Author: Self

“For some in the party, denying the Tories victory would force them to become “true” conservatives again, perhaps under the leadership of Suella Braverman. But for others, including Habib, the goal is to permanently destroy the Conservative parliamentary party as an electoral force. “It does not deserve to survive,” he told me. “You can’t reward failure with incumbency, the party needs to be obliterated.”

Here, though, lies the question at the heart of Reform: what is its ultimate purpose? This question is neatly encapsulated in the figure of Farage himself: the founder and majority shareholder who is not planning to stand for the party at the election but is flirting with the idea of joining the Tories afterwards”

https://unherd.com/2023/12/nigel-farages-plan-for-power/

“But hacks and data leaks happen all the time. Also, companies sell, rebrand, and change business models, and when they do, privacy policies have been known to become more porous. Latch may not be selling my data today, but what about in a couple years? How much trust do I owe a company whose product I am only inadvertently a user of, and which has only caused me headaches?”

https://www.curbed.com/2024/01/latch-smart-lock-nyc-apartments-aggravating-feature.html

“I rewrote my prose over and over, but it didn’t seem to satisfy my robot grader. I finally chose one thought per sentence, broke up paragraphs, and replaced words with suggested keywords to get rid of the red dots signaling problems.

The result feels like an AI summary of my story — at any moment, a paragraph could start with “In conclusion…” or “The next thing to consider is…” The nuance, voice, and unexpected twists and turns have been snuffed out. I’m sure some people would prefer this uncomplicated, beat-by-beat version of the story, but it’s gone from being a story written by a real person to a clinical, stiff series of sentences.

Now imagine thousands of website operators all using this same plug-in to rewrite content. No wonder people feel like the answers are increasingly robotic and say nothing”

https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization

“With more parents working from home, nannies are spending more time out of the apartment, where their behavior can be more readily judged and photographed by spectators. Lidia*, a former nanny who spent 17 years working for families in New York and New Jersey and now consults in the child-care industry, recalls an incident last year when her friend was in the park nannying for two kids and was reported on Facebook for ignoring the children while she was “busy having a dramatic phone call.” The person on the other line was in fact her boss, the children’s mom, who’d called with the upsetting news that she’d had to take her third child to the emergency room”

https://www.thecut.com/article/the-bad-nanny-wars.html

“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

“The Union Government – which had previously argued in the Supreme Court that Indian citizens have no fundamental right to privacy – defended its reform by arguing that citizens have no right to information regarding the funding of political parties”

https://rohanvenkat.substack.com/p/electoral-bonds-no-more-indias-supreme