Got a good look at Mr. Bald Eagle
What life is like on the inside as a locked-in patient
Josh Wilbur writes for The Guardian: “Jake Haendel was a hard-partying chef from a sleepy region of Massachusetts. When he was 28, his heroin addiction resulted in catastrophic brain damage and very nearly killed him. In a matter of months, Jake’s existence became reduced to a voice in his head. To outside observers, Jake exhibited no signs of awareness or cognition. “Is he in there?” his wife and father would ask the doctors. No one knew for sure. An electroencephalogram (EEG) of his brain showed disrupted patterns of neural activity, indicating severe cerebral dysfunction. “Jake was pretty much like a houseplant,” his father told me. They had no way of knowing Jake was conscious. In medical terms, he was “locked in”: his senses were intact, but he had no way of communicating.”
Think you know who invented the toaster? You may have been taken in by the Great Toaster Hoax
From Marco Silva at the BBC: “For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed. “I read through Wikipedia a lot when I’m bored in class,” says Adam, aged 15, who studies photography and ICT at a school in Kent. One day last July, one of his teachers mentioned the online encyclopaedia’s entry about Alan MacMasters, who it said was a Scottish scientist from the late 1800s and had invented “the first electric bread toaster”. At the top of the page was a picture of a man with a pronounced quiff and long sideburns, gazing contemplatively into the distance – apparently a relic of the 19th Century, the photograph appeared to have been torn at the bottom. But Adam was suspicious. “It didn’t look like a normal photo,” he tells me. “It looked like it was edited.”
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Continue reading “What life is like on the inside as a locked-in patient”What the embrace of ChatGPT says about modern life
via Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter:
“The way I see it, the jaw-dropping speed of generative AI’s embrace is essentially a large-scale acknowledgement that modern life is sort of miserable and that most people don’t actually care if anything works anymore. Which is, honestly, fair. Our lives are full of tasks that no one wants to do that offer little reward for doing them well. The systems we live, work, and create inside of are simply too large to comprehend or really care about. I mean, at this point, pretty much everyone I know in an office job that isn’t in media is using ChatGPT at work basically all of the time. But as more companies push to integrate themselves into AI platforms, it’s also revealing that they don’t really care either. The institutions and industries responsible for these systems we all hate don’t want to maintain them either. And we know this because there is simply no way you can say you care about something if you replace it with AI. You can’t say you care about audio production if you replace voice actors. You can’t say you care about food service if you replace drive-thru workers. You can’t say you care about advertising if you replace copywriters. What you care about is speed, scale, and, if this stuff works correctly, money.”
A quick swim in the sea in Taormina, Sicily
That feeling when you just climbed Mount Etna
A swim in the sea in Siracusa, Sicily
A view from Perugia across the hills of Umbria
Time for a little espresso and gelato
Back in Perugia, as god intended
Great day for a kayak trip around the bay
Sunset on the South Jetty in Venice, Fla.
Why yes, we did get a bit of snow last night
New lambs!
Does the end of BuzzFeed News mean the death of social journalism?
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
The past few weeks have not been kind to the giants of digital news. On April 20, Insider—which is owned by the German publishing company Axel Springer—said that it was laying off ten percent of its staff in the US. On April 27, Vice Media initiated a restructuring that was expected to lead to over a hundred job losses and the end of its Vice News Tonight broadcast; on May 1, the New York Times reported that Vice was preparing to file for bankruptcy protection. Since then, there have been reports that a private equity deal could rescue the company, though it may value it as low as three-hundred million dollars—a relatively large amount by everyday standards, but still a far cry from the near six billion dollars the company was said to be worth in 2017. Elsewhere, Disney slashed staff at FiveThirtyEight, the data-driven news site that it owned as part of ABC News. Numerous more traditional media outlets have also made cuts this year, from the Washington Post to Gannett.
More than any of these, however, one recent announcement stood out as a sign of something important dying, at least on the digital-media side of the equation: namely, the closing of BuzzFeed News and the loss of its more than sixty staffers. (BuzzFeed will stay in the news business via HuffPost, which it owns.) “This moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,” Ben Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, told the Times (where he later worked as a media columnist). “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.” As is the case with many marriages, the end of this one was hardly a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. Layoffs at BuzzFeed News had become the norm in recent few years, including two hundred job cuts in early 2019. BuzzFeed went public in 2021, which some hoped would bring prosperity, but its stock soon slid. The company was worth a billion dollars shortly after its initial public offering. At time of writing, its share price implied that it was worth less than eighty million dollars.
Back in the halcyon days of 2015, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, told Recode’s Peter Kafka that he planned to “fish for eyeballs in other people’s streams”—in particular, Facebook’s. The site’s content, consisting of quizzes and short videos in addition to hard-hitting news stories, seemed perfectly suited for that platform, and, for a time, Peretti’s plan seemed to be working well. But by 2017, BuzzFeed’s revenue growth had reportedly started to slow. Then, in 2018, Facebook made a series of changes to its algorithm that were designed to show users more “personal” content, such as photos and posts from friends, ahead of articles from external publishers. For some news outlets, including Mashable and Mic, the changes meant hardship, and even death. BuzzFeed was not hit quite as hard, but it was hit: according to one estimate from a former BuzzFeed staffer, stories that once racked up as many as two hundred thousand visits were now getting a tenth of that amount. As I wrote in 2019, “Editors at BuzzFeed (and many other places) yoked themselves so tightly to Facebook’s wagon, even after the Zuckerberg empire provided ample evidence it would move the goalposts.”
Continue reading “Does the end of BuzzFeed News mean the death of social journalism?”What the embrace of ChatGPT says about modern life
via Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter:
“The way I see it, the jaw-dropping speed of generative AI’s embrace is essentially a large-scale acknowledgement that modern life is sort of miserable and that most people don’t actually care if anything works anymore. Which is, honestly, fair. Our lives are full of tasks that no one wants to do that offer little reward for doing them well. The systems we live, work, and create inside of are simply too large to comprehend or really care about. I mean, at this point, pretty much everyone I know in an office job that isn’t in media is using ChatGPT at work basically all of the time. But as more companies push to integrate themselves into AI platforms, it’s also revealing that they don’t really care either. The institutions and industries responsible for these systems we all hate don’t want to maintain them either. And we know this because there is simply no way you can say you care about something if you replace it with AI. You can’t say you care about audio production if you replace voice actors. You can’t say you care about food service if you replace drive-thru workers. You can’t say you care about advertising if you replace copywriters. What you care about is speed, scale, and, if this stuff works correctly, money.”