Tag: rss_source

“I believe that those most excited about generative AI “letting them write” or “letting them create art” are those who do not understand that what we can create is, much like an artist, limited by the person itself. We are not all capable of doing anything we want, and through experimenting with our own limitations we discover our talents, sometimes through sheer force of will, and even then, sometimes we can put hundreds of hours into something without being as good as somebody who barely tried”

https://wheresyoured.at/p/empty-laughter

“the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas troops had blocked the Border Patrol’s normal surveillance of the river and had assumed responsibility for it. Abbott tried to argue that the deaths were not his fault but rather Biden’s because, he said, Biden’s policies encouraged migrants to attempt the crossing”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-15-2024

“the early 2010s, big social platforms transformed the internet from a place of mostly text into a network of visual content. In 2011, Twitter launched the ability to embed images directly into tweets. And a year later, Instagram was purchased by Facebook and began its slow morph from hipster Polaroid app to Facebook 2.0 for millennials. After that, our social feeds became primarily visual. This was doubly true for brands. Every algorithm suddenly required some kind of image to break through. And after Instagram launched Reels in 2020 to compete with TikTok, you began needing video, as well.

Nowadays, user-generated content platforms are basically just widgets for JPGs. This is especially true for brands using these sites. Which is a problem because digital media is a game of scale and if you need a team of designers, if not an entire video production workflow, to catch the attention of an algorithm, it quickly stops being useful”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-digital-equivalent-of-wearing

“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/

“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/

“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, 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

“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/

“All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for the word “paroxysm.”

Here’s something I should confess, but also something you all probably already know: I live for diminishing returns. I love staying somewhere long after everyone else left, fiddling with minutiae to never be noticed (although sometimes I will try to make people notice), finding pleasure in superfine tuning that comes after fine tuning. I love connecting things and pouring myself into the cracks of a project that few others notice”