#Tech Journalism

[im-not-a-monster]

The “AI is going to eliminate half of white collar jobs” story is one that’s taken hold because it gets clicks and appeals to a fear that everyone, particularly those in the knowledge economy who have long enjoyed protection from automation, has. Nobody wants to be destitute. Nobody with six figures of college debt wants to be stood in a dole queue. It’s a sexy headline, one that scares the reader into clicking, and when you’re doing a half-assed job at covering a study, you can very easily just say “there’s evidence this is happening.” It’s scary. People are scared, and want to know more about the scary subject, so reporters keep covering it again and again, repeating a blatant lie sourced using flimsy data, pandering to those fears rather than addressing them with reality.

[gaykarstaagforever]

Tumblr.

Tumblr.

It's still here. HERE. On Tumblr.

TUMBLR!

Dude.

He then proceeds to say a bunch of old man things about how all this is the fault of "the economic downturn" and "the growth of AI," because when you're a tech writer you can't blame anything on actual stupid dickheads like Elon Musk or simple greed without risking invites to cool Silicon Valley brunches.

...I mean, he's not WRONG, but he's leaving out key factors, I think.

He is also apparently only interested in direct alternatives to Reddit and Twitter, and therein lies the rub: another old white man is grumpy because Reddit and Twitter are collapsing. That is all this is about.

Social media is changing, and probably not in any fun ways for most of us. But it isn't dead.

At least, not right now, unless you favor platforms run for and by toxic WASP men who never EVER had a plan to actually make any of these things even remotely profitable.

Tumblr may always be barely scraping by, but at least it is scraping by. Sorry it isn't Reddit enough for your Twitter Club.

[thepacketrat-blog]

Do what you…like?

“Do what you love, “they say, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.”Such lies they tell.Do what you love for work, and then it becomes work, and you do it for money instead of love, and then you realize how little capitalism values what you love, and you start to hate it instead. What they should say is, “DoWhat You Care Enough To Do Well, Even If Underpaid And Underappreciated, And Save…

[setup-wizard]

nay, liketh for real, fuck reddit!!!!! and fucketh the cruel and most wicked mages of google, of course

[ukjournal]

Meet Forbes Senior Contributor Billy Bambrough’s | Master of Tech Journalism

In the bustling landscape of journalism, where information is the currency and technology serves as its engine, one name stands out prominently: Billy Bambrough. Situated in Greater London, England, United Kingdom, Bambrough has carved a niche for himself as a journalist with a multifaceted interest spanning data, tech startups, and a plethora of other subjects. With a substantial following of 557 and connections numbering 252 on LinkedIn, Bambrough’s influence and reach in the realm of journalism are undeniable. Know more...

Source: UK Journal

[setup-wizard]

investors were promised infinite growth - a fictitious tale so ancient as time!

and whats more, silicon valley was frightened by the imaginary threat of "falling behind" if 't those gents didn't fallow suiteth... but alas, their arms race twas bullshit!

the truth is that generative ai wastes astronomical amounts of their precious gold and treasure... tech giants will need to generate as much as $600 billion a year just to stay afloat. their dim-witted industry barely creates $100 billion today!

as microsoft slowly kills off their ai copilot, i believe that those nincompoops are realizing that the "threat" of falling behind wasn't just imaginary - but a scam!

see more: Ai Can't Afford Itself by UFD Tech

ed zitron, a tech beat reporter, wrote an article about a recent paper that came out from goldman-sachs calling AI, in nicer terms, a grift. it is a really interesting article; hearing criticism from people who are not ignorant of the tech and have no reason to mince words is refreshing. it also brings up points and asks the right questions:

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

all of these models use the same training data so now they're all giving the same wrong answers in the same voice. without massive and i mean EXPONENTIALLY MASSIVE troves of data to work with, they are pretty much as a standstill for any innovation they're imagining in their heads

[titus-androgynous-87]

So MSI came out with a Steam Deck alternative called The Claw. And before pre-orders even open, the thing is dead in the water

No OLED screen option

ZERO built-in storage ;you have to buy a microSD card or M.2 2230 SSD separately

Piss-poor 53Whr battery

And it uses Intel Arc graphics…after Intel discontinued their Arc flagship cards

It’s the Atari Lynx of CES 2024

[shanklin]

Time travel fail in which Stan goes back to not break Ford's project, but gets bored waiting for the science fair and decides he might as well give the footbot another try.

He's no McGucket but he knows enough technical mumbo jumbo to make it move at least. If it goes well maybe they let him graduate high school this time around!

Enter the West Coast Tech judges

Genius kid doing genius kid things?

BORING

Worst student the school has ever seen building a fully functional talking robot? The stereotypical dumb boxer kid always overshadowed by his nerdy brother being a secret neglected undiscovered genius? 

THEY CAN SELL THIS! THEIR PR DEPARTMENT WILL LOVE THIS! A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY!

Before Stan has time to process anything he’s already being shipped off California with a full scholarship to be West Coast Tech's new poster child. 

Filbrick: I don’t care how you convinced them you’re worth anything. Don’t fuck this up and earn us millions or you’re not welcome in this house anymore!

Ford is convinced Stan cheated his way into West Coast Tech so they won't get seperated. Ford doesn’t apply to West Coast Tech out of spite. And he's definitely not believing Stan's ridiculous time travel explanation for a second.

Ford becomes obsessed with proving that Stan’s a fraud instead. 

At least they’re still talking. Even if talking means listening to Ford finding flaws in the newest paper Stan was forced to write.

Poor Stan just wants to go home to Gravity Falls and reopen the Mystery Shack

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?

Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).

After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.

Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.

Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.

It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).

Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond

That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.

Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.

Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:

https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/

Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.

Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.

For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.

Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:

https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger

Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration

Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.

They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:

https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769

Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.

Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:

https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/

Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.

Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."

Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

Image: KMJ (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[emptyanddark]

“Let's say you've got horsepower and bandwidth to burn, and just want to see these AI models burn. Nepenthes has what you need … In short, let them suck down as much bullshit as they have diskspace for and choke on it.” // “It's also sort of an art work, just me unleashing shear unadulterated rage at how things are going. I was just sick and tired of how the internet is evolving into a money extraction panopticon, how the world as a whole is slipping into fascism and oligarchs are calling all the shots - and it's gotten bad enough we can't boycott or vote our way out, we have to start causing real pain to those above for any change to occur.”

love that

[boimlerkisser]

Bro tumblr's really going to shit rn I've been seeing MANY posts marked as explicit that are literally like. Pictures of dogs or personal posts or fashion pics

[sinspawn]

New stickers available in my shop! Approved by Benjamin as pictured 🐈‍⬛

https://sinspawnart.etsy.com

[stupidlittlespirit]

I tried drawing reeda because I love her. I have no idea what you had in mind for her design so I just re-read the chapter and went off of what your description was the best that I could. She gives me Painter vibes from pressure

I LOVE THISSSSSSSSSSSSS THANK YOU!!!!!! Ford absolutely has a mini monitor like this in each room so he can see its messages!

Honestly REEDA's main design in my head fits Ford's lab, so it's a very retro cassette-futuristic style like you've illustrated. Think: how did people imagine the future was going to look in 197-something. All Commodores and IBM and thick plastic etc.

Ford's lab in mtb is designed with that exact aesthetic in mind, so terminals and things like this were at the forefront of my mind:

These types of terminals are primarily in the mainframe room that Reader goes through to access the lab. It's all set up with things like the above. Whereas REEDA's central screens in the main body of the lab look more like the ones in The Forbin Project:

Except they're a mix of both of those aesthetics, so they're weirdly long CRT monitors suspended in a similar layout to the above!

Here's another ss from Forbin bc it works along similar lines! And also it's a great movie and you should watch it!

[the---hermit]

03|08|2024

This has been the first week in which I have felt properly on holiday. I got to spend part of my week eating focaccia and chilling with @ben-learns-smth, which was the absolute highlight of my month. So much serotonine and joy for my brain. And after half a day in the car I am now on holiday with my parents. We are staying in a new place we have never been to, and tho the actual place we are in was quite disappointing I am excited for all the exploration we can do around here. Hopefully it won't be too hot to visit everywhere I'd like to go to, but we'll see. For now I am just chilling with my book eating berries and I could never complain about that.

📖: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

[thepacketrat-blog]

A note of explanation: The Packet Rat 30 years

One of the few places there’s still a reference to my long-deceased Government Computer News psuedonymous column “The Packet Rat” is a citation in the Wiktionary for an alternative meaning for “defenestrate”: (computing, transitive, humorous, slang) To remove a Windowsoperating system from a computer. quotations ▲ 2001 July 21, “Packet Rat” (pseudonym), “Judge Rat calls for a Microsoft…

[thegikitiki]

A Garden of Colors...

Bell Telephone Systems, 1960