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Month: November 2024

  • Opinion | Jeff Bezos: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media – The Washington Post

    When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

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  • Introducing ChatGPT search – OpenAI

    Getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer: Ask a question in a more natural, conversational way, and ChatGPT can choose to respond with information from the web. Go deeper with follow-up questions, and ChatGPT will consider the full context of your chat to get a better answer for you.

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  • Rural Arizona shows how Trump allies could try to thwart election certification – The Washington Post

    After the 2022 midterm election, two county leaders on a three-member board refused to accept the outcome in a timely matter, citing concerns about voting equipment that were rooted in false theories and real problems in the Phoenix area, 200 miles north. One of the leaders eventually relented, after a judge intervened, and joined the Democratic member to sign off on the results. But the standoff pushed the state past its certification deadline, triggered a legal battle and criminal prosecutions, and set off fears that local leaders around the nation would try the same strategy after November’s presidential election, should former president Donald Trump again lose.

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  • How the US elections will unfold overnight for British viewers – The Guardian

    UK residents determined to stick around to the bitter end, whenever that might be, should consider getting some sleep at 8pm or 9pm, and setting alarms (at least six, at three-minute intervals) for midnight or 1am, since not much will happen before then anyway. But pace yourself. For all that we talk about election night, any of the key races – or several of them – could take well into the next day, or longer, to produce a clear result.
    donald-trump elections kamala-harris politics usa

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  • Crudely gesturing Trump effigy appears in Philadelphia – Hyperallergic

    “When I first saw the images of it, I thought, oh, it’s really disrespectful to women, facing this really gentle, beautiful form,” said Cohen, whose organization restored the sculpture and placed it in the park. But when she read the text, she understood that the installation was actually a work of satire, which she called “brilliant.” “This is what public art is all about,” Cohen said. “These kinds of dialogues and debates and standing by your words when you’re quoted in such a manner in public.”

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  • Kaos creator ‘gutted’ at Netflix show’s cancellation – The Guardian

    However, while the show’s debut was promising (3.4m views in its first week and 5.9m views in its second), viewership figures dropped by 43% in its third week to 3.4m and further again in its fourth week to 2.2m. Around this time, Netflix changed the label of the show from Kaos: season 1 to just Kaos, indicating that it was now a limited series. According to Forbes, the drop-off lined up with other recent shows that have been cancelled by Netflix, whose renewal decisions are primarily based on viewership in the first 28 days of a show’s launch. The streamer places significant emphasis on retaining engagement.

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  • Kaos creator reveals plan for future seasons after major cliffhanger – Radio Times

    Covell explained: “The idea is three seasons in total. So, that’s what I have kind of in my brain… I would love to do more.” While some showrunners have started work on future scripts prior to actually receiving an order for more episodes, Covell is holding back until they hear word from the bosses at Netflix.

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  • The Best Available Human standard – One Useful Thing

    The world is full of entrepreneurs-in-waiting because most entrepreneurial journeys end before they begin. This comprehensive study shows around 1/3 of Americans have had a startup idea in the last 5 years but few act on it — less than half even do any web research! This matches my own experience an entrepreneurship professor (and former entrepreneur). The number one question I get asked is “what do I do now?” While books and courses can help, there is nothing like an experienced cofounder… except, as my research with Jason Greenberg suggests, experienced cofounders are not only hard to find and incentivize, but picking the wrong cofounder can hurt the success of the company because of personality conflicts and other issues. All of this is why AI may be the Best Available Cofounder for many people. It is no substitute for quality human help, but it might make a difference for many potential entrepreneurs who would otherwise not get any assistance.

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  • A poem about waiting, and wishing you had a drink – The New York Times

    No one would call “Party Politics” a masterpiece: Commissioned for a 1984 issue of Poetry Review devoted to “Poetry and Drink,” it didn’t appear in any of the books issued in Larkin’s lifetime. But it shares the qualities of some of his best poems. Larkin is prized for his blunt honesty about the inevitability of disappointment, and for the stoicism and virtuosity that lighten the gloom.
    philip-larkin poetry time

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  • ‘They’ve won me over’: chancellor’s constituents welcome budget – The Guardian

    In a vape shop in Bramley town centre, the popular flavours can sell out quickly. The area is a smoking and vaping hotspot – high above the national average – and it is also in chancellor Rachel Reeves’s constituency of Leeds West and Pudsey. “Have you got any blueberry, love?” one customer asked, telling the Guardian that she had been smoking since the age of 11 and was much happier vaping instead. She was not pleased to hear the price of vapes would be going up 2% above the retail prices index, but concluded: “It’s still cheaper than cigs.”

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  • ‘We were wrong’: An oral history of WIRED’s original website – WIRED

    Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?

    Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.

    Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.

    John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.

    Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

    Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

    John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.

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