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

“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/

“Subprime intelligence” – Where’s Your Ed At

“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/

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

“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

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

“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)

“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

“Issue 51 – It’s quiet… too quiet” – Citation Needed

“Fairshake superPAC (funded by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and others [I47]) has just spent around $2 million of the $80 million in its war chest on attack ads against California Senate candidate, Democrat Katie Porter. The ad attacks Porter for receiving three contributions of $500, $2,000, and $2,900 from individuals who are executives at a pharmaceutical company, oil company, and bank (respectively), and claim she has received more than $100,000 in such contributions from “Big Pharma, Big Oil, and the Big Bank executives”. The irony of Big Crypto spending 20x this amount on an attack ad is, apparently, lost on them”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-51/

“February 11, 2024” – Letters from an American

“Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-11-2024

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

“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/