew up in the UK, I took the Brexit vote very personally. Not being able to legally live in the place you used to call home is very hard (although
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Duke University Libraries says "no" to 37 Signals based on DHH's blog posts: "When we enter into business with a company whose boss takes delight in the mass layoffs of tech workers because it disempowers those who might speak out against their company keeping a
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Spoiler alert: no. This concept been tried before, more than once, and will fail again. Jim McKelvey seems to understand why advertising is broken - but not necessarily how to align users and publishers. This quote from a publisher says it all for me: “Honestly, I’m not that invested
As part of my roundup of Giving Tuesday suggestions the other day, I mentioned a few non-profit media organizations that I’ve recently donated to. Of course, as soon as I hit publish, I realized there were more that I wanted to highlight. In particular, I think it’s worth
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If Elon Musk seems to be acting more like a politician than a businessman, then I think it has to be on purpose. This was an awkward exchange that played to an audience on X rather than the one that was in the room. X is not a business in
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Here we go: proof that it's possible to extract real training data from LLMs. Unfortunately, some of this data includes personally identifiable information of real people (PII). “In total, 16.9% of generations we tested contained memorized PII [Personally Identifying Information], and 85.8% of generations that contained
It’s Giving Tuesday: a reaction to the consumer excess of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the whole winter holiday period. Here, you give to causes you believe in, and encourage others to do the same. I’ve used Daffy to donate to non-profits for the last few years. It
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Upgrading the broadband standard is good, although I agree that the new, improved speed benchmarks are still really substandard. Almost all US households have broadband, although in reality, for many of them the internet is very slow. I wonder if this is one of the reasons that most internet traffic
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The most frustrating thing about this is that it's some of the exact same stuff that writers were striking for in the US. While that industrial action seems to have come to a satisfactory conclusion, it looks like American companies are creating similarly exploitative arrangements in areas not
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"Silverman et al. have two weeks to attempt to refile most of the dismissed claims with any explicit evidence they have of LLM outputs “substantially similar” to The Bedwetter. But that’s a much higher bar than simply noting its inclusion in Books3." This case looks like it&
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An instructive look at what independent local news outlets are doing in the face of a tragedy that is part of a rapidly-rising trend. Upshot: their journalism is far more accessible than the local "big" paper. Independent local news is undergoing a renaissance, but to do it well