Author: Self

“We need to talk about digital ownership” – Molly White (Citation Needed)

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“The topic of resale is also more complex. If you buy a movie as a physical DVD and then decide you’re finished with it, it’s perfectly legal to resell it as long as you don’t make copies. If you buy a movie as a digital download or as an item in your online library, it’s much more complicated, but resale is generally prohibited. Do you own something if you can’t resell it?”

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-need-to-talk-about-digital-ownership/

“The Great Fiction of AI” – Josh Dzieza (The Verge)

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“The second thing I realized is that it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Turing test to everything I read, particularly in the more commercialized marketing-driven corners of the internet where AI text is most often deployed. The questions it made me ask were the sorts of questions I should be asking anyway: is this supported by facts, internally consistent, and original, or is it coasting on pleasant-sounding language and rehashing conventional wisdom?; how much human writing meets that standard?; how often am I reading with enough attention to notice? If this is the epistemic crisis AI-generated text is going to bring, maybe it’s a healthy one”

https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper

“The Age Gappers They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?” – Lila Shapiro (The Cut)

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“As Gloria Steinem once put it, “If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves. It is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.” The revelations of Me Too undercut that logic, showing that powerful men, protected by the institutions they dominated, could harm even the most capable and intelligent women. Age-gap discourse, which is aimed primarily at older men dating younger women, grew out of that movement’s concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent. But it also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — “Believe women” — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them”

https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-couples.html

“Japan’s SmartNews was growing fast in the U.S. What went wrong?” – Andrew Deck (RestOfWorld)

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“SmartNews also instituted an annual company road trip as part of this project. Employees, often accompanied by Suzuki himself, would drive through political swing states across the American Rust Belt and the South to interview SmartNews users, local voters, and politicians. The company’s most recent road trip in the fall of 2022 brought members of the marketing team to Atlanta, Georgia, ahead of the state’s midterm elections.

The trips often included visits to rallies for Donald Trump, multiple employees said. “Why would I want to give up one week of my life showing some guy from Tokyo around a Trump rally?” recalled one employee who declined an invitation to join the road trip in 2020. “The whole premise of the idea was very bizarre.”

https://restofworld.org/2023/smartnews-japan-unicorn-layoffs-media/

“The Collapse of Hollywood” – Development Hell

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“Everyone is trying to sell this thing you’ve created to the next person in line, that’s how the industry works. At its core, it’s a sales business. Not creative. Try to get that into your head. This is not a creative industry, you didn’t read Save The Cat from cover to cover because you wanted to be David Lynch

When I left school I worked in sales for a couple of years, and I learned one very valuable lesson; most sales people don’t relish a challenge. They would far rather you gave them something easy to sell, something that sells itself. “We’d be more comfortable selling this movie if you had Tom Cruise attached”. Sure, I get that. But if I had Tom Cruise, I could sell the fucking thing myself – how about you try earning your commission?”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/the-collapse-of-hollywood

“Microsoft is about to share a new ‘vision for the future of Xbox’ – here’s what that could mean” – Keith Stuart (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)

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“Microsoft has effectively backed itself into a corner from which no escape route is totally desirable. In many ways, the smart thing would be to combine the business models of Sega, which abandoned console development after the failure of Dreamcast and became a third-party games publisher, and Valve, which stopped being a developer and became a digital platform holder with Steam. In effect, it could abandon the Xbox hardware and concentrate on bringing Microsoft exclusives to other platforms while maintaining the Xbox name for a streaming service accessible via PC, phones and smart devices. But that would leave a lot of extremely unhappy Xbox fans”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/feb/07/pushing-buttons-xbox-future-phil-spencer

“Congressional Republicans to Defund the Antitrust Division?” – Matt Stoller (Big)

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“So how do political opponents take on a popular agenda? Well, instead of taking it on directly, you do it by being super-boring. Just cut the budget of the entity you don’t like. And indeed, since the turn against antitrust in the 1980s, Congress has been cutting the funding of the Antitrust Division, such that it has 230 fewer employees today than it did in 1979, despite a much larger economy. Few pro-consolidation politicians said “I like monopolies,” instead they just defunded the cops”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

‘ “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement’ – Anil Dash

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“But for creators, and for the world, that inefficiency was often wonderful. The inefficiency of old media formats resulted in less surveillance of the purchasing and behavioral habits of individuals, and larger surpluses that sustained a healthier, more vibrant media ecosystem that could even afford to invest in important stories or content despite the fact that they might not have a large audience”

https://anildash.com/2024/02/06/wherever-you-get-podcasts/