onfocus

Trust in AI technology and the companies that develop it is dropping, in both the U.S. and around the world, according to new data from Edelman shared first with Axios.

Not much to this summary, but interesting to hear AI skepticism is on the rise even as it's being built into every technology product.

Cuban needs no more convincing on who he’ll vote for come November. Speaking to Bloomberg this month, he shrugged off concerns about Biden’s advanced age: “If they were having his last wake, and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given last rites, I would still vote for Joe Biden.”

Pretty funny for a billionaire.

I mean, yeah, I don't know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can't—Joe Biden's only been president for three years, so he can't—it made no sense.

A good interview with the journalist who broke the SOTU rebuttal trafficking lie on TikTok.

Reporting (endlessly) that Biden is old without noting that Trump is deranged is not “independent” journalism, it’s just bad journalism.

The NYT is basically the PR division for the Republic party. They have fully embraced fascism and trolling for attention.

If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

This article really is as good as everyone is saying. Read it on the Internet Archive while you still can. Why it was removed we'll probably never know. cough unhappy rich people cough

“I don’t really see any good that can come from Reddit going public,” Dan M. told me. “Not to sound dramatic but it kinda feels like the final nail in Reddit’s coffin after years of degrading quality.”

Same, they treat their volunteer moderators like expendable cogs and all of their revenue depends on them. Add the new pressure of shareholders to the situation and it seems like a recipe for meh. Feels like someone’s cash out before the end.

Update (3/9): LOL

Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.

Surveillance capitalism is going just great. I guess we can thank these developers for not bothering to obfuscate the names of their dystopian programs.

Side note: if the thing you are purchasing has a camera and/or microphone it will likely be used in an unintended way by someone. Always pay more to buy dumber machines if you can.

So we can see that Republicans don’t even actually care about securing the border in the cruel ways they say they want to secure it; not as much as they want to establish that only they get to decide what happens to human beings in this country whether or not those human beings are at the border or anywhere else. A bipartisan bill allowing them to do everything they say they want to do simply doesn’t send the authoritarian message as much as doing it illegally in defiance of a Democratic president would.

Speaking of newsletters that recently moved away from Substack, I’m happy to see The Reframe free. Democrats need to stop playing this game where they try to give Republicans everything they want to shut them up. They will not be appeased and their requests gain legitimacy in the process.

His position as a justice on the highest court in the land should require more candor, not less, in reporting the kind of relationships the Ethics in Government Act requires be made public.

Not to mention his failure to recuse himself on cases where his wife is an activist for one side. Law and order for thee but not for me.

Her case highlights a chilling reality of post-Roe America: Medical exceptions to abortion bans have not stopped doctors from turning away patients with significant pregnancy complications, often with harrowing consequences.

Abortions are health care. If Texas doctors are erring on the side of legal caution at the expense of someone’s life, something is seriously wrong.

Pitch work is basically when a director, writer, producer, or any combination of those get together with an artist and say, “We want to pitch to studios and we need imagery.” All of that has now been given to generative AI.

Fascinating interview with concept artist Karla Ortiz about the impact of generative AI on her industry.

To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product. Unless you plan on subsidizing an entire internet’s worth of constantly new content with the revenue from your AI chatbot, the information it’s spitting out will get worse as people stop contributing to the network.

Speaking of newsletters that recently moved away from Substack, Garbage Day made the jump to Beehiiv. Go read about AI search nihilism and a bunch of other stuff.