Werd I/O

“William Faulkner wrote two failed novels (his words) before he famously gave up writing for other people and began to write just for himself. The books he wrote after that volta are the ones that students still read for classes around the world.” #Culture

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“The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.” #Climate

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“The Internet is failing us. The Internet Archive has tried, along with hundreds of other libraries, to do something about it. A ruling in this case ironically can help all libraries, or it can hurt.” #Culture

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“The story I heard was that Welch had called to complain after he had been playing golf with some buddies and they began asking why MSNBC had some "anti-war kooks" on the air. I was never able to officially confirm the story, but the fact MSNBC employees believed it is an indication of the pressure they felt to conform to the national narrative.” Conforming to a “national narrative” is exactly what journalism should not be doing. #Media

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““We’re seeing a sustained volume of antisemitic hate speech on the platform following the takeover,” said Jacob Davey, who leads research and policy on the far-right and hate movements at ISD.” #Twitter

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“On Monday, Thorn — who has co-owned Maximum Fun with his wife since it was incorporated 2011 — announced his company would become a workers cooperative, a novel business model in the podcast industry, but one that has been tried by many small businesses including bakeries and pizza places. The ownership will be shared equally by at least 16 people, including Thorn, the company said.” #Media

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““You basically lose your entire social graph to go [to another social network], which is a super high wall,” says Tim Chambers, Principal and Co-Founder of Dewey Digital and administrator of the Mastodon server indieweb.social. “However, when things become sufficiently chaotic on platforms as Twitter is seeing now, that is a force strong enough to incite such migrations.”” #Technology

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“As the Bush administration began making its case for invading Iraq, too many Washington journalists, caught up in the patriotic fervor after 9/11, let the government’s story go unchallenged.” #Media

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A list of anti-racist books, articles, documentaries, podcasts, and interviews. #Society

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“The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about human cognition—that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains.” #Media

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“Silicon Valley Bank was one of the few that would give venture-backed start-ups led by women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people a line of credit. After the bank’s collapse, they are now being hit the hardest.” #Business

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“It’s a lot quicker to jump on your bike and go into town than it is to bring your horse into the barn, harness it to the buggy, and go. It’s a lot quicker and you travel faster too.” #Technology

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“In a historic decision aimed at accuracy and reconciliation, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it would drop the use of “internment” in most cases to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.” Let’s call them what they were: concentration camps. #Media

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““Many of us work at Bandcamp because we agree with the values the company upholds for artists: fair pay, transparent policies, and using the company’s social power to uplift marginalized communities,” says Cami Ramirez-Arau, who has worked as a Support Specialist at Bandcamp for two years. “We have organized a union to ensure that Bandcamp treats their workers with these same values.”” #Labor

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“Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!” #Technology

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“In short: an antilibrary is that collection of books you know a bit about, but have not read, and the latent potential of all the wonders they may hold. We can extend the same idea to other media, too — essays, films, websites, and so on — anything you might learn from.” #Culture

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“At one of these gatherings, we were having celebration cake in the room, but first, said my Los Angeles agent, we should light a candle of gratitude. She did so and it set off the fire alarm system. This too is part of The Editorial Process.” #Culture

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“Here we have a sector full of self-styled free thinkers — brought to its knees by groupthink. Risk-takers who valorize failure — as long as someone else is footing the bill. Meritocrats who couldn’t hack it on their own. Mavericks who scoff at the political establishment until they desperately need it.” #Technology

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““I remember an era where you’d sit by the TV, when I was a kid with my family, and we’d all watch ‘60 Minutes’ together,” said Mr. Finkelstein, who comes from a wealthy New York publishing family. “Or we all couldn’t wait to get the next issue of Vanity Fair or whatever other magazine you were interested in. Those days are over, and the fact is, I want to help bring those days back.”” Narrator: those days are not coming back. #Media

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“The sched­uled-re­place­ment pol­icy is one of a num­ber of poor or in­ef­fec­tive pass­word prac­tices that make log­ging into sites, apps and ser­vices more com­pli­cated and an­noy­ing than ever.” #Technology

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“All that said, this much activity in the last few weeks shows that protocol-based social media is having a moment. I’m not saying that it’s the moment that inevitably leads to a bigger shift in how we view the internet, because it could still all come crashing down. But, something’s happening, and it’s pretty exciting.” #Technology

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“Building a decentralized social network could let Meta experiment with an app that pushes back on standard criticisms of Facebook and Instagram. Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.” #Technology

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“Note, for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, the moral indifference born of unintelligence. Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators.” #AI

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“I think it best that I begin with the end. On March 1, I and dozens of Dan’s friends and fellow activists received a two-page notice that he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy because the prognosis, even with chemo, was dire. He will be ninety-two in April.” #Society

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“In a turn of events that must have come as a surprise to absolutely no one, it turns out that the employee Elon was abusing for his amusement was an actual human being. His name is Haraldur Thorleifsson, and he has a fascinating backstory, a very real disability, and a fairly wicked sense of humor.” #Technology

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