Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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.
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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
I’ve been trying to create a productive home office that fulfills the following criteria: * I can concentrate and do great heads-down work * I can take video calls with impunity * It’s a relaxing space for me * The background when I take calls conveys some sense of professionalism After
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"A surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims." No
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"We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor. Here's how we did it." What this single spammer pulled off - 1800 articles written by technology in order to scrape traffic from a competitor's legitimate site - is what AI
Nonfiction
A riveting analysis of our moment in history, using the parallel paths of Naomis Klein and Wolf as a device to examine the multiple realities we've constructed for ourselves. Incisive and pointed, I particularly agree with a conclusion that pulls no punches about how to correct our paths
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Molly White explores why effective altruism and effective accelerationism are such dangerous ideologies - selfishness disguised as higher-minded philosophies. "Both ideologies embrace as a given the idea of a super-powerful artificial general intelligence being just around the corner, an assumption that leaves little room for discussion of the
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"Every year I invite people who are celebrating the colonial holiday to do something in support of Native people. Amid an overdose crisis and high rates of poverty, illness, and unemployment, Indigenous organizers are doing incredible work to reduce harm and help our peoples thrive. Through mutual aid, cultural
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"“We know it is still possible to make the 1.5 degree limit a reality. It requires tearing out the poisoned root of the climate crisis: fossil fuels. And it demands a just, equitable renewables transition,” said Antònio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations." How realistic is