This is where your find short posts, like quick updates, interesting links or photos.
Here's a parable.
Imagine you're Coca-Cola. After a year with record-breaking sales, you decide on an unusual course of action: You intend to stop advertising your products entirely for four years. No TV ads. No billboards. No online ads. You even take down the Coca-Cola logos that are part of diner signs.
During these four years, Pepsi advertises relentlessly. Pepsi reaches out to new media and finds inventive ways of getting attention. And not only that: Pepsi also promotes every negative story and bad rumor about Coke through all its messaging routes. Did they really find rat poison in a batch of Coke? Are Coke cans radioactive?
Coca-Cola is aware of all these negative stories, but it doesn't respond to them. Its executives conclude that responding to the stories will just draw attention to them. Coke says nothing. It doesn't even find a way to say that Coke is working hard to maintain high standards of quality control. The rumors spread and spread.
At the end of these four years, Coke sales have declined approximately 8%. That's not a lot -- but as a result, Pepsi is now outselling Coke by a small margin.
What conclusion do Coke executives draw?
"People hate Coke."
And that's the wrong conclusion. People don't hate Coke. Coke was the #1 carbonated drink, and now it's slightly less popular, after four years when the public heard almost nothing positive about Coke and a great deal that was negative.
Ryan Broderick seems to have the correct take on Facebook changing their approach to content moderation:
I floated a theory of mine to Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel [..] that content moderation, as we’ve understood, it effectively ended on January 6th, 2021. [T]he way I look at it is that the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.
I stayed on through the last round of changes, but I'm approaching the end, I think.
Det er skrevet mange julesanger, som oftest er spilt inn i enda flere versjoner hvorav en troner høyere enn andre. I tillegg kommer stadig nye julesanger til, og Ramsalt jul av Thea Sæther fra Frøya (aka. Trøndelagskystens perle) er utvilsomt min favoritt fra 2024. Det er en vakker sang, og nydelig fremført; artisten har selv skrevet teksten. Det er skrevet nok sanger om å feire jul i skauen, så det var på høy tid at kyst-Norge får et nytt tillegg.
[T]he so-called AI boom we’re in right now is really selling two things, neither of which have to be very good. A way to automate work you don’t value enough to hire a human being to do or, at the bare minimum, a way to hide the human beings doing that work so you can feel better about how little you pay them.
Sam Altman needs you to believe that AI will kill us all or going to destroy all our jobs and that he’s a little bit scared of AI, because if you think for even a second about what this man is saying, you’ll realize that he’s not an engineer, he’s a lobbyist and a liar. He needs us to humor — even if he rejects the notion — the idea that AI could be considered a “creature” because doing so allows him to add further mystique and hype to distract from the fact that he doesn’t seem to know anything and OpenAI doesn’t seem to be innovating.
I blame my parents for making me a fan of musicals at a young age. I’ve yet to see 1955’s It’s always fair weather, but when this scene popped up in my feed, I realize that has to change. I mean, _wow! – I can’t imagine how hard this was to do.
The Dark Side Of The Moon is David Cameron’s favourite album of all time. The latter ex-Prime Minister actually has a lot in common with Waters. Both men have taken charge of something arrogantly and made it immeasurably worse than it was in the first place. Also, each one owns a wardrobe full of inflatable pigs.
[E]ven if Ukraine falls, the fundamental conflict between Putin and the West will not diminish, because it’s really about Poland. Poland’s Western-backed success represents the major challenge to Russia’s domination of what Putin sees as its rightful sphere of influence. And as long as Poland is wealthy and strong and independent, Putin, with the 1600s still fresh in his mind, will always feel like Russia is under direct threat.
I haven’t paid Russell Brand much attention since his brief Hollywood stint. Turns out that he’s discovered he could make lots of money on the far right conspiracy crowd. This is an interesting video from Media Matters’ Abbie Richards, detailing the grift economy network. Brand almost certainly doesn’t believe any of the claims he makes, but he’s making a lot more money from the Alex Jones crowd than he did as a self-help guru type. In other words: follow the money.
