I think to have journalism with integrity, you have to have technology with integrity. And in my mind, open source is the way to have technology with integrity. And I want the best journalism to win because it's the best journalism, not because they have the best platform.
Activity
Coinbase's "Stand With Crypto" PAC website is now confirming what I reported earlier.
More than 99% of the amount they claimed was raised by this supposedly "grassroots" PAC is in fact massive corporate contributions to the FairShake super PAC.
Even if you don’t plan to build a full website and start blogging, at least buy a domain, build a page that links to your other online presence. That way you can get started with little work and when you start to get ideas that don’t quite fit into any social platforms you’re in, you have a place to put it – and people you’ve shared your address before already know where to find you.
Here I get to share my thoughts in a place I control. I get to piss around and add/remove new features & eye candy as I see fit. And on top of all that, I get to have a place on the web that's 100% mine that (hopefully) expresses a bit of my personality too. All of that is extremely difficult on a cookie cutter social media profile.
Does anyone know of a good employment lawyer in California?
The decision made international news, driven in part by the complaints of ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was quoted by USA Today claiming that the ADL had been “silenced” and its research “marginalized”. Greenblatt went on Morning Joe to discuss the matter, which MSNBC promoted with the headline “‘It’s flat out wrong’: ADL head slams Wikipedia for saying org is unreliable source”.. The truth is a more complicated. The ADL certainly was rebuked, but the severity has been overstated, and it’s up to ADL leadership what happens next.
If your website uses polyfill.io, remove it IMMEDIATELY.
The two candidates in today’s primaries that received substantial backing from cryptocurrency PACs both won their primaries.
1. John Curtis defeated Trent Staggs in the Republican Utah Senate primary, with the help of $5 million in crypto industry funding.
2. George Latimer defeated Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for NY H-16, with the help of $2 million in crypto industry funding.
Ads run by these PACs made no mention of crypto or technology. In the NY race, ads from Fairshake seemed to align very closely with AIPAC’s aggressive campaign against Bowman, echoing their messaging accusing him of antisemitism.
“Defend American Jobs” was the PAC splashing out in the Utah race. They’re the Republican-focused crypto super PAC; “Protect Progress” is the Democrat counterpart.
Though Fairshake (nominally nonpartisan, and by far the highest fundraiser of the crypto PACs) previously made identical donations to both, they’ve just made another $5 million donation to Defend American Jobs without a corresponding donation to Protect Progress.
Defend American Jobs has raised $14.7 million so far this cycle; Protect Progress has raised $10.3 million.
Here's a glimpse at the spending in each race.
Other outside spending for Curtis mostly came from a super PAC called Conservative Values for Utah, with Defend American Jobs pitching in $5M last minute.
And as I mentioned, Bowman’s other opposition primarily came from AIPAC's UDP.
Fighting bots is fighting humans
One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.
In my personal view, option 1 is almost strictly better. Option 2 is never as simple as "only allow actual human beings access" because determining who's a human is hard. In practice, it means putting a barrier in front of the website that makes it harder for everyone to access it: gathering personal data, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, etc.
This is not to say a website owner shouldn't implement, say, DDoS protection (I do). It's simply to remind you that "only allow humans to access" is just not an achievable goal. Any attempt at limiting bot access will inevitably allow some bots through and prevent some humans from accessing the site, and it's about deciding where you want to set the cutoff. I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction.
What I learned from this experiment is that flooding the internet with an infinite amount of what could pass for journalism is cheap and even easier than I imagined, as long as I didn’t respect the craft, my audience, or myself. I also learned that while AI has made all of this much easier, faster, and better, the advent of generative AI did not invent this practice—it’s simply adding to a vast infrastructure of tools and services built by companies like WordPress, Fiverr, and Google designed to convert clicks to dollars at the expense of quality journalism and information, polluting the internet we all use and live in every day.