Tag: Twitter
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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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Hey Elon Musk, Tinder Imperfectly Cracked Verification, So Can Twitter
If you were on the internet over the last week you probably heard that Elon Musk bought up stock in Twitter to the point he is now the largest single shareholder. Musk started Tweeting, like a college kid who decided to try the big Adderall for the first time, turned down a board seat, deleted…
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Did Negative Media Coverage of Covid19 Reduced Treatment Options?
The other day, Jon Hardister a Republican member of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Tweeted his summary of a working paper from November, 2020. That paper analyzed the tone used in U.S. media coverage of Covid19. The paper maybe of interest, but Hardister didn’t link to the paper, he just Tweeted the following: “A study…
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Looking At Conspiracy Theories From Inside Someone Else’s Foil Hat
Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, they say, is the best way to understand them. Last week, I donned a foil hat and took to Twitter. I wasn’t out to understand conspiracy theorists – I was sarcastically mocking them. But now I do better understand how the fringes are drawn to conspiracy theories. In…
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Snake Oil Sales Dominant Social Media
Snake oil sales dominate social media to the extent that burns my eyes. Instagram booty models want me to buy a useless detox tea, and if you call out a guru selling the word salad to success, they will flag your YouTube video for copyright infringement. All while the MD’s of Twitter, are either cringing…
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Online Gurus Are Beyond Parody
I used to make videos mocking the folks you see in ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. selling you some form of info product. I had to stop, because, while standing in front of a U-Haul place and talking about the haters who will claim I the great, “Dutch Ovens” don’t own all these trucks,…
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Should I Use Twitter? A 2019 Risk-Benefit Analysis Of Using Twitter
Periodically I try to make Twitter work for me, a productivity tool! Or if not productivity, a way to be informed, entertained… just to promote things I care about, perhaps? It’s failed for me, at the very least the way I was using it has not been working to any of these ends. Productivity on…
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Why is Self-improvement Bad When it’s Biohacking?
After looking at The Atlantic’s take on Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey’s fasting; I’m getting tired of the way some publications stand against well… self-improvement. I realize some of the Silicon Valley bros make it an easy target. But “biohacking” is self-improvement, backed by science. Sometimes biohacking is also pseudoscience, and other times just crazy measures that…
