It’s still a bubble
In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong about something—and that maintaining a wrong doesn’t make it right. That’s why we were already working on MyTerms (IEEE 7012) at the time. It’s done now, and ready to rock what’s overdue to pop.
And this subscription cancellation was made by a human being
Hanaa’ Tameez in NiemanLab: “This price was set by an algorithm”: News subscribers are surprised by a new line in their renewal emails—Outlets like Wired, NJ.com, and The Wall Street Journal are setting renewal prices just for you — and being forced to disclose it.
A One of One
In tech journalism’s golden age, when mags were thick and slick and hot, and covered world-changing work like a swarm of noisy bees, the most readable, annoying, hated, and loved writer of them all was John C. Dvorak, who died three days ago at just 80.
In Quaker meetings, the rule is not to speak until you can improve on the silence. In tech journalism, the rule is not to speak until you can improve on the cacophony of good things others are saying and writing, while not knowing if what you’re writing works or not, but you can’t stop doing it anyway. I learned a lot about all that from John. Hats off.
Here’s his newsletter’s announcement.
What they said
Peter Kaminsky: How Well Do Frontier LLMs Write in Languages Other Than English? What Native-Speaker Critics Say. Pete’s AI fu is second to none. You’ll read why. And how.
He the People
My Modern Met: Colorado Mayor Mike Coffman Spends Every Friday Night Sleeping in a Homeless Shelter. Excerpt:
Coffman has described his overnight stays as a form of quality control, allowing him to evaluate whether Aurora’s incentive-based model is helping residents move toward stable housing. He plans to continue sleeping at the shelter every Friday until the program reaches its full potential. His goal is to create a model that other cities can follow.
Here’s not looking at you, kid
Noah Shachtman in Wired: For Taylor Swift, Madison Square Garden’s Controversial Cameras Briefly Went Dark—MSG’s sprawling surveillance system can monitor guests down to the second. Its owners made an exception for the pop star’s rehearsal dinner. Background, also by Noah: The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine.
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