"Hours after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in late October, the Trust and Safety team responsible for combating hate speech on the site received an urgent directive: Bring back the Babylon Bee." An inside look at Musk's approach to content moderation: washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

MATT RUBY It's over a decade old at this point, but Scott Rosenberg wrote an excellent history of the blogosphere: amazon.com/Say-Everything…

🤖 I seriously don’t understand people being shocked by “how much chatGPT knows.” It contains a slightly-compressed database of all the text OpenAI could get their hands on. Of course it “knows” what your python function does; it’s got the whole of StackExchange.

Cory Doctorow in New Yorker. Highly recommend! newyorker.com/culture/the-ne…

Empires are crumbling; what should we build in the ruins? Must-read Robin Sloan missive: "It is 2003 again. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram haven’t been invented yet … except, it’s also 2023, and they have, so you can learn from their rise and ruin." robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenue…

Here's the cover of my upcoming book! After 19 years of writing about them, I've seen how metaverse platforms can transform lives for good & bad. And have stories to share for the next 20. Plz consider pre-ordering: Amazon: amazon.com/Making-Metaver… B&N: barnesandnoble.com/w/making-a-met…

I'll say again what I will doubtless be saying a million times in the coming years: Algorithmic feeds have pushed content creators to conform to the acceptable aesthetic and cultural average; A.I. generation will just automatically produce that average from the start

Started re-reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg last night. Was so interesting to me when it was a new book, but it’s just as good now that software development has evolved for another 15+ years. #computerhistory #SoftwareDeveloper @mkapor Andy Hertzfeld

Welcome Ryan to @Axios and the Login team!

This is a perfectly reasonable story nytimes.com/2023/04/15/bus… and yet: "Faking it" is never over in Silicon Valley, it just goes into hiding for a while, then re-emerges in the next boom. Live long enough, you see these cycles repeat. Beware all "end of" narratives.

Kinda knew that my blog and everyone else's was part of the general AI training data pool but it was epiphanic to see it confirmed in the amazing work from WaPo's Nitasha Tiku and colleagues. I wrote about the experience in my latest Axios axios.com/2023/04/24/ai-…

A "tappable web presentation" short-story-let serves as the framing narrative for a new album produced by the two-guys-and-AI group Cotton Modules (Robin Sloan and Jesse Solomon Clark). I highly recommend you take the few minutes to read-click through it ooo.ghostbows.ooo/story/

"Turning us all into paper clips" is the trope of choice for describing runaway super-AI over-optimization that could destroy humanity. Also: A previous generation's colossal chatbot flop took the form of ... a talking paper clip. Coincidence???

This is one important insight and fear I share. I don't worry for myself because I will never stop writing. I worry that the practice of writing-as-thinking will diminish and fade as fewer people *need* to do it.

This will be a very exciting book to read. Congrats. (No, no relation)

Thrilled to share the news that Megan Morrone will be joining Axios starting next week as technology editor, working with me and our intrepid tech coverage team

I did it, I wrote in Axios about how the revelation that the Expensify Lounge was really an experiment in "back to work" psychology should make us all feel like lab rats. axios.com/2023/10/26/exp…

OpenAI's drama looks like the result of a culture clash on the nonprofit board over its mission. Nonprofit boards aren't like other boards! They're responsible for a mission, not for maximizing shareholder value. My analysis at Axios axios.com/2023/11/18/sam…

If you’re in the Bay Area and you still have power, charge your phone.

It could certainly be a DDOS attack. But DDOS looks a lot like "many people trying to view content from a server that lacks enough capacity to serve that volume of people."