Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions:
“In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short.
I too have been challenged by defining “federation” to non-technical audiences, so it was fun and instructive to see others give it a go.
The CEO of Instagram says that social media platforms will be under mounting pressure to help users tell the difference between human-made and AI content, and that going forward, it will be more practical to label real content over AI.
I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than men—25 percent lower on average—in part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social media experiences tend to be more open to AI, while Americans’ distrust is shaped by years of watching tech platforms erode trust. Meanwhile, one of the largest social platforms has turned its AI chatbot into a harassment tool—generating roughly one nonconsensual sexualized deepfake image per minute, disproportionately targeting women and girls.
Blogging from the Ruins is an essay getting a ton of attention in the fediverse this week, making a strong case for intentionally building non-algorithmic intellectual communities on the open web.
On the Media spends an hour exploring the media strategy behind the calls for debate. Tl;dr: controversy extends unpopular ideas much further than they would reach organically on their own.
One of my favorite low-cost cooking hacks is baking nice charcuterie on a frozen pizza. Today, I found out that Alimentari carries Smoking Goose products from my home state, so we’re having frozen pizza from Sal’s with capicola for dinner. Rawr, yum.
I just completed my first attempt at coding using AI, in this case having Claude assist me with putting together a simple client-side OPML parser using Dave Winer’s Feedland service.
Winer’s original script is pretty slick, and includes a list of all my feeds with titles, URLs, and categories; click-to-expand functionality to see the 5 most recent posts from each feed; clickable post titles that open articles in new tabs; sort options (by title or by update); and automatic updates when I change my FeedLand subscriptions.
Just speaking this into the universe, but it would be exceedingly cool if someone pulled together a micro.blog plugin for Feedland blogrolls and page feeds.