Werd I/O

"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 the world than a hundred AI "thunks"; as this article says, it's about the interpretation more than it is about data. Writing and reading are inherently human endeavors. They're a conversation that sometimes takes place over generations. There is no shortcut. #Media

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"Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market."

It's very on the nose that a former Southern slave plantation is now the country's largest maximum-security prison and a hub for this kind of forced labor. #Democracy

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The former Editor in Chief of the Guardian on Julian Assange: "I know they won’t stop with Assange. The world of near-total surveillance, merely sketched by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-four, is now rather frighteningly real. We need brave defenders of our liberties. They won’t all be Hollywood hero material, any more than Orwell’s Winston Smith was."

It's interesting that every description of Assange's actions needs to start with, "I'm not a fan of Assange." He's certainly a problematic character. But I do believe that the war leaks he helped release were an important insight into what was being done in our name. They were important, and it's also notable that they're being downplayed now.

Rusbridger's larger point - that his potential extradition has larger implications for press freedom - is also well-made. We need people to hold truth to power; sometimes that involves revealing the secrets that are being kept from us. #Media

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"Threads users will be allowed to follow accounts that post political content, but the algorithm that suggests content from users you don't follow will not recommend accounts that post about politics."

It's not clear to me what the definition of "politics" encompasses here. Is it just literal party / election politics? Does it include discussions about equal rights, which would disproportionately hit users from underrepresented groups?

Adam Mosseri says that he wants to create a "less angry place", but what about the topics where people are right to be angry? #Technology

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"The FCC announced the unanimous adoption of a Declaratory Ruling that recognizes calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)."

A sign of the times that the FCC had to rule that making an artificial intelligence clone of a voice was illegal. I'm curious to understand if this affects commercial services that intentionally use AI to make calls on a user's behalf (eg to book a restaurant or perform some other service). #AI

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Tony is a smart, analytical person, which comes across strongly in this useful, transparent interview about the future of Medium. It's doing better than it ever has.

Also, I like this, which is very close to how my career has worked to date:

"The creator economy locked a lot of people into this passive income game that just doesn’t pay nearly as well as the other game, which is research something until you know more about it than anyone else, and then go get paid for that." #Media

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A characteristically great review from Molly White of Chris Dixon's disclosure-free shilling of blockchains as a way to save the web. Read, written, owned.

I do think there are some areas where blockchain is unfairly maligned: it introduced the idea of decentralization to a much wider audience, and it's the only community that has made widespread use of identity in the browser.

But this kind of shilling - particularly without disclosures - is out of date and unnecessary. What would serve the conversation is an open, good faith discussion of the possible options that doesn't go out of its way to dismiss technologies in active use as being dead. Otherwise what you're left with is the impression that rather than serving a higher calling to save the web, the author is looking for technologies he can make a lot of money from. #Technology

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"“I would tell my family to avoid the Max. I would tell everyone, really,” said Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration." And so I shall.

This is going to be a textbook example of how moving to a sales-led rather than engineering-led culture can be incredibly harmful. Clearly Boeing is feeling stress from its competition, but rushing planes out the door has hurt its standing rather than helped it. This ongoing incident makes me incredibly reluctant to fly on any Boeing plane at all. #Business

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"Only 44 percent of adults completely rebelled at the notion of giving the former president — who is currently facing 91 felony charges — dictatorial authority, calling it “definitely bad” for America."

In case anyone was still wondering what the stakes are this election season. #Democracy

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"Computer - enhance!"

I like the approach in this release from Apple: an open source AI model that can edit images based on natural language instructions. In other words, a human can tell the engine what to do to an image, and it goes and does it.

Rather than eliminating the human creativity in the equation, it gives the person doing the photo editing superpowers: instead of needing to know how to use a particular application to do the editing, they can simply give the machine instructions. I feel much more comfortable with the balance of power here than with most AI applications.

Obviously, it has implications for vendors like Adobe, which have established some degree of lock-in by forcing users to learn their tools and interfaces. If this kind of user interface takes off - and, given new kinds of devices like Apple Vision Pro, it inevitably will - they'll have to compete on capabilities alone. I'm okay with that. #AI

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"You’ve got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are. [...] The commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security."

In the new economy, every artist must also be an entrepreneur. In doing so, they compromise their intentions; a world where everyone is just shilling is one free from the purity of ideas and discourse. There is no such thing as being discovered or being heralded on the merit of your work alone. You've got to sell. #Culture

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"In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice."

What's interesting to me is that this is very similar to the tactics that got Microsoft into hot anti-trust water a few decades ago. And here it is again: research that shows Microsoft is prioritizing its Edge browser in Windows. New browser, same dark pattern. #Technology

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"Limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels has been the gold standard for climate action since at least the 2015 Paris Agreement. A new scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, however, suggests that the world unknowingly passed this benchmark back in 2020."

Not so great, but what's cool here is how they determined this: by analyzing strontium to calcium ratios in a species of sea sponge that lives for hundreds of years. Previously we'd only been able to determine ocean temperatures starting in 1850, when the industrial revolution was already underway.

This new analysis suggests that the pre-industrial oceans were cooler than had been previously understood, meaning we may be 20 years further along the global warming curve than we'd known. Even more reason to take dramatic action now. #Climate

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"If your position is that public money will irrevocably taint journalism but the biggest companies in America buying ads will not, I submit that you have not thought about this issue very deeply."

I don't know how I feel about a publicly-funded media, although I couldn't be a bigger fan of independent public media entities like the BBC and Channel 4. What I do think is that we're a long way from a US government administration that will actually do that and guarantee freedom from interference.

"Today, I am just trying to make a singular, clarifying point: We need to build a large, continual public funding stream for journalism not because it is an easy task, but because it is the only way. Stop looking for magical alternative solutions."

This, on the other hand, may turn out to be true. #Media

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"As social traffic collapses and Google makes ominous AI-powered sounds about search, publishers across the board have started to reemphasize their websites as destinations, and that means there are a lot of new ideas about what makes websites valuable again." A lot of which look like blogging.

Semafor Signals, described in this piece, may be AI-augmented, but it really comes down to a collection of links that form an umbrella story, with some context from an editor to link it all together.

What's groundbreaking here is the newsroom tool used to produce it, not the product itself. And that's where AI - and a lot of other technology - becomes more interesting. Not as a way to replace journalists or churn out content at speed, but as a way to give them more information to work with in order to produce work (written and created by humans) that might not have been possible otherwise. #Media

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"The only way to predict the future is to control it." An interesting idea that powers a book that has a lot to say about 21st century oligarchy and our relationship to technology. There's one conclusion that hits home particularly hard; I can't describe it without spoiling the story, but I'm glad it's there.

If I have a criticism, it's that the author has so many ideas to share that they sometimes burst the seams of the thriller that forms this novel's page-turning center. But I enjoyed every minute, nodding along and wondering what was going to happen next. #Fiction

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During Meta's earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Instagram data is used to train the company's AI models.

“On Facebook and Instagram, there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos, which we estimate is greater than the Common Crawl dataset and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well.”

He's playing to win: one unstated competitive advantage is that Meta actually has the legal right to use training data generated on its own services. It's probably not something most users are aware of, but by posting content there, they grant the company rights to use it. If OpenAI falls afoul of copyright law, Meta's tech has a path forward.

It's a jarring thought, though. I'm certainly not keen on a generative model being trained on my son's face, for example. I'm curious how many users will feel the same way. #AI

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"If you’ve spent any time in journalism, it’s completely wild to think about what a small team of smart, hungry journalists and editors could do with $50 million. It’s enough to staff a team of hard-nosed ProPublica-esque journalists for the better part of the next decade."

While we're here, might I suggest donating to ProPublica so those hard-nosed journalists can stick around to do exactly that? #Media

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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 is an entire world out there, that there are actually many people living diverse lives that were not visible or encouraged in Singapore."

Winnie and I both worked at Medium at different times, and yet both have a very strong own-your-own-domain philosophy. Her blogging story is really similar to mine, even if the content of her blog is very much her own.

Just a complete pleasure to read. #Culture

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"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 some of the tasks. The researchers also noticed that GPT-4 brought the student cohort’s answers up to the “expert’s baseline” for two of the tasks in particular: magnification and formulation." Um, splendid?

"However, the study’s authors later state in a footnote that, overall, GPT-4 gave all participants a “statistically significant” advantage in total accuracy." Ah, superb? #AI

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"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 so jarring to me that I was angry about it for a month. As Tyler Fisher says here, it presents existential risk to the news industry - and beyond that, following a FOMO-driven hype cycle rather than building things based on what your community actually needs is a recipe for failure.

As Tyler says: "Instead of trying to compete, journalism must reject the scale-driven paradigm in favor of deeper connection and community." This is the only real path forward for journalism. Honestly, it's the only real path forward for the web, and for a great many industries that live on it. #AI

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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 actually a great breakdown of what went wrong here, and why businesses like The Messenger don't work anymore. The scale-advertising-social equation is obsolete.

Forgive me if it sounds like I'm banging some sort of drum, but you really do need to build deeper relationships through community, get to know the people you're serving, and build something that meets their unmet needs incredibly well. A content farm ain't it. #Media

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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 corporate sponsorships. The Tube actually did this once before already, renaming Bond Street to Burberry Street for London fashion week. That (as well as these new maps, presumably) was temporary; these are permanent.

I don't blame transit authorities for trying to make up for budget shortfalls however they can. But it's also sad. Public transit is an important public good; it's a real shame that we can't seem to fully fund it from the public purse. The point is not for transit to be profitable, it's to provide real infrastructure that lifts everybody up. #Society

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"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 sense: it deepens the relationship between a reader and the journalist whose work they're interacting with.

I think these are just the first steps of that humanization, though. Newsrooms need to transition from thinking about "audience" to "community": a one-way broadcast relationship to the kind of two-way conversation the internet was built for. #Media

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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 culture recognizes that a high level of operational safety can be achieved only when the root causes of human error are examined; who made a mistake is far less important than why it was made."

Exactly! #Business

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