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Finished reading: Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron 📚
Fascinating read. Almost overwhelming at times in its detail on the history, people and cultures. Enjoyed.
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Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents – O’Reilly
But over time, something went very wrong. Instead of continuing to deploy their attention optimization algorithms for their users’ and suppliers’ benefit, the tech giants began to use them to favor themselves. It first became obvious with social media: recommended posts and amplification of addictive, divisive content in order to keep users scrolling, creating additional surface area for advertising
This is such a good essay. Robber Barons indeed.
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John Battelle’s Search Blog Mine, Mine, All Mine
But…I can’t help but think that there’s a better way. Wouldn’t it be cool, I sometimes idle, if I could make just one playlist called “All of It” – a playlist that has everything I’ve ever loved, ever owned, ever experienced. A playlist that holds what I lost – all those albums I purchased, all those mix tapes I ripped from the airwaves. And all the bands I’ve gone to see live – if ever there was a thumbs up that mattered, it’s paying money to see the music in person, right?
Yep.
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NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth – Voyager
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety
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Nope Meta, that won’t work either.
It has to be concluded that, in most cases, it will not be possible for large online platforms to comply with the requirements for valid consent if they confront users only with a binary choice between consenting to processing of personal data for behavioural advertising purposes and paying a fee.
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A trauma surgeon on why Gaza is the worst of war zones - The Economist
Read if you want to be informed. Don’t read if you don’t want to be utterly depressed.
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A tale of two headlines.
Meta wants to put students and teachers in Quest VR headsets Axios.
Zuckerberg Avoids Personal Liability in Meta Addiction Suits. Bloomberg.
If I were a school principal, I know what my attitude would be.
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Health Insurance
I spent some time yesterday reviewing health insurance. With skyrocketing costs and continually changing plans, identifying the plan that best meets your needs at a budget that you can afford is not easy.
It is more difficult and complex than it needs to be for most people. While the Health Insurance Authority website is useful to compare plans across insurance companies, it should be more intuitive to use.
Access to healthcare though, remains totally unfair. While everyone has access to the public health system, If you have health insurance you can get access to diagnostics relatively quickly. If you don’t, you’ll be in a queue, possibly for a very long time, which of course affects health outcomes.
The best advice is to call the insurances companies, tell them what you want, what your concerns are and an approximate budget and ask them to recommend what they consider the best plan for you across all of their plans including corporate plans.
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Weekend Update #76: A Tale of Two Raids: Ukraine Has No Nuclear Weapons So Must Suffer
Thought provoking, as always.
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To understand the risks posed by AI, follow the money
It is instructive to consider how the algorithmic technologies that underpinned the aggregator platforms of old (think Amazon, Google and Facebook among others) initially deployed to benefit users, were eventually reprogrammed to increase profits for the platform.
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Finished reading: The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor 📚 Took me a while to finish this but enjoyed it. Discovered it’s interesting to then ask ChatGPT to give you a summary of the book and a summary of critiques as well.
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The State of the Culture, 2024 - by Ted Gioia
The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.
This is really good.
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What just happened, what is happening next
things that we thought were uniquely human a year ago are going to be done by machines in the coming years, often at a “superhuman” level
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Made a first pass at creating a blogroll on a new page. Will be updating.
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Must go and see this.
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If you have an interest in finance or have seen the film “The Big Short”, you may know who Steve Eisman is. I enjoyed the latest Odd Lots podcast with him as guest. Irish investors will note his enthusiasm about CRH. The digression into comics was great.
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Did a search for a place to stay in a town in Google on desktop. All links above the fold sponsored. First sponsored link is booking.com, all remaining visible links are thin affiliate sites linking to Booking.com. Complete waste of time using Google for travel related queries.
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Now following President Biden (@potus@threads.net) on Micro.blog via Threads to Fediverse. Excited for the Fediverse. Now we need to push for everyone to use their own domains.
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Are we in the EV trough of disillusionment?
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If you want to make a really big AI model — the kind that can generate images or do your homework, or build this website, or fake a moon landing — you start by finding a really big training set.
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Mediapart en 2023 : tous nos comptes, chiffres et résultats | Le Club
Fascinated by the way French publisher Mediapart publishes its financials each year for all to see. It’s doing well with over 200,000 subscribers and growing.
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A Diary of Gaza’s Destruction - New Lines Magazine
The below is based on a collection of diary entries written by the Palestinian poet and literary critic Talat Qudaih from the beginning of the present war in Gaza until February 2024.
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Lots of Primroses now along the ditches. Spring arriving.