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Mark and Lily Osler: Governor’s order on transgender youth cruel, short-sighted

“Because Gov. Abbott has moved to threaten transgender kids by criminalizing the kind of support they need, it’s time for Lily and me to tell this part of our family story and to address the harm Gov. Abbott is doing.”

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The case for induction cooking

“But for all the sexiness of cooking with gas (a concept bolstered by aggressive lobbying and advertising from the natural gas industry), it has been shown to be catastrophic for the environment, emitting potent greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere. Worse, a recent study demonstrated that 75 percent of these emissions occur when the stove is off.” This is mostly about how amazing induction is for cooking - I’m envious.

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Downside: this is a really bad flight with really bad turbulence. Probably the worst I’ve been on as an adult.

Upside: it turns out I’m not anywhere near as afraid of flying as I used to be.

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Grimes Reveals Y, Her New Baby Daughter With Elon Musk, in Cover Interview

Come for the secret baby, stay for an interview that makes Grimes seem like a pretty cool person.

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I love my family so much.

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I found a bunch of Elgg T-shirts. What was that again?

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Tatiana Perebyinis and two children identified as those seen dead in viral Lynsey Addario photo from Ukraine

“Photos flashing on his Twitter feed showed four people lying next to a World War II memorial just outside Kyiv after they were fired on by the Russian military. One of them was his wife, and two were his children.” Pure horror.

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One of my most toxic traits is that I really like April Fool's Day and I've been thinking hard about how to make fools of you all

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Making openness as usable and interesting as possible is far more interesting than making a closed ecosystem. Build the web, not CompuServe.

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After George Floyd’s murder, police built a secretive surveillance machine that lives on

“We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.”

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What’s the best way to get a Getty image printed and framed for my own display at home? Reuse rights feel like overkill for this.

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How COVID pressure led single moms to turn to coliving with other adults

“The move to cohabitation eased a significant amount of pressure for Villagomez-Morales at a time when parents, but especially single parents, were being squeezed on all sides — by child care, loss of work and extreme burnout. That, mixed with a housing market that has become increasingly inhospitable to low-wage people, and especially moms, has more single parents looking into the benefits of cohabitation to ride out the pandemic.”

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Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets

“We must take strong steps to reduce the risks that digital assets could pose to consumers, investors, and business protections; financial stability and financial system integrity; combating and preventing crime and illicit finance; national security; the ability to exercise human rights; financial inclusion and equity; and climate change and pollution.”

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If people are this upset about high gas prices, wait until they see water prices a decade or two from now.

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Heading to Philly for a short trip soon. I already know it’s a huge, interesting city, but what are some non-obvious things I shouldn’t miss?

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I'm still mad that you can't share an AirTag with an iCloud family. Great, so now I'm the only person who can find the car keys.

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Google is releasing an open source harassment filter for journalists

“Harassment Manager also lets users download a standalone report containing abusive messages; this creates a paper trail for their employer or, in the case of illegal content like direct threats, law enforcement. For now, however, there’s not a standalone application that users can download. Instead, developers can freely build apps that incorporate its functionality and services using it will be launched by partners like the Thomson Reuters Foundation.”

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Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank

“Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.” Drinking any amount of alcohol shrinks your brain.

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Or a show with an unreliable narrator where the “previously on” recap is a lie.

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A show where the “previously on” segments contain snippets of something that wasn’t in the show itself, clawing its way through time towards the protagonists …

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Centralization - of information, discourse, applications, power - is a deep societal harm that I think we’re only beginning to really understand.

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Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” Adjusted for Late-Stage Capitalism

“Working 8 to 6, but they call you after hours / Barely gettin’ by, lots of crying in the shower / You might prequalify, won’t even hurt your credit / Ran out of sick days—well, I hope y’all don’t catch it”

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Companies telling their employees to get back to the office right now are transparently putting their own interests over the health of the people who work for them. At least it should clarify where their priorities really are.

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AI-written blog posts are spam

AI tools let you write articles very quickly without adding much value.

The software analyses existing content and then rewrites the information in a way that’s meant to be engaging or makes it easy for search engines to find.

But when you read an article written by AI, you can tell that it’s lacking something. There’s no real emotion or understanding of the subject.

If you want to create content that converts, it needs to be relatable and emotionally engaging. You need to show your customers that you understand their struggles and are willing to help them solve their problems.

AI-generated articles and videos are growing in popularity. They are cheap to make and easy to scale. But they will never be able to tell stories that matter.

The most obvious use case for AI is to create fake news. Spam content has been a problem on the internet since the beginning of the World Wide Web. The need for scale pushed automated bots to generate posts, which were then filled with ads.

AI takes this to the next level, by making it easier and cheaper to create fake news than it is to write real news.

But who cares about fake news? It's not like people read it. Nobody believes it!

The problem with AI-generated articles isn't that they are fake, but that they are mediocre. The purpose of writing is not just about sharing your thoughts with others; it's about adding value.

AI-generated articles are not the future of journalism. They are content spam.

For the past year, I’ve been writing articles on Medium. Some of them have become pretty popular. However, over time, I have come to resent the platform because it promotes content written by AI.

Medium is not alone in this problem. It’s a systemic problem that affects all platforms that allow machine-generated content to be posted unchecked.

Writing 1000 articles in 30 seconds is the type of thing that makes VCs and journalists excited about “AI-first” companies and how these companies will “disrupt” a traditional industry like publishing.

But for the rest of us, we need to be worried about our media ecosystem getting filled with this type of content. And we need tools that recognize content written by AI and mark them as such or as spam.

 

This entire blog post was written by an AI writing tool.

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Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New

“Now, over a decade later, Twitter is reversing course. The company is pursuing the sort of decentralization Mr. [Blaine] Cook championed. It is funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter.” Quite a lovely piece about decentralization.

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