My digital presence has been deliberately fractured for years, so I’m watching how this site stitches together my breadcrumbs through SEO, with the serious stuff and throwaway asides alongside the occasional hilarity. Currently one of my top Google results.
Big internet controversy over dress codes in chain restaurants.
Just experienced my first thundersleet.
Author Margaret Atwood plays with Claude and reports back on her experience.
On the many failures of social media companies to act with pro-social ethics.
Pulling everything she’s ever posted back to her own website: Lisa Charlotte Muth flips POSSE to PESOS, “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.”
A gift link from The Atlantic, a reporter is given $10k to spend on emerging betting markets and reports on what he found. Spoiler: it’s dark!
Lean In girlbosses out, burned out babes in.
Interesting read: NYT is using a custom LLM tool to track trends within the “manosphere,” as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. I’d guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count will beget more followers by suggesting clout and credibility she didn’t earn as a reader talking to fellow readers. And followers aren’t subscribers, but that’s the business bet.
People are lookie-loos, they get curious when something is doing numbers and creating activity, so inflating follower counts is a real and persistent strategy. None of this is new. But best practices still hold regardless of which technologies you layer on top. Marketing erodes trust when it prioritizes short-term gains over honesty and reliability.
It’s strange to live in a time when you can’t reliably distinguish someone who has engaged with ideas from someone who automated the appearance of engaging with them.
Anecdotally hearing about LLMs being weaponized in divorce and custody, including inundating the other party with slop to drive up the opponent’s legal fees. Worse, the sycophancy is tuned to and confirms the aggrieved party’s grievances, regardless of their real-world relevance in court.
Brooke Warner grapples with the implications around authorship and ownership in relation to AI writing, and how it’s showing up in the small publishing business.
NYT on the trend of “Luddite teens.” I have a growing suspicion that various neo-Luddist trends will largely map to class identity. In some areas of the world, in some areas of the US, Facebook is the internet, yellow pages and water cooler, and the internet experience is entirely mediated by apps.
From 2021, notes on supply chains and chip shortages in a global economy.
Twitter on a vape, the great e-waste crisis.
A good essay on writing and communication in this time. Ultimately the pickle of AI writing is that meaning is something best made through collaboration.
Forgive me, but I’d like to propose we call this a “sloppelganger.”
Excited about Inkwell, a contemporary treatment of the classic RSS reader.
Doing numbers on Twitter/X this week: this paper tested 70+ LLMs on open-ended prompts and found they all produce strikingly similar outputs. Worse, the systems used to improve models actively penalize diversity, reinforcing the convergence.
I need someone to talk me into/out of the new Macbook Neo. Is this just a Chromebook for design people?