Kind: Reads

The task of reporting is not a simple one. Each and every day, reporters and editors at publications like The Onion make difficult decisions about which issues should receive attention, knowing that our coverage will influence not only how people think, but also how they act. This responsibility is at the core of an…

The broken Twitter everyone warned us about is finally here.

Next week the Supreme Court will hear the biggest Internet case in more than a decade: Gonzalez v Google. At issue is Section 230; the law that empowers all of us to create and engage with online…

The New York Times had a chance to earnestly grapple with a serious critique of its trans coverage by a serious group of professionals, including journalists The Times believed were credible enough to have a byline in the paper or contribute in other ways. Instead, it decided to demean them as activists who aren’t truly […]

Researchers have spent years warning that text-generation algorithms can spew bias and falsehoods. Tech giants are rushing them into products anyway.

As Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk has arbitrarily changed the platform’s rules to benefit himself. Republicans are turning a blind eye to this manipulation even while highlighting censorship of conservative voices.

Back in our day, memes didn't benefit from centralized services like YouTube, Twitter.

Listen now (6 min) | Democrats must reclaim patriotism and affirm its true meaning

Plus: The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video.

In writing and in dispensing my (very dubious, probably shady) writing advice, I am often keen to note that ideas are bullshit. Most writers treat them like precious gems when really, ideas are lik…

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

ChatGPT Is Ingesting Corporate Secrets by Bruce Schneier

Interesting:

According to internal Slack messages that were leaked to Insider, an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data.

This issue seems to have come to a head recently because Amazon staffers and other tech workers throughout the industry have begun using ChatGPT as a “coding assistant” of sorts to help them write or improve strings of code, the report notes.

[…]

“This is important because your inputs may be used as training data for a further iteration of ChatGPT,” the lawyer wrote in the Slack messages viewed by Insider, “and we wouldn’t want its output to include or resemble our confidential information.”…

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Extraordinarily Confused Congressional Rep. Thinks Social Media Companies Are Secretly Communicating With Gov’t Censors… Via Jira by Mike Masnick

I wrote last week about the bizarrely bad House Oversight hearing that was supposed to expose how Twitter, the deep state, and the, um “Biden Crime Family” conspired to suppress the NY Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Of course, wishful thinking does not make facts, and we already know that story is totally false. […]

Elon Musk has called an earlier stretch at Tesla the "most difficult" of his career. His employees say his time at Twitter is proving worse.