Along with the full interview of MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan interviewing Matt Taibbi, Tech Dirt goes into even more detail about the errors and inaccuracies Taibii brought with his reporting on the Twitter Files.
Hasan came prepared with facts. Lots of them. Many of which debunked the core foundation on which Taibbi and his many fans have built the narrative regarding the Twitter Files.Since the interview, Taibbi has been scrambling to claim that the errors Hasan called out are small side issues, but they’re not. They’re literally the core pieces on which he’s built the nonsense framing that Stanford, the University of Washington, some non-profits, the government, and social media have formed an “industrial censorship complex” to stifle the speech of Americans.
Tech Dirt does a fantastic job of breaking down multiple points where Taibbi got things wrong and flat-out omitted vital context. I highly recommend reading it rather than taking my small quotes here.
I am so happy I didn’t believe the hype when it came to this “historic” information. I knew something smelled fishy from the start, and it’s clearly only gotten more rotten.
A few weeks ago, I found myself staring at the about box for the app, and this default shade of blue stood out to me:
Old Blue Shade of MarsEdit
There’s nothing particularly wrong with it. It is, after all, the default color for all links. But I’m not sure anybody spent much time weighing the aesthetics of the default HTML colors. To my eye, the saturation reads “1990s” and “Windows”. When I see that default color on a web site, the site comes across as less refined. And suddenly, my app felt less refined as well. Here’s how the same default link looks in MarsEdit 5.0.5:
New Shade of Blue on MarsEdit
It’s just another arbitrary color, but it’s my choice. I think it looks nice. It’s a better shade of blue. I liked it so much I changed the default blue in MarsEdit’s Plain Text syntax highlighting as well.
I know this is a really simple change but it reminds me of what my thought process was when I made this website. I spent so much time trying to kill and default blue links that were around.
Also, the shade of blue Daniel Jalkut chose is damn near perfect.
In the coming days, we will start rolling out a way for writing, ideas, and discussion to travel through the Substack network. We’re calling this new product Notes.
In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences.
While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything.
The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention. In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform.
By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.
So just that I have this clear Substack is making short form content, but because they aren’t a “legacy social network” it’s somehow better than Facebook or Twitter?
Tack this on with the fact Substack is asking readers for funding gives you a company looking to get as much money as they can and keep people on their app and website as long as they can.
As we develop Notes, we will focus on building a system that lets people control the contours and boundaries of their subscription universe so that it is easy to keep trolls out and even easier to let valuable contributors in. The goal here is not to create a perfectly sanitized information environment, but to set the conditions for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas. It won’t feel like the social media we know today.
While Substack doesn’t necessarily have an infinite scroll they do have a ranking algorithm, check marks for highly successful Substacks, and now something they claim isn’t Twitter but looks a lot like Twitter.
Substack Notes
Substack was once my home for Clicked and other works I made, and I liked what it had to offer back then. However, I am happy to no longer have my work there because this is just another weird and concerning decision from them.
Feedly, the popular RSS feed service, recently came under fire for a now-deleted blog post (here is an Internet Wayback Machine link) in which they discussed using AI models to track protests, riots, and rallies. Many people were concerned that this technology could be used by employers and corporations to engage in union busting, worker surveillance, and strikebreaking.
Tracking the ever-changing nature of protests can be a daunting task.
They help security analysts track riots, strikes, and rallies that pose a risk to a company’s assets and employees.
With these AI models, tracking protests related to specific geographies, socio-political events, or corporations becomes more streamlined and efficient.
While Feedly responded to the backlash on Twitter and Mastodon, many people were not satisfied with their cookie-cutter response and are choosing to cancel their subscriptions.
Shortly after the backlash on Twitter and Mastodon, Feedly began auto-replying with the following:
Sorry for the disappointment, [First Name]. The blog post should have been clearer. This is used to notify employees of a potential security risk if they travel or work at locations where violence emerges. The content was misleading, so deleted.
I haven’t been a Feedly customer for years but if I were I would absolutely be pulling my RSS feeds from it and going to somewhere like Inoreader, Feedbin, or NetNewsWire.
If you are a Feedly user and are concerned about this issue, you can follow this guide on how to export your OPML file and switch to a different RSS feed service that does not use AI for potentially nefarious purposes.
Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard.
“I think that there are two paths for AI in digital media,” Peretti told CNN. “One path is the obvious path that a lot of people will do — but it’s a depressing path — using the technology for cost savings and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles that are lower quality than what a journalist could do, but a tenth of the cost.”
Perusing the memo Peretti sent to BuzzFeed staffers back in January, it’s hard to trace his sunny verbiage to these dismal, SEO-bait travel guides. In it, Peretti also took pains to suggest that human writers wouldn’t be replaced, saying instead that AI will work in tandem with “creative humans like us.”
“To be clear, we see the breakthroughs in AI opening up a new era of creativity that will allow humans to harness creativity in new ways with endless opportunities and applications for good,” Peretti wrote, using the term “creativity” twice in one sentence.
While the quizzes seemed more or less true to that spirit — instead of using AI to generate articles wholesale, they used it as a tool for human staff to produce custom results for readers, which is an interesting idea even if the execution was choppy — these wretched travel guides clearly aren’t.
It’s official: Anchor, the world’s largest podcast hosting platform, has combined with Spotify for Podcasters to create an all-new, first-of-its-kind platform with everything you need to create and grow a podcast
This is exciting for podcasters who are already hosted on the platform—but it’s also a breakthrough for all creators. In addition to bringing our creator offering all into one platform, we’re also–for the first time ever–opening up Spotify’s unique, interactive features to all podcasters, no matter where your show is hosted.
While many of these features have been limited exclusively to Anchor users (now referred to as Spotify-hosted creators), it was important to us that we built the new Spotify for Podcasters in a way that offers more open access to innovation. Today, that starts with opening up access to Q&A and poll functionality for all Spotify for Podcasters users–including those not hosting their content with us.
To help jumpstart the conversation and make it easier for listeners to provide you with valuable feedback, we’ve included a default question–“What did you think of this episode?”–on your most recent episode and all new episodes published through Spotify for Podcasters. You have the ability to customize your own question for each episode or to turn off the setting altogether in the new Interact tab of your dashboard. Audience answers are visible only to you by default, but you can “pin” your favorite answers so everyone can view them on your episode page in Spotify.
The video on the announcement post showcasing the interactivity offered in the app is something that made my eyes widen with excitement. Adding ways to interact with your podcast audience sounds fun and interesting. I know of a several podcasts I would love to interact with instead of being a silent listener. That being said, I can also see how this added interaction can be cumbersome and difficult for some creators.
Hard Fork is a show that I slept on far too long and as someone that has interviewed Casey before I feel shame admitting it. This episode in particular really grabbed on to me, and it was so good I plan to listen to it again in a few days.
In short hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton asked their listeners to send in examples of how they are using AI in their lives and some of the examples given made me want to open my laptop and start playing around with what AI tools I have available.
Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw—generally considered one of the greatest playwrights in the English language—was a controversial figure, who infused his many plays with his strident political and social views.>> One of the causes he embraced most passionately was the very contentious matter of spelling reform.
Shaw’s main concern was waste: time lost teaching children and foreigners a system full of irregularities, time lost in writing silent or redundant letters, and the paper and ink thrown away after them. The world would be a better place, he argued, if the alphabet had more letters so that every letter had a precise sound.
Shaw died in 1950 he left money in his will for the creation and promotion of an alphabet of at least 40 letters that will enable English “to be written without indicating single sounds by groups of letters or by diacritical marks.”>> A competition for creating this was launched in 1957, and offered a prize of £500 (about $18,000 in today’s money) for the winning entry. By the next year, the judges had received 467 entries, and decided to split the money among the four best ones—none of which was determined to be good enough to be adopted as the new official alphabet of the English language. One of the winners, Ronald Kingsley Read, however, made adjustments to his submission, and the judges accepted this new version as official “Shavian,” the Bernard Shaw Alphabet.
The rest of the money designated for spelling reform in Shaw’s will was spent in 1962 to publish an edition of his play Androcles and the Lion, in which the text appeared in both Roman and Shavian alphabets. The alphabet, however, failed to catch on, and apart from a minimal online presence, the Shavian alphabet is now little more than a curiosity.
The puzzle attached to this article was a lot of fun to do and helped me understand this alphabet. The solutions are available as well if you are stumped.
If you want to view Androcles and the Lion with the Shavian alphabet you can do so on the Internet Archive.
One thing that I thought was interesting was that in 2003 the Shavian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard.
Popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has been hacked this morning, with the channel’s 15.3 million subscribers seeing videos for crypto scams instead of tech hardware reviews. It’s the latest breach in a series of high-profile YouTube accounts being hacked, with scammers regularly gaining access to prominent accounts to rename them and livestream crypto scam videos.
The account was eventually suspended, presumably as YouTube employees work to restore it. Other Linus Media Group YouTube channels, including Techquickie and TechLinked, have also been breached and given new names focused on Tesla.
It’s not immediately clear how the channels have been breached, but owner Linus Sebastian tweeted that he was aware of the situation. Later, in a statement posted to Floatplane (a streaming service spun out of Linus Media Group), he said that the company is working on it with Google, and is “getting to the bottom of the attack vector with the (hopeful) goal of hardening their security around YouTube accounts and preventing this sort of thing from happening to anyone in the future.” He also promised to discuss additional details on the company’s podcast, though warned they might not come this week as it’s “still a developing situation.”
LTT fans have noted that almost a decade’s worth of videos were deleted. Sebastian has backed up his old videos using a “Vault” backup system, and is an advocate of using the 3-2-1 method of storing data across multiple storage devices (including one offsite).
Every time I have seen a YouTube channel get hacked like this YouTube usually finds a way to restore the channel to something close to how it was before the attack. That said, I truly hope Linus does have his videos stored somewhere else just in case.
If you learn anything from this consider looking into backing up your work and perhaps follow the 3-2-1 method for backups.
