Let's all agree, for the sake of argument, that there's a lot of bad stuff on the old interwebs, okay? I mean, there's some really bad stuff – and not just porn, but violence and death and that sort of thing. I would rather not
In a recent essay in Asterisk magazine entitled Scapegoating the Algorithm, Cambridge PhD and social scientist Dan Williams wrote that there seems to be a sense that the United States (and possibly other parts of the world) is going through an epistemic crisis, which he describes as a "breakdown
Ever since Google climbed onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon last year by announcing that AI results would start appearing at the top of search pages, there has been a suspicion that by using AI to provide answers, Google would inevitably wind up displacing websites and media companies whose businesses depend
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous research. Obviously, there are some things
Hi everyone! I'm going to keep this (mercifully) short. I don't do this a lot, and in fact I think I've only done this one other time. I write and publish this newsletter because I love writing about tech and the impact it has
You might have noticed that there’s a tiny bit of anxiety about artificial intelligence these days — its design, its implementation, its uses and misuses, its reason for existing at all. Is it ruining society? Is it making our kids stupid? Is it going to kill us? Etc. A lot
I'd like to apologize in advance for the topic of this week's newsletter, which I fear may not interest all (or perhaps even most) of you. It would be nice to think that lots of people care about the nuances of how news and information gets
Ever since ChatGPT first emerged on the scene in 2022, there has been a vociferous debate about whether the indexing (or "scraping") of public content that AI companies do when they are training a large-language model should be considered an infringement of the copyright held by publishers and/
A little over six months ago, I (and pretty much everyone else with a pulse) was writing about Bluesky's meteoric growth, which seemed to be driven in equal parts by frustration with Elon Musk's MAGAfication of Twitter/X and the search for somewhere to talk about
This isn’t an AI newsletter per se, in the sense that I don’t always write about it. However, I do write about it fairly often, mostly because I don’t think there’s anything else happening — apart from maybe crypto — that blends the surprising and the terrifying and
I've never met Marc Andreessen, although at one time in the distant past we were Twitter friends — I enjoyed the long threads he used to do, and I wrote about a few of them at Gigaom in a previous lifetime (including one about how newspapers should "burn
Let's get this out of the way right up front: I don't have an iPhone, I have a Pixel. And I run Windows and Linux on my desktops, not MacOS. That said, I am a longtime Macbook Air fan, having had more than half a dozen