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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
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin: They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of
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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
This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival, in which Manuel Moreale prompts us to think about the various facets of digital relationships. Our relationship to digital technology has been through a few different phases. One: the census In the first, computers were the realm of government and big
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
I tried Arc Search, the new mobile app from the Browser Company. Its central insight is that almost every mobile browsing session starts with a web search; rather than giving you the usual list of results, it prioritizes building a web page for you that contains all the information you