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TikTok, Drugs, Congress, and Monopoly
Very few accusations are unique to TikTok. But, to the extent that members of congress know about data brokers, I assume they feel the U.S. data brokers’ selling lists of all the closeted gay people, with cancer, taking anti depressants in Kentucky are good and clean. But first party data collection by the Chinese Communist…
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How Forbes Monetizes The Frauds They Create
Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Charlie Javice share a few things in common. They all seem to have committed fraud; though a court of law convicted only Homes at the time of writing. The three are also Forbes ’30 Under 30′ Alumni. Forbes is the best in the business at monetizing frauds on the way…
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AI Will Break Online Search
AI is going to give super powers to Blackhat SEO, breaking online search as we know it. RIP magic box at the top of the browser where we all reflexively type “how to [blank]”, “[blank] near me”, “best [blank] Reddit”, and anything else we seek a semi-reliable answer to at any given moment. Online search…
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Human-AI Interaction Is A Partnership Based on Blind Trust
People express a lot of fear when it comes to AI. Some worry AI will grow superhuman and kill us all. Others are concerned that AI lead automation will displace over 100 million workers and devastate the economy. Honestly, either may happen because the simple truth of AI is that when machines learn, humans lose control. Currently, self-learning AI…
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Advertising Scams With MrBeast and Cory Doctorow
Every digital advertising platform wants more revenue and less expense. Policing ad quality is an expense, whereas advertising, whether the purpose is legitimate or not, generates revenue. Only when the economic incentives shift due to public outrage, demands from large advertisers or investor pressure will the companies in a position to stop advertisements of scams…
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Add Value, Not Noise: An Orwellian Social Media Post
Seeing engagement bait posts in social media groups is common. “Add value not noise” posted in a startup group on Facebook, however, is noteworthy due to the Orwellian level of using the behavior you’re cautioning not to use, to condemn the behavior you’re using. To the person who wrote this single sentence a few days…
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Apocalyptic Myths And The Horrible Reality Of AI
A mythology of artificial super intelligence has dominated the conversation about AI since the 80s. Constant media coverage of AI as if it’s a dark and threatening abyss likely to usher in an apocalypse is impacting how AI is developed, clouding the discourse when people bring up real flaws in the current generation of AIs.
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How Gawker Media Once Kept Silicon Valley In Check
At one time, Valleywag part of Gawker served as a tattletale hall monitor for the startup community. But since Peter Thiel sued the publication out of existence, the startup world has run amok without media coverage until hundreds of millions of dollars are involved. That’s a problem for the entire ecosystem.
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Why Google Search Sucks And A Tribute To Neil Gaiman
Google grants access to information kings didn’t have 50 years before. I have consumed so much content, books, podcasts, movies, articles, songs, and possibly the Ph.D. thesis of a woman from Chesapeake. I cannot remember it all. Like most, I’ll occasionally use Google to find a specific but only half-recalled crumb of content. Increasingly I…
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AI-Generated Articles: A Party Trick With Dangerous Consequences
AI is far from the science fiction vision. But generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) AIs like ChatGPT are now mainstream. GPT processes a tremendous amount of existing text, essentially reading millions of articles and books, “learning” how to generate human-like writing. For an example of how it works and how far into general awareness the tech…
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What Is A Tank And When Is It Pedantic
An apartment isn’t a house, but if someone invites you over “to the house” for dinner, quibbling about names of building structures is needlessly pedantic. In most day-to-day contexts being a little imprecise with language is unproblematic. An SUV can be a “car”, a thumbtack can be a “small nail,” and so on. In most…
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Media Literacy: The Musk Emerald Mine & Andrew Tate’s Arrest
We will discuss Andrew Tate’s arrest and Elon Musk’s father’s emerald mine. But those are ancillary to the real story about how to navigate mainstream media. I’m Mason Pelt, and I’ll be your soyfaced-cuck or guide; I don’t care how you think of me. My travels in the weird corners of cyberspace have shown over…
