I somehow missed a lot of this history, so I’m bookmarking this for future reference.

Very excited to watch this.

DOGE continues to insist on the dumbest way to carry out its dumb goals.

The rules seem to be that it’s okay to do whatever in the GOP, but no Democrat can even seem to be in a sticky situation. What a joke.

Bookmarking for… sigh… teaching purposes.

Resubscribed to WIRED because despite my efforts to focus more on tech news than political news, THEY HAVE BECOME ONE AND THE SAME IN REALLY WORRYING WAYS.

Torn on this article. I think you can choose to patronize a platform without being associated with its worst users, so I wonder if the Fuentes connection is overstated. That said, choosing to livestream on Rumble is absolutely pandering to Fuentes-type right-wingers, so it’s a bad, bad move.

Even more than AI’s potential to replace humans in the name of saving money, I think we need to talk about the way companies are exploiting humans to save money—so that it can train AI.

Don’t know how I missed this story yesterday, but what the heck? Like the article says, nothing particularly new revealed by these stunts, but it’s still a compelling critique of Amazon.

How a platform is managed has real consequences.

Some interesting writing on a topic I’ve posted about a few times recently.

Some important—if disheartening—observations from Marwick.

Three cheers for ChatGPT or whatever.

Good article on a worrying trend. It’s things like this that make me skeptical of arguments that generative AI could have real benefit when used properly. It’s not that I disagree—it’s that in the aggregate, I’m not sure the proper uses will outweigh the problems.

This is not a future I look forward to (or a present I want to live in).

Lots of good stuff in here.

So many of our conveniences depend on someone else doing work we wouldn’t want to do ourselves.

I think this is a much bigger deal than any purported security risk.

Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

This is a wild, compelling story that I missed when it first came out. Glad to be reading it now.

Good focus on the digital labor aspects of this whole thing. I sympathize with Reddit for not wanting to provide free value for generative AI (this is one of the trickiest parts of that conversation), but Reddit’s users are right to balk at providing free value for the platform.

A good glimpse at content moderation, and why it’s important to do it correctly.

I was not familiar with the term “glass cliff,” so this was an insightful read.

I haven’t read much on the coronation and don’t plan to read much more, but even if I were, I think this would still take first place. A surprisingly deep dive into internet culture.

Some good commentary here. Musk loves certain buzzwords and flashy stunts, but they’re often in tension with the other decisions he makes.

A dumb future that no one is asking for.

I am not an AI expert, and my concerns aren’t on the existential scale. However, I do think it’s important to avoid moving fast and breaking things with these powerful technologies. That isn’t necessarily to say that more powerful AI shouldn’t be released (though I’m already disinterested by the current stuff), just that racing to improve them for commercial benefit and as technological flourish doesn’t strike me as socially responsible.

RIP my Twitter research. Glad I have other irons in the fire…

Somewhat meandering read, but I think there are interesting implications for both teaching and research.

Two years later, and we’re still learning just how bad this event was. Only two years later, and large parts of the country are ready to sweep it all under the rug.

I have deliberately not been following the Twitter Files stuff, but I did read this and found it helpful.

A helpful and thoughtful critique of how people are doing AI text generation.

Infertility sucks, and stories like this make me even more upset about Musk’s callous and chaotic Twitter takeover.

I had not thought this much about the privacy implications of VR, and ooooof.

I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m glad WIRED is putting them together.

This is a good response to Musk’s complaining about bots.