Werd I/O

A complete pleasure: I've admired Private Eye's Ian Hislop for most of my life, and Jon Stewart for most of my adult life. And here they are talking about the future of media and democracy with intelligence, wit, and humor. I wish I could watch these two chat with each other every week. #Media

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“A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.” #AI

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“In a world of widespread, suspicionless surveillance of protests by law enforcement and other government entities, and of massive corporate union-busting and suppression of worker organizing, Feedly decided they should build a tool for the corporations, cops, and unionbusters.” #Technology

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“Elon Musk asked a U.S. judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.” Related: Twitter’s logo changed to Doge as soon as this story broke - almost as if Musk wanted to bury it. #Technology

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“I am aware that focusing on individual responsibility can obscure the reality of broken systems. That neither my parents nor I am to blame for what they were up against. That it was always going to be beyond my capacity to provide and pay for all their care out of pocket when they had significant medical needs and, for many years, no healthcare coverage. But I was—I am—their only child, and I not only wanted but expected to be of more help to them. I didn’t know that we would run out of time.“ #Culture

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“The outlier cases include custom summonses that sought records from a youth soccer league in Texas; surveillance video from a major abortion provider in Illinois; student records from an elementary school in Georgia; health records from a major state university’s student health services; data from three boards of elections or election departments; and data from a Lutheran organization that provides refugees with humanitarian and housing support.” #Democracy

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“The press called it the great resignation. Many of our low-wage worker members are calling it the great revolution.” #Labor

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“Maternity leave should still be our top policy priority in the U.S. However, paternity leave is an important next step. In the shorter term, for individuals and companies, these results are worth considering. Flexibility for overlapping leave in the short term, and concentrated father time in the first year, both appear to have positive impacts.” #Health

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I adore New York City. This is why. #Culture

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“So as an exercise, let’s grant his premise for a moment. Let’s treat him as an expert witness on paradigm shifts. What would it mean if he was right that this is a fundamental new paradigm? What can we learn about the shape of AI’s path based on the analogies of previous epochs?” #AI

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“The following images are originally from 1897-1973. After noticing how much more responsive audiences are to color photos, Eli decided to work on past images from queer and trans history. During a time when politicians can openly argue trans people did not exist until 2015, it is important to use reminders like these that we have always been here.” #Society

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A delight from beginning to end: a cozy murder mystery set on rings around Jupiter, where humanity lives on great platforms linked by trains, centering on two women who rekindle an old romance as they get to the bottom of the crime. If that doesn’t sound like fun, I don’t know what to tell you. #Fiction

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“Such simple devices as robots.txt, “noindex,” and password protection could wall off any news media web page from search engines. But no media companies were doing that, because they WANT the traffic delivered by search engines. So it has always been clear that the media recognized the value of being seen by search engines.” #Media

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““I don’t really feel safe anymore. I used to feel safe,” said Maya, a 12-year-old trans girl who traveled to Washington D.C., from Texas with her mom for the meeting.” #Society

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“In absence of time-consuming commutes, remote workers—particularly those living with children—are spending more time on childcare and housework. This increased flexibility and time helped boost birth rates over the pandemic, specifically for wealthier or more educated women.” #Society

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“As a company, we do not think it’s a wise use of resources to pay for individuals to retain a blue checkmark that is no different from anyone else’s — an amateur medical expert, Elon stan, or otherwise — who is simply willing to pay the fee for a blue check.” #Media

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“We believe this moment, when people are so dissatisfied with the platforms that have dominated for the past decade-and-a-half, presents a unique opportunity to build a digital public sphere where people and communities with different preferences and purposes can participate accordingly.” #Technology

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“The Podcast Standards Project is a grassroots industry coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.” #Technology

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“As Earth warms, groundwater — long seen as an immutable resource — is in flux. Most often, climate change is associated with a decrease in groundwater, fueled by worsening drought and evaporative demand. But in some areas, this water is actually creeping higher, thanks to rising sea levels and more intense rainfall, bringing a surge of problems for which few communities are prepared.” #Climate

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“The stakes felt especially high for me to get this story right, because right now, we are working in a media and political environment that is saturated with misinformation and extremist rhetoric about transgender people. I feel very supported by my editor and my colleagues at The 19th News, but I know that most transgender people working in the media either do not have any support or are simply not given full-time employment.” #Society

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“The EU law will require all new cars sold to have zero CO2 emissions from 2035, and 55% lower CO2 emissions from 2030, versus 2021 levels. The targets are designed to drive the rapid decarbonisation of new car fleets in Europe.” #Climate

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“Amid the confusion, several conservative and far-right media personalities have used the reported identity of the shooter as an opportunity to shift the conversation away from gun control and onto restricting gender-affirming care for transgender people, or simply to focus on anti-trans rhetoric.” #Society

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“The Scott Trust is deeply sorry for the role John Edward Taylor and his backers played in the cotton trade. We recognise that apologising and sharing these facts transparently is only the first step in addressing the Guardian’s historical links to slavery. In response to the findings, the Scott Trust is committing to fund a restorative justice programme over the next decade, which will be designed and carried out in consultation with local and national communities in the US, Jamaica, the UK and elsewhere, centred on long-term initiatives and meaningful impact.” #Media

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“Banning TikTok is not, as lawmakers claimed in the hearing, a sign that we’re about to get real tech reform. It will almost certainly be a PR move that lets some of the same politicians who profess outrage at TikTok get back to letting everyone from Comcast to the DMV sell your personal information, looking the other way while cops buy records of your movements or arrest you using faulty facial recognition.” #Technology

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“I used GPT-4 to code a command line tool that summarizes any web page. It felt wonderful to collaborate with AI like this.” I wonder if I could use this with my RSS feeds? #AI

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