Journalism
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The First Source of Personal Intent
The largest coming conflict in the new AI world is not the one between AI giants or the one between those giants and governments. It will be the conflict between containment and expansion of personal agency. On the side of containment are expanded surveillance, guesswork, and entrapment in walled corporate gardens. On the side of… Continue reading
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Oneday
Flaming excess Big fire on Santa Rosa Island. Largest fire ever there. Success story Susie James: Three chords, the truth, and a woman behind the signal is a nice piece about good local radio in Lebanon, Tennessee. It's in the Lebanon edition of Good News Exchange, which explains itself here. Continue reading
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Flinks
The first version of this post became Snucked and sucked, but never mind that. I'm also packing to fly early tomorrow, so for now I'm just blabbing an annoted link pile during what's left of today. In other words, sort of like the usual but without subheads. I didn't know we were in an Axial Age… Continue reading
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Leftunders
And it will probably be very bad A super El Niño is coming this year. Let’s get it in the OED I’ve been throwing away leftunders, a word I just made up and then found in the Urban Dictionary. Speaking of worse Axios says we’re scaling sin. They are correct, at least in the sense… Continue reading
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Nutherday
Agents by agents for agents with agents around agents over agents without agents beside agents… I’m at the Agentic Internet Workshop, where most of the sessions are about what personal AI agents can do: for you, with each other, and (choose a preposition) each other. Wow: https://github.com/loyalagents, within which is https://github.com/loyalagents/loyal-agent-evals HT: Dazza Greenwood. We’ll miss it… Continue reading
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Frylings
Truth for sale Who Will Monetize Truth? asks Francesco Marconi in a long, thoughtful paper. Pull quote: “Content is free. Intelligence is not. The entire media industry is being repriced around that distinction.” HT to Rasmus Kleis Nielsen for linking to it here, and sharing this excerpt: The media industry is splitting into three different species. The Intelligence Business,… Continue reading
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Whyday
Yum On the latest Prof G Pod, David Brooks says, “One of my favorite sayings about writers is, ‘Writers are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread.’” And now I’m disincentivized from subscribing to anything published by Hearst. I don’t know how I started subscribing to the Esquire newsletter, or if I had… Continue reading
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Thrustday
A hopeful sign My News Commons site and series are getting action lately. Continue reading
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TGI Day
Bad news OMFG, news is such a shitshow. Start with Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes, by NiemanLab. Then, Social Media has Become a Freak Show, by Nate Silver. Thing is, more and more people in the U.S. now get their news (if that’s what it is) from social media, which… Continue reading
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Twos Day
One small test I wanted to know when the transmitter site for Denver radio station KHOW/630 (above), which I shot from an airplane in 2018, was built. So I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Three had the answer, sourcing this report by Scott Fybush from January 2018. (Answer:1979.) The AI that found nothing was… Continue reading
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Someday
Bad Karma In August of 2024, Audacy killed off WCBS/880 in New York, handing its ratings over to sister station WINS/1010, which now identifies by its new FM signal on 92.3 (even though the AM signal is much bigger). In the process, Audacy also handed off the 880 channel to Good Karma Brands, which already… Continue reading
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Flursday
Might do the same for you In The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis, the latest episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra compresses by Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, into 55 minutes of pure inspiration. Not just because Demis is a hugely inspired and driven dude, but… Continue reading
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Wednesfool
1 You’re welcome I don’t hate April Fools Day. I’m just too busy to participate. So this is a fooling-free blog post. Much to munch on Getting great hang time with Jon Udell (who also manifests here) lately. Here are two of his recent publishings ya’ll might dig: • Introducing XMLUI • Beyond The Dip Is there also… Continue reading
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From Mainstream to Allstream
David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for… Continue reading
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Everday
Time/Place capsule My shots of Delhi in 2018. CSAT journalism! Karl Bode, via Gary Marcus: “CEO said a thing!” Karl: “‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.” His examples—from Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg—are spot-on. Reminds me of… Continue reading
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Tornado Spotting
I left dinner at the Uptown to stand at the corner of Kirkwood and College in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, to shoot the tornado my phone just told me had formed eight miles west of there. That’s where I was facing when I shot this video, from which I pulled a bunch of screen grabs in… Continue reading
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Webless Day
Perspective 10 Largest Things in Nature That Will Make You Feel Incredibly Small. The only one I didn’t know about was Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. It covers 4,086 square miles. News Thunderstorm hits Santa Barbara. (Very rare.) Delays at Newark after smoke in the cockpit forces a JetBlue plane to return. Here’s the… Continue reading
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Remembranes
And I thought the voice was a knockoff of Leo Laporte Washington Post: He spent decades perfecting his voice. Now he says Google stole it: NPR’s David Greene says he was “completely freaked out” when he heard an AI voice that sounded just like his own, and he’s suing over it. It's still vendor sports.… Continue reading
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Dues Day
Currently I have three of them. Do you have a principle? I hadn’t thought about that before reading Justin Mikolay‘s Inventing on Principle: A Distillation of Bret Victor’s Extraordinary Talk About How To Live Your Life. And that’s just one of many things that have been written about Bret Victor, a guy about whom I knew… Continue reading
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Webnesday
The Oligarch Giveth, and The Oligarch Taketh Away The Guardian: ‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers—Former Post executive editor blasts owner Jeff Bezos’s ‘sickening efforts to curry favor’ with Trump This Pew study says 25% of US adults get news regularly from the Washington Post. (Disclosure: I subscribe, and I’m… Continue reading