Category: links_read

“Risky Business” – A Scammer Darkly

Selflinks_read

“In a business where some level of loss is written in, the last two years have blown a hole in P&Ls and caused an industry-wide panic. Politicians are faced with an uncomfortable choice – let for-profit insurers gouge their customers by hiking rates double digits each year, or have swaths of their citizens unable to obtain insurance at all. A few states are trying to lure insurers back by shielding them from legal liability, but that’s a band-aid on a shotgun wound”

https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/risky-business/

“The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work” – Ludicity

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“There’s plenty of work that consists of simply churning out widgets faster, and I’m happy to see that work disappear (so long as we find a way for people to continue living healthily without it), but it must be acknowledged that many of the things we value in society come from an ill-defined, more vital place, and there is an intersection of that spark with the realities of production”

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-failed-commodification-of-technical-work/

“Bitcoin has “no chance” of going to the moon” – Molly White

Selflinks_read

“I learned this week just how brain-poisoned I am from following the cryptocurrency industry. When I first saw reports that HyperVerse’s CEO was revealed to have been completely made up, I thought “lol yeah that makes sense” and went on with my day. I was then surprised to see headlines about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian, only to realize that yeah, companies completely making up their CEOs is actually unusual in most other industries and still raises the eyebrows of normal people”

https://citationneeded.news/issue-48/

“A Continual Christmas” – Ed Zitron

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“Failing to say what is actually happening for fear that you won’t be “objective” is failing your audience. Accepting that humans are biased, thoughtful, and terrible creatures, and that writing for humans requires a clarity of message and spirit, is necessary to fully communicate what is happening around us. Journalism is not objective, has never been objective, and never will be objective. It can seek balance, but overall it should seek clarity”

https://wheresyoured.at/p/a-continual-christmas

“Widows and Orphans” – Warren Ellis

Selflinks_read

“Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to make a lot of widows. Sometimes making the widows takes longer than it did to write the original document.

But when someone calls for a certain length, you’ve got to run the widows and orphans on it. All day. All week, if you have to. what it teaches you is to revise and revise again, and find a balance between energetic language and clear concise language”

Widows And Orphans

“The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think” – Caitlin Stall-Paquet (The Walrus)

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“He cites S&P Global’s estimate that, in transitioning to green energy, manufacturers will need more copper in the next three decades than the world consumed over the past 120 years. Demand for copper is expected to roughly double between now and 2035, to make hardware such as rechargeable batteries, solar panel heat exchangers, and wind turbine generators. The question now is whether biomining can scale up fast enough to meet soaring demand”

The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think

“Bill Gates is bad for humanity” – Quinn Slobodian (New Statesman)

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“Although Schwab’s book is a tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Perhaps we are starting to solve the “Bill Gates Problem” by the creeping (if highly uneven) return of faith in the ability of public authorities to do better than private world-makers, alongside the ongoing discrediting of the tech saviours who enjoyed such a gullible audience in the early years of the millennium”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/11/bill-gates-is-bad-for-humanity

“Cake and Casualties” – Christoph Reuter (Das Spiegel)

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“A family stands at the grave of Danylo Boguslavskyi, born on April 7, 1990, and killed in action on October 16, 2022. “We always come on Saturdays,” says his brother Roman. “One Saturday, I drove him to the station. That was the last time we saw him. He was a lawyer and historian and was present at the Maidan protests in Kyiv in 2014. He volunteered after Russia’s invasion and was then wounded several times. For a while, he was in the hospital every month,” Roman recalls. It was almost as if the injured man maintained the hope that, by getting wounded again and again, he would be given a reprieve and would never be killed. Until he was”

https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/russlands-krieg-gegen-die-ukraine-uschhorod-der-friedlichste-ort-der-ukraine-a-48943553-cba2-4c04-8cc2-6dd4f6a10a14

“Begin End” – James Somers (New Yorker)

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“Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself.

In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

“The end of anonymity on Chinese social media” – Caiwei Chen (restofworld)

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“other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over 500,000”

https://restofworld.org/2023/weibo-legal-display-name-influencers/