šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this weekās relentless algorithmic chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuffā”ļø
š Reading
AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google:
[T]here is noĀ actualĀ precedent for saying that scraping data to train an AI is fair use; all of these companies are relying onĀ ancient internet casesĀ that allowed search engines and social media platforms to exist in the first place. Itās messy, and it feels like all of those decisions are up for grabs in what promises to be a decade of litigation. So now imagine that you are Google, which on the one hand operates YouTube, and on the other hand is racing to build generative AI products [ā¦]
Nilay PatelāThe Verge | 9 minutes
Substack CEO Chris Best Doesnāt Realize Heās Just Become The Nazi Bar:
[S]ubstack is a centralized system. And a centralized system that doesnāt do trust & safetyā¦ is the Nazi bar. And if you have some other system that you think allows for āmoderation but not censorshipā then be fucking explicit about what it is. There are all sorts of interventions short of removing content that have been shown to work well (though, with other social media, they still get accused of ācensorshipā forĀ literally expressing more speech). But the details matter. A lot.
Mike MasnickāTech Dirt | 15 minutes
How to be a hands-on citizen:
We define ourselves through competition. Along the way, our choices represent our power, our creativity, our identity ā they make us who we are. Every organisation and institution, from businesses to charities to government, exists to offer these choices. All are reduced to providers of products and services [..] onāt get me wrong, these things matter and are good to do ā but, deep inside, I think most people would recognise they are not commensurate with the challenges we face.
Jon AlexanderāPsyche | 15 minutes
š§ Listening
Certainty is the Death of Thought:
We're going to have to use the internet actively rather than passively. We can no longer trust anything we see online. We will have to be the fact-checkers ourselves. And I think that's a good thing because it will make us more robust at determining truth [..] So this is a way of, I suppose, strengthening our psychological immune system and ensuring that it's robust enough to handle this new world that we're going to be living in.
Gurwinder BhogalāInfinite Loops | 81 minutes
Metaverse and crypto - beyond the BS:
There is a bridge between the engineering capability of the technology and creating [..] things that people realized they wanted or didn't realize they needed [..] Web3 and Metaverse, these are architectural layers that could be used to create new kinds of experiences; they are not ready to be used to build those new kinds of experiences. When they are, they may or may not get to the point that they are able to build mass-market experiences.
Benedict EvansāAnother Podcast | 38 minutes
Why the 6-month AI Pause is a Bad Idea:
Calling for a delay in research and development smacks me of a new wave of obscurantism essentially; why slow down the progress of knowledge and science? Then there's the question of products. I'm all for regulating products that get in the hands of people. I don't see the point of regulating research and development; I don't think that serves any purpose other than reducing the knowledge that we could use to actually make technology better, safer also.
Yann LeCunāDeepLearning.AI | 32 minutes