We’ve been dealing with some intense family health events since Wednesday night, so I’m running on very little sleep and not updating much over here. I’ll be popping in from time to time, but probably not running on all cylinders for a little while. There’s a
Technology
[Robin Rendle] "Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”" Yes. Co-signed. Speaking of which ... "ProPublica, the nation’s leading nonprofit investigative newsroom, is
Media
[Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab] There are some interesting referral statistics embedded in this piece. Facebook referral traffic has fallen more than 40% over the last year; referrals from Reddit have increased by 88%. But the focus is this: "Search traffic, still dominated by Google search, has remained relatively
Media
[Paul Bradley Carr] "I’ve worked at (and founded!) my fair share of billionaire-funded publications and I’ve always had a firm rule: You have to be more critical of the people writing the checks (and their cronies) than you are of anyone else. It’s the only
Media
[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation] Dan Kennedy picks up on a detail in Brian Stelter's Atlantic article about troubles at the Washington Post: "The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on
More coverage of the Social Web Foundation has been rolling in today. (See my coverage of the announcement over here.) The New Stack: The fediverse has been a critical development in the open web over the past several years, since most of the social media landscape is dominated by centralized
I’m extraordinarily excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation, which has been created to promote and support the growth of the Fediverse: the interoperable social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Users of services on the Fediverse can follow, share, and interact with each other, regardless of
Media
[Casey Newton at Platformer] This fantastic round-up post focuses on Platformer's decision in January to leave Substack in protest of its content policies that permitted full-throated Nazis to earn money on the platform. With a long-term view, it's been a good strategic move:
AI
[Matthew Hutson at Nature] "Beyond the ability to fine-tune open models for focused applications, Kal’tsit says, another advantage of local models is privacy. Sending personally identifiable data to a commercial service could run foul of data-protection regulations. “If an audit were to happen and you show
AI
[Kyle Orland at ArsTechnica] "Microsoft and Constellation Energy have announced a deal that would re-open Pennsylvania's shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The agreement would let Microsoft purchase the entirety of the plant's roughly 835 megawatts of energy generation—enough to power approximately 800,
Technology
[Tracy Durnell] "Links — connections between ideas — are the magic system of the Internet. They power the open web, enriching online writing. Generative AI is the parasitic dark magic counterpart to the link." I love Tracy's observation that "online, we think together", which also calls
Business
[Chris Metinko at Crunchbase News] "Last year, venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups cratered — totaling only $699 million and marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows." And: "While last year did not see Black