Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
I selected nightgown but it's more like a shirt that reaches under my bum, not the image the name "nightgown" conjures up, long and frilly and whatnot lol. I got a longer one (just under knee length) for winter, but I don't like it because I sleep like a rotisserie chicken and end up getting strangled in it.
White nationalists are like "Everything will be great once we get rid of the minorities and it's just us and our planet-killing plutocrats and our serial killers and our mass shooters and our flavorless food and our ass music and our vapid culture and our soulless spirituality."
In order to protect a dying fossil fuel industry, the corrupt fascists in the US are doing grave harm to their own constituents, the economy, and the future of the country.
Note how the American version of oligarchic democracy fails: many people say that they despised both Trump and Biden.
In Maine, trades workers are facing catastrophic layoffs.Why? Trump has cancelled hundreds of billions of dollars for clean energy projects to pay for tax cu...
rambospecial.com ๐ Health Insurance. Call David For A Free Quote at (609) 577-8557 or ๐ป Visit MidAtlanticBA.com/RAMBO Newstreason.com Tulipblooms.shop promo code RAMBO Epicminerals.net promo code RAMB
3/5: This book is primarily a collection of a couple dozen homebrew recipes, with little else to offer. Given the title, I expected more in the way of tips, techniques, or brewing insights, but the brief explanatory sections lacked some depth.
for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -y -i "$f" -vf "scale='if(gt(a,1),1024,-1)':'if(gt(a,1),-1,1024)',pad=1024:1024:(1024-iw)/2:(1024-ih)/2" -c:v libx264 -preset fast -crf 18 -c:a aac -b:a 128k "normalized_video/${f%.*}_normalized.mp4"; done
#then cd normalized_video for f in *.mp4; do echo "file '$f'" >> concat_list.txt; done
By Manu Pineda. Under the guise of food distribution, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation serves the Israeli project of transforming Gaza into a 21st-century archipelago of concentration camps.
What's the deal with converting all the efficient pairs of one-way streets into two-way?!
In my town, all the 4+ lane one-ways are being converted to single-lane two-ways + bus-only lanes and bike lanes. I cycle a shiitload downtown, and this is fucking retarded. I'm less safe on my bike, and god forbid a car needs to turn: that one auto lane is now backed up.
I've assumed that this is all dipshit bureaucratic social engineering. They are ashamed of cars. Am I wrong?
Israel has the support of world's leaders, especially Western. But Israel will never see millions of millions of people to support its cause, because this cause is obviously against the oppressed people of the world. Israel's destiny is decomposition and dissolution. All the bottom people of the world for a #freepalestine.
A terrorist entity like the zionist will never have the support of millions of bottom people. It's time for the bottom people to face the reality and turn against their authorities who support the colonial capitalist system to end this exploitive system. todon.eu/@dbattistella/1146599โฆ
The Freedom Flotilla was part of a global coalition that includes a march to Gaza. People has been working on this for months and the support for the convoy as the 100+ buses and cars move across North Africa heading to the Rafah border in Egypt, is tremendous.
"We, the presidents of Gazaโs three non-profit universitiesโ Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University-Gaza, and the Islamic University of Gaza โ together accounting for the vast majority of Gazaโs students and faculty members, issue this unified statement to the international academic community at a time of unprecedented devastation of higher education in Gaza."
Another move which can bring the collapse of #EU. Not because Kazakhs want to press down the Union, but because Europe for so many years left the traditional diplomatic way of dealing to follow the new capitalist way of monopolies to attack everything to gain more profit. All this was a boomerang that now comes to "our" neoliberal face. The problem is that working class will pay the price, not the political and economic elite...
Download joborun linux for free. Like Arch built from ground up with runit. Arch as it was meant to be, simple, fast, secure, cutting edge - without the systemd labyrinth to choke it
Utilizing runit (default) init and service supervisionโฆ
Once in a while I enter dark background + sea or fog or forest and whatever jumps out as dark enough so slightly brighter stuff will show I download. Look for pics that don't have much contrasting content because that will interfere with letters or if you like your conky to right or left or top look for one that at least on that side is dark enough. You can also use an image viewer/editor and flip it horizontally left right. nature doesn't mind being flipped ๐ Sometimes if I like the picture too much but it is not dull or dark enough I use some adjustment.
Except for the ones on the image I haven't kept links for my other ones, I have about 30-40
I assume that dark other than being easy on my eyes, it also saves electricity and cuts down any radiation. My screen that I do most work that is very dark stays cool, my other screen that plays video tv whatever gets warm enough I can feel the heat from it in my face.
I don't really like icewm but I used it as a test of wayback .. as a concept my favorite is vtwm I wish I had the patience to tame it enough to do what I do with openbox
Also. ram use whether labwc or wayback is much higher than X + wm. After all that work with labwc I see myself being one of the last few still using X after some years ... I don't see outliving X though ๐
This came at a cost, we had a batch of upgrades all related to a major perl upgrade, I was supposed to wait for perl to leave testing and go to stable before I synced, I copied the file into the sync directory to upload the bg didn't think that ALL the pkgs being upgraded were removed from the directory, so 1 bg up 15 files deleted ๐
So I just went ahead and did the full upgrade, we are now all caught up with testing ๐
Ohh... well ... at least we are not behind, we are ahead. Let's hope nothing breaks. If it does activate extra-testing and will all be OK again
Hydrocarbon lake and methane rain clouds on Titan Jenny McElligott/eMITS
NASA research has shown that cell-like compartments called vesicles could form naturally in the lakes of Saturnโs moon Titan.
Titan is the only world apart from Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. However, Titanโs lakes and seas are not filled with water. Instead, they contain liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane.
On Earth, liquid water is thought to have been essential for the origin of life as we know it. Many astrobiologists have wondered whether Titanโs liquids could also provide an environment for the formation of the molecules required for life โ either as we know it or perhaps as we donโt know it โ to take hold there.
New NASA research, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, outlines a process by which stable vesicles might form on Titan, based on our current knowledge of the moonโs atmosphere and chemistry. The formation of such compartments is an important step in making the precursors of living cells (or protocells).
The process involves molecules called amphiphiles, which can self-organize into vesicles under the right conditions. On Earth, these polar molecules have two parts, a hydrophobic (water-fearing) end and a hydrophilic (water-loving) end. When they are in water, groups of these molecules can bunch together and form ball-like spheres, like soap bubbles, where the hydrophilic part of the molecule faces outward to interact with the water, thereby โprotectingโ the hydrophobic part on the inside of the sphere. Under the right conditions, two layers can form creating a cell-like ball with a bilayer membrane that encapsulates a pocket of water on the inside.
When considering vesicle formation on Titan, however, the researchers had to take into account an environment vastly different from the early Earth.
Uncovering Conditions on Titan
Huygens captured this aerial view of Titan from an altitude of 33,000 feet. ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Titan is Saturnโs largest moon and the second largest in our solar system. Titan is also the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere.
Thanks to Cassini, we now know Titan has a complex meteorological cycle that actively influences the surface today. Most of Titanโs atmosphere is nitrogen, but there is also a significant amount of methane (CH4). This methane forms clouds and rain, which falls to the surface to cause erosion and river channels, filling up the lakes and seas. This liquid then evaporates in sunlight to form clouds once again.
This atmospheric activity also allows for complex chemistry to happen. Energy from the Sun breaks apart molecules like methane, and the pieces then reform into complex organic molecules. Many astrobiologists believe that this chemistry could teach us how the molecules necessary for the origin of life formed and evolved on the early Earth.
Building Vesicles on Titan
The new study considered how vesicles might form in the freezing conditions of Titanโs hydrocarbon lakes and seas by focusing on sea-spray droplets, thrown upwards by splashing raindrops. On Titan, both spray droplets and the sea surface could be coated in layers of amphiphiles. If a droplet then lands on the surface of a pond, the two layers of amphiphiles meet to form a double-layered (or bilayer) vesicle, enclosing the original droplet. Over time, many of these vesicles would be dispersed throughout the pond and would interact and compete in an evolutionary process that could lead to primitive protocells.
If the proposed pathway is happening, it would increase our understanding of the conditions in which life might be able to form.
โThe existence of any vesicles on Titan would demonstrate an increase in order and complexity, which are conditions necessary for the origin of life,โ explains Conor Nixon of NASAโs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. โWeโre excited about these new ideas because they can open up new directions in Titan research and may change how we search for life on Titan in the future.โ
NASAโs first mission to Titan is the upcoming Dragonfly rotorcraft, which will explore the surface of the Saturnian moon. While Titanโs lakes and seas are not a destination for Dragonfly (and the mission wonโt carry the light-scattering instrument required to detect such vesicles), the mission will fly from location to location to study the moonโs surface composition, make atmospheric and geophysical measurements, and characterize the habitability of Titanโs environment.
Quick machine recovery, a #feature introduced as part of the #Windows #Resiliency Initiative at Ignite 2024 โ is available for Windows Insiders in the Canary Channel. When enabled, it automatically detects and fixes widespread issues on #Windows11 devices using the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). This reduces downtime and avoids the need for manual fixes. If a device experiences a widespread #boot issue, it enters #WinRE, connects to the internet, and #Microsoft can deliver a targeted fix through Windows #Update.
Next step is a tool to fix the tool you need to boot ๐
Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27898 to the Canary Channel.
We are also not planning to release SDKs for 27xxx series builds for the time being.
Whatโs
"The truth of the matter is that Israeli leaders have been pushing genocidal advocacy for many years. The genocidal thinking has always been a part of the Zionist project in one way or another, fueled by its settler-colonial logic of elimination. But these genocidal tendencies have often had to be balanced with a semblance of democracy, just like in the case of its apartheid.
But now, Israel seems to have unleashed itself from such constraints to a much greater degree. It appears that Israel no longer sees the need to put on the perfume of democracy."
Nonbinary awareness day, yโall. And itโs been nonbinary awareness week. Just remember, nonbinary folks donโt owe you androgyny, weโre not โwomen liteโ or โsoft guys.โ Weโre not a phase on a transition diagram. Gender is much more than a spectrum, itโs a multidimensional convoluted hyperspace.
Berlin, Germany : A Car of the Stรถlting Company Set on Fire
Solidarity with Maja and all prisoners โ A car of the Stรถlting company set on fire
During the night of 12 to 13 June, a car belonging to the Stรถlting company went up in flames.
The Stรถlting group is a services company and presents itself, among other things, as an external alternative for management, food, medical treatment, care and support for jails; it is proposing taking over certain areas, or even the management of prison establishments as a whole.
In the past, the Stรถlting group has also been associated with anti-union practices โ workers found themselves offered money to leave the union.
With all the different roles they play in prison, they are supporting a system based on the punishment of persons who do not integrate into the logic of capitalist exploitation, and try to break them through isolation.
Prisons are one of the many repressive tools of the State to prevent actions of resistance and intimidate people who use counter-violence against them.
At the present time, in Germany, there are more compas in jail than there have been over the past thirty years. The State is acting very firmly against all those who are putting its monopoly of violence in question.
The antifascist movement is presently at the centre of investigations, but anarchists M. and N., of Munich, as well as Daniela Klette [one-time militant of the RAF, arrested in February 2024 and presently on trial; NdAtt.] are also imprisoned on remand.
In Greece, anarchists Marianna, Dimitra, Dimitris and Nikos are on remand following the explosion that took place on October 31 2024 in an apartment in Athens, and cost anarchist combatant Kyriakos Xymitiris his life.
They are being accused of being members of a terrorist organisation, as is often the case, the simple fact of knowing each other is punished, aimed at satisfying the appetites of the authorities in charge of the inquest, always seeking more suspects.
In Hungary, Maja has started a hunger strike on June 5th 2025 [see here; NdAtt.], protest against solitary confinement and the prison conditions and to be assigned to house arrest or be sent back to Germany.
For prisoners hunger strike is often the last means they have to resist. They put their health and also their life at risk and use their body as a last weapon against the repressive system.
All those in prison who resist and fight back deserve our solidarity โ beating up nazis, blowing up prisons, burning cops cars are all parts of a practice of resistance which can only continue to live thanks to support in the street and the defence of our ideas with all means.
Against the prison society โ Freedom for all prisoners !
The Guardian Sues Trump Administration for Withholding ICE Immigration Enforcement Data
"The news organization sought to uncover whether ICEโs enforcement efforts focused primarily on illegal immigrants with criminal records or if broader populations were being targeted.
Although ICE initially acknowledged the request and asked for more time, the agency ceased responding, prompting The Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to file a lawsuit..."
Let us recall that the central objective of this variant of unconventional warfare is to frighten, destabilize, and shock. In short, it aims to generate chaos and pave the way for military forces with a minimum of losses
uspol engaging in a call for honest reflection, discussion, and perhaps a shared point of view for those with populist viewpoints?
Sensitive content
The MAGA Populists have now had their Bernie 2016 blackpill moment. Maybe, just maybe, we can use this opportunity for all of us to come together and engage in some much needed; very frank discussion, and perhaps, a new shared point of view?
these people should be beaten with an iron pipe and left in the street to slowly decay, as Californians walk by, laughing and nodding their heads in approval.
"Script meetings were also dominated by references to what โCollierโ might say โ referring to David Collier, a social media activist who had discovered the omissions of the previous film. In one editorial meeting..a senior BBC reporter told us we should not use certain information as this would not be acceptable to ๏ปฟCamera, a pro-Israel media monitoring organi๏ปฟsation"
David Collier is a zionist thug who should be nowhere near BBC policy decisions.
AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.
On May 23, we got a very interesting email from Ghost, the service we use to make 404 Media. โPaid subscription started,โ the email said, which is the subject line of all of the automated emails we get when someone subscribes to 404 Media. The interesting thing about this email was that the new subscriber had been referred to 404 Media directly from chatgpt.com, meaning the person clicked a link to 404 Media from within a ChatGPT window. It is the first and only time that ChatGPT has ever sent us a paid subscriber.
From what I can tell, ChatGPT.com has sent us 1,600 pageviews since we founded 404 Media nearly two years ago. To give you a sense of where this slots in, this is slightly fewer than the Czech news aggregator novinky.cz, the Hungarian news portal Telex.hu, the Polish news aggregator Wykop.pl, and barely more than the Russian news aggregator Dzen.ru, the paywall jumping website removepaywall.com, and a computer graphics job board called 80.lv. In that same time, Google has sent roughly 3 million visitors, or 187,400 percent more than ChatGPT.
This is really neither here nor there because we have tried to set our website up to block ChatGPT from scraping us, though it is clear this is not always working. But even for sites that donโt block ChatGPT, new research from the internet infrastructure company CloudFlare suggests that OpenAI is crawling 1,500 individual webpages for every one visitor that it is sending to a website. Google traffic has begun to dry up as both Googleโs own AI snippets and AI-powered SEO spam have obliterated the business models of many media websites. This general dynamicโplummeting traffic because of AI snippets, ChatGPT, AI slop, Twitter no workie so good no moreโhas been called the โtraffic apocalypseโ and has all but killed some smaller websites and has been blamed by executives for hundreds of layoffs at larger ones.
Despite the fact that generative AI has been a destructive force against their businesses, their industry, and the truth more broadly, media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasnโt worked, and pretending that they are forward thinking or have any clue what they are doing will perhaps allow a specific type of media executive to squeeze out a few more months of salary.
But pivoting to AI is not a business strategy. Telling journalists they must use AI is not a business strategy. Partnering with AI companies is a business move, but becoming reliant on revenue from tech giants who are creating a machine that duplicates the work youโve already created is not a smart or sustainable business move, and therefore it is not a smart business strategy. It is true that AI is changing the internet and is threatening journalists and media outlets. But the only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings, and that the work they are doing is worth supporting because it is human work that is vital to their audiences. This is something GQโs editorial director Will Welch recently told New York magazine: โThe good news for any digital publisher is that the new game we all have to play is also a sustainable one: You have to build a direct relationship with your core readers,โ he said.
Becoming an โAI-firstโ media company has become a buzzword that execs can point at to explain that their businesses can use AI to become more โefficientโ and thus have a chance to become more profitable. Often, but not always, this message comes from executives who are laying off large swaths of their human staff.
In May, Business Insider laid off 21 percent of its workforce. In her layoff letter, Business Insiderโs CEO Barbara Peng said โthereโs a huge opportunity for companies who harness AI first.โ She told the remaining employees there that they are โfully embracing AI,โ โwe are going all-in on AI,โ and said โover 70 percent of Business Insider employees are already using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly (our goal is 100%), and weโre building prompt libraries and sharing everyday use cases that help us work faster, smarter, and better.โ She added they are โexploring how AI can boost operations across shared services, helping us scale and operate more efficiently.โ
Last year, Hearst Newspapers executives, who operate 78 newspapers nationwide, told the company in an all-hands meeting audio obtained by 404 Media that they are โleaning into [AI] as Hearst overall, the entire corporation.โ Examples given in the meeting included using AI for slide decks, a โquiz generation toolโ for readers, translations, a tool called Dispatch, which is an email summarization tool, and a tool called โAssembly,โ which is โbasically a public meeting monitor, transcriber, summarizer, all in one. What it does is it goes into publicly posted meeting videos online, transcribes them automatically, [and] automatically alerts journalists through Slack about whatโs going on and links to the transcript.โ
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are doing all sorts of fucked up shit that definitely no one wants but are being imposed upon their newsrooms because they are owned by tech billionaires who are tired of losing money. The Washington Posthas an AI chatbot and plans to create a Forbes contributor-esque opinion section with an AI writing tool that will assist outside writers. The Los Angeles Timesintroduced an AI bot that argues with its own writers and has written that the KKK was not so bad, actually. Both outlets have had massive layoffs in recent months.
The New York Times, which is actually doing well, says it is using AI to โcreate initial drafts of headlines, summaries of Times articles and other text that helps us produce and distribute the news.โ Wirecutter is hiring a product director for AI and recently instructed its employees to consider how they can use AI to make their journalism better, New York magazine reported. Kevin Roose, an, uhh, complicated figure in the AI space, said โAI has essentially replaced Google for me for basic questions,โ and said that he uses it for โbrainstorming.โ His Hard Fork colleague Casey Newton said he uses it for โresearchโ and โfact-checking.โ
Over at Columbia Journalism Review, a host of journalists and news execs, myself included, wrote about how AI is used in their newsrooms. The responses were all over the place and were occasionally horrifying, and ranged from people saying they were using AI as personal assistants to brainstorming partners to article drafters.
In his largely incoherent screed that shows how terrible he was at managing G/O Media, which took over Deadspin, Kotaku, Jezebel, Gizmodo, and other beloved websites and ran them into the ground at varying speeds, Jim Spanfeller nods at the โboth good and perhaps badโ impacts of AI on news. In a truly astounding passage of a notably poorly written letter that manages to say less than nothing, he wrote: โAI is a prime example. It is here to a degree but there are so many more shoes to drop [...] Clearly this technology is already having a profound impact. But so much more is yet to come, both good and perhaps bad depending on where you sit and how well monitored and controlled it is. But one thing to keep in mind, consumers seek out content for many reasons. Certainly, for specific knowledge, which search and search like models satisfy in very effective ways. But also, for insights, enjoyment, entertainment and inspiration.โ
At the MediaPost Publishing Insider Conference, a media industry business conference I just went to in New Orleans, there was much chatter about AI. Alice Ting, an executive for the Daily Mail gave a pretty interesting talk about how the Daily Mail is protecting its journalism from AI scrapers in order to eventually strike deals with AI companies to license their content.
โWhat many of you have seen is a surge in scraping of our content, a decline in traffic referrals, and an increase in hallucinated outputs that often misrepresent our brands,โ Ting said. โPublishers can provide decades of vetted and timestamped content, verified, fact checked, semantically organized, editorially curated. And in addition offer fresh content on an almost daily basis.โ
Ting is correct in that several publishers have struck lucrative deals with AI companies, but she also suggested that AI licensing would be a recurring revenue stream for publishers, which would require a series of competing LLMs to want to come in and license the same content over and over again. Many LLMs have already scraped almost everything there is to scrape, itโs not clear that there are going to consistently be new LLMs from companies wanting to pay to train on data that other LLMs have already trained on, and itโs not clear how much money the Daily Mailโs blogs of the day are going to be worth to an AI company on an ongoing basis. Betting that this time, hinging the future of our industry on massive, monopolistic tech giants will work out is the most Lucy with the football thing I can imagine.
There is not much evidence that selling access to LLMs will work out in a recurring way for any publisher, outside of the very largest publishers like, perhaps, the New York Times. Even at the conference, panel moderator Upneet Grover, founder of LH2 Holdings, which owns several smaller blogs, suggested that โa lot of these licensing revenues are not moving the needle, at least from the deals weโve seen, but thereโs this larger threat of more referral traffic being taken away from news publishers [by AI].โ youtube.com/embed/La2R3iIL9BE?โฆ In my own panel at the conference I made the general argument that I am making in this article, which is that none of this is going to work.
โWeโre not just competing against large-scale publications and AI slop, we are competing against the entire rest of the internet. We were publishing articles and AI was scraping and republishing them within five minutes of us publishing them,โ I said. โSo many publications are leaning into โhow can we use AI to be more efficient to publish more,โ and itโs not going to work. Itโs not going to work because youโre competing against a child in Romania, a child in Bangladesh who is publishing 9,000 articles a day and they donโt care about facts, they donโt care about accuracy, but in an SEO algorithm itโs going to perform and thatโs what youโre competing against. You have to compete on quality at this point and you have to find a real human being audience and you need to speak to them directly and treat them as though they are intelligent and not as though you are trying to feed them as much slop as possible.โ
It makes sense that journalists and media execs are talking about AI because everyone is talking about AI, and because AI presents a particularly grave threat to the business models of so many media companies. Itโs fine to continue to talk about AI. But the point of this article is that โweโre going to lean into AIโ is not a business model, and itโs not even a business strategy, any more than pivoting to โvideoโ was a strategy or chasing Facebook Live views was a strategy.
In a harrowing discussion with Axios, in which he excoriates many of the deals publishers have signed with OpenAI and other AI companies, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, said that the AI-driven traffic apocalypse is a nightmare for people who make content online: โIf we donโt figure out how to fix this, the internet is going to die,โ he said. youtube.com/embed/H5C9EL3C82Y?โฆ So AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allowing random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either canโt or donโt care to distinguish from real news. And yet media executives have decided that the only way to compete with this is to make their workers use AI to make content in a slightly more efficient way than they were already doing journalism.
This is not going to work, because โusing AIโ is not a reporting strategy or a writing strategy, and itโs definitely not a business strategy.
AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they โneedโ to use AI, that their jobs depend on it, that they must become more productive, and that becoming an AI-first company is the strategy that will save them from the old failed strategy, which itself was the new strategy after other failed business models.
The only journalism business strategy that works, and that will ever work in a sustainable way, is if you create something of value that people (human beings, not bots) want to read or watch or listen to, and that they cannot find anywhere else. This can mean youโre breaking news, or it can mean that you have a particularly notable voice or personality. It can mean that youโre funny or irreverent or deeply serious or useful. It can mean that you confirm peopleโs priors in a way that makes them feel good. And you have to be trustworthy, to your audience at least. But basically, to make money doing journalism, you have to publish โcontent,โ relatively often, that people want to consume.
This is not rocket science, and I am of course not the only person to point this out. There have been many, many features about the success of Feed Me, Emily Sundbergโs newsletter about New York, culture, and a bunch of other stuff. As she has pointed out in many interviews, she has been successful because she writes about interesting things and treats her audience like human beings. The places that are succeeding right now are individual writers who have a perspective, news outlets like WIRED that are fearless, publications that have invested in good reporters like The Atlantic, publications that tell you something that AI canโt, and worker owned, journalist-run outlets like us, Defector, Aftermath, Hellgate, Remap, Hearing Things, etc. There are also a host of personality-forward, journalism-adjacent YouTubers, TikTok influencers, and podcasters who have massive, loyal audiences, yet most of the traditional media is utterly allergic to learning anything from them.
There was a short period of time where it was possible to make money by paying human writersโsome of them journalists, perhapsโto spam blog posts onto the internet that hit specific keywords, trending topics, or things that would perform well on social media. These were the early days of Gawker, Buzzfeed, VICE, and Vox. But the days of media companies tricking people into reading their articles using SEO or hitting a trending algorithm are over.
They are over because other people are doing it better than them now, and by โbetter,โ I mean, more shamelessly and with reckless abandon. As we have written many times, news outlets are no longer just competing with each other, but with everyone on social media, and Netflix, and YouTube, and TikTok, and all the other people who post things on the internet. They are not just up against the total fracturing of social media, the degrading and enshittification of the discovery mechanisms on the internet, algorithms that artificially ding links to articles, AI snippets and summaries, etc. They are also competing with sophisticated AI slop and spam factories often being run by people on the other side of the world publishing things that look like โnewsโ that is being created on a scale that even the most โefficientโ journalist leveraging AI to save some perhaps negligible amount of time cannot ever hope to measure up to.
Every day, I get emails from AI spam influencers who are selling tools that allow slop peddlers to clone any website with one click, automatically generate newsletters about any topic, or generate plausible-seeming articles that are engineered to perform well in a search algorithm. Examples: โClone any website in 9 seconds with Clonely AI,โ โThe future of video creation is hereโand itโs faceless, seamless & limitless,โ โjust a straightforward path to earning 6-figures with an AI-powered newsletter thatโs working right now.โ These people do not care at all about truth or accuracy or our information ecosystem or anything else that a media company or a journalist would theoretically care about. If you want an example of what this looks like, consider the series of โGood Dayโ newsletters, which are AI generated and are in 355 small towns across America, many of which no longer have newspapers. These businesses are economically viable because they are being run by one person (or a very small team of people) who disproportionately live in low cost of living areas and who have essentially zero overhead.
And so becoming more โefficientโ with AI is the wrong thing to do, and itโs the wrong thing to ask any journalist to do. The only thing that media companies can do in order to survive is to lean into their humanity, to teach their journalists how to do stories that cannot be done by AI, and to help young journalists learn the skills needed to do articles that weave together complicated concepts and, again, that focus on our shared human experience, in a way that AI cannot and will never be able to.
AI as buzzword and shiny object has been here for a long time. And I actually do not think AI is fake and sucks (I also donโt really believe that anyone thinks AI is โfake,โ because we can see the internet collapsing around us). We report every day on the ways that AI is changing the web, in part because it is being shoved down our throats by big tech companies, spammers, etc. But I think that Princetonโs Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor are basically correct when they say that AI is โnormal technologyโ that will not change everything but that over time will lead to modest improvements in peopleโs workflows as they get integrated into existing products or as they help around the edges. Weโyes, even youโare using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already, even if you hate such tools.
In early 2023, when I was the editor-in-chief of Motherboard, I was asked to put together a presentation for VICE executives about AI, and how I thought it would change both our journalism and the business of journalism. The reason I was asked to do this was because our team was writing a lot about AI, and there was a sense that the company could do something with AI to make money, or do better journalism, or some combination of those things. There was no sense or thought at the time, at least from what I was told, that VICE was planning to use AI as a pretext for replacing human journalists or cutting costsโit had already entered a cycle where it was constantly laying off journalistsโbut there was a sense that this was going to be the big new opportunity/threat, a new potential savior for a company that had already created a โvirtual officeโ in Decentraland, a crypto-powered metaverse that last year had 42 daily active users.
I never got to give the presentation, because the executive who asked me to put it together left the company, and the new people either didnโt care or didnโt have time for me to give it. The company went bankrupt almost immediately after this change, and I left VICE soon after to make 404 Media with my co-founders, who also left VICE.
But my message at the time, and my message now two years later, is that AI has already changed our world, and that we have the opportunity to report on the technology as it already exists and is already being usedโto justify layoffs, to dehumanize people, to spam the internet, etc. At the time, we had already written 840 articles that were tagged โAI,โ which included articles about biased sentencing algorithms, predictive policing, facial recognition, deepfakes, AI romantic relationships, AI-powered spam and scams, etc.
The business opportunity then, as now, was to be an indispensable, very human guide to a technology that peopleโhuman beingsโare making tons of money off of, using as an excuse to lay off workers, and are doing wild shit with. There was no magic strategy in which we could use AI to quadruple our output, replace workers, rise to the top of Google rankings, etc. There was, however, great risk in attempting to do this: โPR NIGHTMARE,โ one of my slides about the risks of using AI I wrote said: โCNET plagiarism scandal. Big backlash from artists and writers to generative AI. Copyright issues. Race to the bottom.โ
My other thought was that any efficiencies that could be squeezed out of AI, in our day-to-day jobs, were already being done so by good reporters and video producers at the company. There could be no top-down forced pivot to AI, because research and time-saving uses of AI were already being naturally integrated into our work by people who were smart in ways that were totally reasonable and mostly helpful, if not groundbreaking. The AI-as-force-multiplier was already happening, and while, yes, this probably helped the business in some way, it helped in ways that were not then and were never going to be actually perceptible to a companyโs bottom line. AI was not a savior then, and it is not a savior now. For journalists and for media companies, there is no real โpivot to AIโ that is possible unless that pivot means firing all of the employees and putting out a shittier product (which some companies have called a strategy). This is because the pivot has already occurred and the business prospects for media companies have gotten worse, not better. If Kevin Roose is using AI so much, in such a new and groundbreaking way, why arenโt his articles noticeably different than they ever were before, or why arenโt there way more of them than there were before? Where are the journalists who were formerly middling who are now pumping out incredible articles thanks to efficiencies granted by AI?
To be concrete: Many journalists, including me, at least sometimes use some sort of AI transcription tool for some of their less sensitive interviews. This saves me many hours, the tools have gotten better (but are still not perfect, and absolutely require double checking and should not be used for sensitive sources or sensitive stories). YouTubeโs transcript feature is an incredible reporting tool that has allowed me to do stories that would have never been possible even a few years ago. YouTubeโs built-in translations and subtitles, and its transcript tool are some of the only reasons that I was able to do this investigation into Indian AI slop creators, which allowed me to get the gist of what was happening in a given video before we handed them to human translators to get exact translations. Most podcasts I know of now use Descript, Riverside, or a similar tool to record and edit their podcasts; these have built-in AI transcription tools, built-in AI camera switching, and built-in text-to-video editing tools. Most media outlets use captioning that is built into Adobe Premiere or CapCut for their vertical videos and their YouTube videos (and then double check them). If you want to get extremely annoying about it, various machine learning algorithms are in ProTools, Audition, CapCut, Premiere, Canva, etc for things like photo editing, sound leveling, noise reduction, etc.
There are other journalists who feel very comfortable coding and doing data analysis and analyzing huge sets of documents. There are journalists out there who are already using AI to do some of these tasks and some of the resulting articles are surely good and could not have been done without AI.
But the people doing this well are doing so in a way where they are catching and fixing AI hallucinations, because the stakes for fucking up are so incredibly high. If you are one of the people who is doing this, then, great. I have little interest in policing other peopleโs writing processes so long as they are not publishing AI fever dreams or plagiarizing, and there are writers I respect who say they have their little chats with ChatGPT to help them organize their thoughts before they do a draft or who have vibecoded their own productivity tools or data analysis tools. But again, thatโs not a business model. Itโs a tool that has enabled some reporters to do their jobs, and, using their expertise, they have produced good and valuable work. This does not mean that every news outlet or every reporter needs to learn to shove the JFK documents into ChatGPT and have it shit out an investigation.
I also know that our credibility and the trust of our audience is the only thing that separates us from anyone else. It is the only โbusiness modelโ that we have and that I am certain works: We trade good, accurate, interesting, human articles for money and attention. The risks of offloading that trust to an AI in a careless way is the biggest possible risk factor that we could have as a business. Having an article go out where someone goes โActually, a robot wrote this,โ is one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to us, and so we have made the brave decision to not do that.
This is part of what is so baffling about the Chicago Sun Timesโ response to its somewhat complicated summer guide AI-generated reading list fiasco. Under its new owners, Chicago Public Media, The Sun Times has in recent years spent an incredible amount of time and effort rebuilding the image and good will that its previous private equity owners destroyed. And yet in its apology note, Melissa Bell, the CEO of Chicago Public Media, said that more AI is coming: โChicago Public Media will not back away from experimenting and learning how to properly use AI,โ she wrote, adding that the team was working with a fellow paid for by the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit funded by OpenAI and Microsoft.
Bell does realize what makes the paper stand apart, though: โWe must own our humanity,โ Bell wrote. โOur humanity makes our work valuable.โ
This is something that the New York Timesโs Roose recently brought up that I thought was quite smart and yet is not something that he seems to have internalized when talking about how AI is going to change everything and that its widespread adoption is inevitable and the only path forward: โI wonder if [AI is] going to catalyze some counterreaction,โ he said. โIโve been thinking a lot recently about the slow-food movement and the farm-to-table movement, both of which came up in reaction to fast food. Fast food had a lot going for itโit was cheap, it was plentiful, you could get it in a hurry. But it also opened up a market for a healthier, more artisanal way of doing things. And I wonder if something similar will happen in creative industriesโa kind of creative renaissance for things that feel real and human and arenโt just outputs from some A.I. companyโs slop machine.โ
This has ALREAAAAADDDDYYYYYY HAPPPENEEEEEDDDDDD, and it is quite literally the only path forward for all but perhaps the most gigantic of media companies. There is no reason for an individual journalist or an individual media company to make the fast food of the internet. Itโs already being made, by spammers and the AI companies themselves. It is impossible to make it cheaper or better than them, because it is what they exist to do. The actual pivot that is needed is one to humanity. Media companies need to let their journalists be human. And they need to prove why theyโre worth reading with every article they do.
"As the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, Iโve been raising the alarm โ in the halls of Congress and back here in Los Angeles โ about the disastrous impact of Donald Trumpโs policies. I was absolutely appalled to learn of the Trump administrationโs plans to slash more than $30 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in his budget for next year. That is more than one quarter of the departmentโs budget."
Perhaps the bros knew what they were doing after all...Sign up with code GVS for 2 free weeks of Boostcamp Pro!https://www.boostcamp.app/#GVS00:00 Geoff Says...
Silence Screams: The Zionist-Washington Empire Unveils Technocratic Blueprint for War & Escalates Domestic Surveillance thewallwillfall.org/2025/07/12โฆ
Syriaโs Fall Into Israeli Hands, US-Zionist Entity Targets Hezbollah, Abraham Shields Forges On, Trumpโs Big Beautiful Bill Points To War With Iran, Russia, China & Warrantless Survโฆ
You might be having a bad day, and Iโm sorry for that, but your day is probably going better than that of whoever is in charge of Sesame Streetโs social media right now.
yeah, that was vaguely worded. I blame the dayquil.
What I meant was "in trying to find what was actually posted rather than taking the CBC's word for it, I stumbled across an idiot who said that everyone involved in spreading the hacked posts should be investigated by the US's FBI."
Sign up with code GVS for 2 free weeks of Boostcamp Pro!https://www.boostcamp.app/#GVSTimestamps:00:00 Geoff Says Hello00:16 1 No bar speed slowdown04:12 2 โ...
Millions of people spied on by malicious browser extensions in #Chrome and #Edge | Malwarebytes "...when an #extension has been available in the web store for a while, #cybercriminals can insert #malicious code through updates to the extension. Some researchers refer to the clean extensions as โsleeper agents.โ
Here we go again: Over an acerbic dissenting opinion by Justice Sotomayor (joined in full by Justices Kagan and Jackson), #SCOTUS, with no explanation, grants a stay in the Department of Education RIFs caseโeffectively clearing the way for the Trump administration to dismantle much of the agency:
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PA.c Platform 30.0.3 has been released with some quick updates. It's open source and free so download today! And please make a donation if you can as we have been operating at a loss for the last few months.
PortableApps.com is proud to announce the PortableApps.com Platform 30.0.3 release. This release adds specialized close handling for another app and updates 7-Zip to the latest version.
El turismo es daรฑino y todos somos conscientes de ello salvo si quienes lo ejercen son madrilenials, que entonces criticarlo es xenofobia low cost porque turistear es su derecho divino o algo. Si es que te tienes que reir.
Restrictions of atmospheric aerosol and precursor emissions in East Asia have contributed to the observed global surface warming acceleration since 2010, according to Earth System Model simulations isolating regional changes.
BGSJI and KFA UK support the statement "The U.S.-Japan-ROK military nexus threatening regional peace should be closely watched and deterred": juche007-anglo-peopleskoreafriโฆ
HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 11 (ACN) Cuba presents progress in preventing and combating financial crimes, as well as its commitment to international cooperation in this field, during the 31st plenary session of the Egmont Group, an international forum on finanโฆ
We will definitely continue to increase our domestic weapons production and develop all our defense projects โ both our Ukrainian and joint projects with partners. And this is one of the top priorities for the renewed Government.
sahqon
in reply to bazkie ๐ฉ๐ผโ๐ป bitplanes ๐ต • • •m0xEE
in reply to sahqon • • •Float on a river forever and ever
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