[Robin Berjon] This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call: "If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function for it: that's what checks and balances … | Continue reading
If you’re waiting for permission to build something, or if you want to see how well something has worked for your peers or competitors before you implement it yourself, you will never, ever innovate. That’s the trap that news media seems to be in: nobody wants to be the first to … | Continue reading
I’m, uh, very bad at task management. I wouldn’t want to pathologize, but I’ve never been a particularly organized person. I’ve always aspired to be more organized, but I’ve never found a tool or a methodology that really works for me. They were either too rigid and opinionated o … | Continue reading
I really like Lou Plummer’s list of 15 books which made the most impact on him , which I discovered via Tracy Durnell’s own list : I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them. At one point or another, each o … | Continue reading
[Plausible Analytics]"We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot capture the economic va … | Continue reading
[Helene Smith at The Guardian]"Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already … | Continue reading
[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram T … | Continue reading
[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica]"Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural R … | Continue reading
My availability has opened up for a handful of consulting engagements in addition to my regular work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica . I’ve founded two startups (both based on open-source technology communities that I also founded). I’ve been a CTO, led product, an … | Continue reading
The only goal that really matters is building a stable, informed, democratic, inclusive, equitable, peaceful society where everyone has the opportunity to live a good life. One where we care for our environment, where we champion democracy, science, education, and art, where equa … | Continue reading
[Becky Chambers] “You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a … | Continue reading
I’m a natural-born American citizen but never lived here until my early thirties. I have a complicated relationship with the country: I never thought I’d live here until I suddenly did. As it happened, my parents moved back to look after my grandmother, and ten years later, I cam … | Continue reading
[Lydia Kiesling] It took me a long time to get through the first third of this novel. The protagonist is so vapid, her point of view so incurious and at the same time so familiarly American, against a backdrop of obvious imperialism and climate obliviousness, that it was hard to … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the week in Florence, Oregon, a lovely little town on the coast. It’s a bit windy and a little cold, but as I’m fond of saying, I lived in Scotland for a decade. I can take it. Frank Herbert came to the town in 1957 to write about the dunes overtaking it. The piece was … | Continue reading
[Cloudflare] "To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier." This is really neat! Whatever you land on AI scraping, giving site owners … | Continue reading
[Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Hadley Beeman, Daniel Appelquist, Robin Berjon, et al] "Government engagement in digital and Internet governance is needed to deal with many abuses of this global system but it is our common responsibility to uphold the bottom-up, collaborative an … | Continue reading
[Rachel Leingang at The Guardian] "The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate … | Continue reading
[Jonathan Zeller at McSweeney's] "We do not live in some tech dystopia in which our smartphones clandestinely use their mics to pick up every word we say and then feed us commercial messages based on them. The truth is simpler and not at all alarming: your phone only seems to be … | Continue reading
I want to apologize for yesterday’s rant about British politics. That kind of rhetoric isn’t big or clever, and it runs against the tone I usually try for*. Over time, this space has shifted from more personal thoughts towards more directed opinions at the intersection of tech an … | Continue reading
[Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian] “Art is about reaching out. So I think it’s wrong to allow one strata of society to have the most access.” This is an older article, but it resonated with me so much that I wanted to share it immediately. This is so important, and a sign of what w … | Continue reading
[Molly White] "I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction." I've been struggling with this. I'm not in favor of the 404 Media approach, which is to stick an auth wall in fro … | Continue reading
"Governed by an independent board of directors, the 501(c)3 charitable organization will help AP sustain, augment and grow journalism and services for the industry, as well as help fund other entities that share a commitment to state and local news." Fascinating! And much needed. … | Continue reading
On July 4th I’ll be on the beautiful Oregon coast, and I plan to have a bottle of champagne handy. Not so much because of the American Independence Day — although there’s nothing wrong with celebrating that, and I’m sure I will — but because of the British election happening on t … | Continue reading
[Drew Harwell at the Washington Post] "Postal inspectors say they fulfill [requests from law enforcement to share information from letters and packages] only when mail monitoring can help find a fugitive or investigate a crime. But a decade’s worth of records, provided exclusivel … | Continue reading
[Hunter Walk] "The best commerce platforms will be constantly grooming you, priming you, shaping you to buy. The combination of short-term and long-term value that leads to the optimal financial outcome for the business." I think this is inevitably correct: the web will devolve i … | Continue reading
[Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra in Aeon] "Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking … | Continue reading
[Anil Dash] "I realize that most people who've never been in the boardroom have a lot of questions (and often, anxieties) about what happens on a board, so I wanted to share a very subjective view of what I've seen and learned over the years." This is great, and jibes with my exp … | Continue reading
[Nikhil Suresh at Ludicity] "This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They're an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world … | Continue reading
[Dave Maass and Cooper Quintin at EFF] "When law enforcement uses ALPRs to document the comings and goings of every driver on the road, regardless of a nexus to a crime, it results in gargantuan databases of sensitive information, and few agencies are equipped, staffed, or traine … | Continue reading
[Sarah E. Needleman and Ann-Marie Alcántara at the Wall Street Journal] "Earning a decent, reliable income as a social-media creator is a slog—and it’s getting harder. Platforms are doling out less money for popular posts and brands are being pickier about what they want out of s … | Continue reading
[Alan Levine at CogDogBlog] "ShareOpenly breaks the door even wider than sharing to Mastodon, and I intend to be using it to update some of my examples listed above. Thanks Ben for demonstrative and elegant means of sharing." Thank you, Alan, for sharing! There's more to come on … | Continue reading
A sound shook Frances fully awake. Her dreams faded quickly into the cold air, her sleeping memories of San Francisco collapsing into the smell of stone and moss and rot. There was someone in the house. And so begins The Source, at least as the draft stands today. What follows is … | Continue reading
[Michael Atleson at the FTC Division of Advertising Practices] "Don’t misrepresent what these services are or can do. Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods … | Continue reading
[Michael Grothaus at FastCompany] "United Airlines announced that it is bringing personalized advertising to the seatback entertainment screens on its flights. The move is aimed at increasing the airline’s revenue by leveraging the data that it has on its passengers." Just anothe … | Continue reading
[Robb Knight] Perplexity AI doesn't use its advertised browser string or IP range to load content from third-party websites: "So they're using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string. I can't even block their IP ranges bec … | Continue reading
[Chris Bing and Joel Schechtman at Reuters] "The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say t … | Continue reading
[Heather Bryant] "What generative AI creates is not any one person's creative expression. Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data points that the models are based upon. Those data p … | Continue reading
Imagine a life where you dictate your own schedule, free from the confines of a traditional job. That’s a thought experiment I’ve been playing with lately: what would it look like if this was my last ever job? How might I optimize my lifestyle for freedom? By that I don’t mean th … | Continue reading
[Janet Vertesi at Public Books] "Our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no longer know the truth when we see it. And when we don’t know how to weigh different truths, or to coordinate among different real-world experiences to look behind the veil, there is … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago I wrote about how solving the challenges facing the news industry requires fundamentally changing newsroom culture. While newsrooms have depended on referrals from social media and search engines to find audiences and make an impact, both of those segments are in … | Continue reading
[Renee Dudley at ProPublica] "Former [Microsoft] employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others." … | Continue reading
[Calm Company Fund] "Inhale. Exhale. Find the space between… Calm Company Fund is going on sabbatical and taking a break from investing in new companies and raising new funds. Here’s why." Calm Company Fund's model seems interesting. It's a revenue-based investor that makes a ret … | Continue reading
[The Markup] "Now all three men are speaking out against pending California legislation that would make it illegal for police to use face recognition technology as the sole reason for a search or arrest. Instead it would require corroborating indicators." Even with mitigations, i … | Continue reading
I consider myself really lucky that people stop by and read my posts. Thank you! Every year I like to pause and ask folks a little bit more about themselves, what they’re worried about, and what they’re interested in. It’s a really short, anonymous survey that helps me out on man … | Continue reading
"Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor d … | Continue reading
"Open Rights Group has published its six priorities for digital rights that the next UK government should focus on." These are things every government should provide. I'm particularly interested in point number 3: "Predictive policing systems that use artificial intelligence (AI) … | Continue reading
"The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out - a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving." Unsurprising but also immoral: these responden … | Continue reading