Month: February 2024

“YouTube is the last bastion of unbiased journalism in India” – Sonia Faleiro (restofworld)

Selflinks_read

“going solo is punishing work in a country that the World Press Freedom Index now ranks 161st out of 180. A YouTube channel or Instagram account does not offer the same protections as working for a mainstream media company: There is little financial security, legal support, or physical protection. Alone in their own homes, several of India’s best-known journalists told Rest of World they are fearful for their future. They spoke of online threats and warnings over the phone, of being frozen out by friends and family; of fears their equipment could be seized, their homes raided, or they could be thrown into jail”

https://restofworld.org/2023/india-youtube-journalism/

“The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas” – Das Spiegel

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“What exactly does destroying Hamas actually mean?” wonders a source in Doha who is familiar with the negotiations. When Sinwar and Deif are dead? What happens if they are liquidated, but a new leader takes over control? Does the entire command structure need to be annihilated? Do all Hamas fighters have to be killed? The Israeli government, the source says, has thus far been avoiding all of these questions. Along with that of who should rule the Gaza Strip in the future.”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-gaza-conundrum-the-story-behind-the-rise-of-hamas-a-d9e30bb6-2295-45a1-825c-dbd0c43c3613

“Subprime intelligence” – Where’s Your Ed At

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“While Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have technically “invested” in these companies, they’ve really created guaranteed revenue streams, investing money to create customers that are effectively obliged to spend their investment dollars on their own services. As the use of artificial intelligence grows, so do these revenue streams, forcing almost every single dollar spent on AI into the hands of a few trillion-dollar tech firms.

It’s a contrived process with a fairly simple revenue stream”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-fried/

“Steve Ells Is Still Trying to Solve Lunch” – Elizabeth G. Dunne (Grub Street)

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“Ells is not the only restaurateur looking for ways to trim labor through automation. Sweetgreen is testing a bowl-composing robotic assembly line in two stores. White Castle is rolling out a robotic arm called Flippy 2 to work its fry stations. Chipotle has been testing a chip-frying bot, an automated guacamole-maker, and a roboticized make-line that can assemble certain digital orders”

https://www.grubstreet.com/article/steve-ells-kernel-restaurant-chipotle-founder.html

“Who killed Google Reader?” – David Pierce (Verge)

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“At its peak, Reader had just north of 30 million users, many of them using it every day. That’s a big number — by almost any scale other than Google’s. Google scale projects are about hundreds of millions and billions of users, and executives always seemed to regard Reader as a rounding error. Internally, lots of workers used and loved it, but the company’s leadership began to wonder whether Reader was ever going to hit Google scale. Almost nothing ever hits Google scale, which is why Google kills almost everything”

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

“On notes, outlines, and somehow cobbling a script together…” – Development Hell

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“If you can make notes and create outlines and then stick to those things and create a good script out of them, then that’s great. Good for you. I can’t do it. And the reason I know I can’t do it is that it has taken me writing this piece up to this point for me to actually understand what my problem is: I have to figure out where I’m going by starting the journey. No amount of packing lists and reading of maps is going to help. Until I’m on the road, I have no idea what’s going to happen”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/on-notes-outlines-and-somehow-cobbling

“Public intellectuals have short shelf lives – but why?” – Scholar’s Stage (2020)

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“Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s:  these are the years in which they have already gained the training necessary to make a real contribution to their chosen field but have not lost enough of their fluid intelligence to slow down creative work. By a person’s mid 40s this period is more or less over with. The brain does not shut down creativity altogether once you hit 45, but originality slows down. By then the central ideas and models you use to understand the world are more or less decided. Only rarely will a person who has reached this age add something new to their intellectual toolkit”

https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/

“A Trilli – AI, Green Energy, Uber, and Reading” – A Scammer Darkly

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“It allows Uber to control drivers by forcing them to take lower-paying rides to hit ‘utilization’ metrics or face consequences. Like the advertising auctions we talk about around here sometimes, creating opaque markets where the company in charge sets prices on both the buy and sell side means Uber can pay itself more with no repercussions – riders may grumble about fare increases, but they’re unaware that money isn’t ending up in the driver’s pocket”

https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/a-trilli-ai-green-energy-uber-and-reading/

“It’s Apple’s Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here” – Matt Stoller (Big)

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“Scientific and engineering development isn’t a function of corporate size and power, but the collective knowledge of our society and how we organize it. The internet is a massive scale network, the biggest in human history, and no one owns it. By contrast, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have control over immense swaths of our knowledge base, but there is no reason for that except a political choice to allow a regulatory scheme that concentrates power”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-apples-vision-pro-the-rest-of