I’ve loved every moment of working with The 19th. I was a supporter before I joined, and I’ll continue to be one afterwards. As well as well-executed journalism at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy, The 19th is a masterclass in building an equitable remote organizational culture
“If Google's AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?” #AI [Link]
“Technology alone does not create the future. Instead, the future is the result of an unpredictable mix of technology, business, product design, and culture.” #Technology [Link]
“Hi, we’re the company you work for and we care about your mental health!” #Labor [Link]
“Montana has became the first US state to ban TikTok after the governor signed legislation prohibiting mobile application stores from offering the app within the state by next year.” I’m willing to wager that this never comes to pass. #Technology [Link]
“A majority of Americans who have used Twitter in the past year report taking a break from the platform during that time, and a quarter say they are not likely to use it a year from now.” #Technology [Link]
Though it fades out weakly, I loved this story about loss, meaning, and what it means to be an immigrant, dressed up as a science fiction novel. The science fiction is good too, and alarmingly close to the real-life global pandemic that took place a few years after it was
“ChatGPT (via Plugins) can access YouTube transcripts. Which is pretty neat. However, as expected (and predicted by many researches) all these quickly built tools and integrations introduce Indirect Prompt Injection vulnerabilities.” Neat demo! #AI [Link]
“A groundbreaking epidemiological study has produced the most compelling evidence yet that exposure to the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.” By as much as 70%! #Health [Link]
“Rather than pointing to some future utopia (or robots vs. humans dystopia), what we face in dealing with programs like ChatGPT is the further relentless corrosiveness of late-stage capitalism, in which authorship is of no value. All that matters is content.” #AI [Link]
“Moreover, researchers have also discovered that it’s probably mathematically impossible to secure the training data for a large language model like GPT-4 or PaLM 2. This was outlined in a research paper that Google themselves tried to censor, an act that eventually led the Google-employed author, El Mahdi El
Interesting to see what creating a new startup entails in 2023. #Startups [Link]