this is an interesting interview and if i were clipping it for social media i would have excerpted "We're still a place where we don't downrank links. We love sending traffic to people. We send two million clicks a day to publishers" rather than the part that'll just piss people off lol

The Verge@theverge.com · 2d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

the dumbest argument about this is "new technologies produce increases in wellbeing that aren't easily captured in economic metrics", which sure, but you can't tell me facebook increased wellbeing more than electricity

Putting another set of hands in calculating the value for money proposition is a cart-and-horse idea. What's needed is a permanent department with the capability to do the planning and early design work, the ability to understand and guide the work the engineering consultants hand back.

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · last wk.

We need an OBR for infrastructure ft.trib.al/LisfRLr | opinion

Anthropic and OpenAI are creating a Streisand Effect where their ongoing attacks on open Chinese AI models lets everyone know those models are actually so good that they’re worth checking out.

Silicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I. (Gift Article)

Anthropic and OpenAI are clashing with the rest of the tech industry over whether “open-source” models from China should be freely available or restricted.

nytimes.com

Should make a stronger claim at the end here: You do not want *AI specialists* to help your company take advantage of the tech, you need *domain specialists* using the tech to tell you whether they can get something useful out of it.

Thread worth reading. I'd add that Britain has to contend with a globalisation that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, isn't reversing.

Tomas Hirst@tomashirstecon.bsky.social · 2w ago

Lot of commentary about UK’s economic missteps - through line for me is that the series of shocks the country has experienced reduced the role of sterling as a reserve currency without reducing financialisation of the domestic economy. So raised cost of capital without reducing reliance on leverage.

like the way Messi is just magically absolved for the shitty conduct of his teammates on and off the pitch is really something. he's the captain!

In 2011, WeChat destroyed my presumption that China could not innovate (in tech, design, business model), and you can't visit China today without noticing innovations large and small. A decade and a half of easily-observable innovation, but much of the American punditry has not caught on yet.

Graham Webster@gwbstr.com · 3w ago

My most important 2¢: ”The Chinese models are not excellent only because of distillation,” said Mr. Webster of Stanford. “There is real innovation going on.” I keep hearing people of a certain ideological bent saying everything China builds in AI is effectively stolen. Not a wise assumption. 2/2

2 yrs ago, moaty SV firms were relative beneficiaries of the macro effects of CN-driven disinflation, because they operated in domains (social media/search) segregated from CN by the firewall & so immune to such disinflation. But AI has been different (so far??) open.substack.com/pub/sankaran...

Christopher Mims@mims.bsky.social · 3w ago

HUGE news from China last night, and I have a comprehensive analysis of its implications for the AI bubble this morning. Xi Jinping has more or less declared war on OpenAI and Anthropic and any U.S. tech firm that insists on closed, proprietary AI models. 🎁🔗: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chea...

Just started the BIS paper on AI and www.bis.org/publ/work136...

Karthik Sankaran@rajakorman.bsky.social · 4w ago

Things I learned from a mentor 1999-2001 1. It may make sense to value 1 company in an new sector as a future monopolist; it makes no sense to value every company in the sector that way. 2. When you’re in the middle of an investment boom, you’re adding demand but once it’s done, you’ve added supply.

Lot of hot takes on housing flying around at the moment. My basic contention is that the problem has always been that you can’t have a thing that provides shelter, your primary savings vehicle, and something that acts as the main collateral for small businesses all be the same thing.

For a long time, UK tech policy has been burdened by the desire to be best in the world at something (anything) rather than delivering more of what we're already good at. As such, it's tended to be flimsy - good for announcements, bad for delivery, because typically there is no plan for delivery

Anyway, no doubt we’ll get rounds of “true rebalancing has never been tried” over the next few years but I see this period as a pretty strong reason to push back against the kind of oversimplified hydraulic macro that these mental models betray.

The full remote -> hybrid -> back to office trajectory should be mapped against signals of labour bargaining power. Not seeking to litigate which is the better model here, but it’s fairly clear to me that there has been a pretty radical rebalancing from employees to employers between 2021 and 2026.

Overwhelming message from an ECIPE webinar on the subject - globalisation is a hugely powerful force which cannot be turned off. That this is not accepted in Europe whether by politicians or media is undoubtedly a factor in relative decline.

I call this phenomenon "CEO skim-read Forbes in the Business Class Lounge" and once you notice it you can't stop seeing it everywhere. Open plan offices, beanbags and pool tables, everything-must-be-blockchain, everything must be in the cloud, outsource everything, AI everything...

The UK also has one of the best university systems in the world so we can train our own people to do high skill jobs. And the whole concept of "high skill" is dodgy anyway; there is human capital in excess demand and human capital not in excess demand.

Full comic here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gold-5 #smbc #comics

The funny thing is that the real threats from LLMs are not what the boosters and doomers actually tell us. It's a world of mediocrity, where some asks are much easier from LLMs, but we lose some skills and that leads to at modestly higher living standard but more bullshit noise.

It is often said that a “wave” or “tsunami” of technological change is heading our way. These metaphors are powerful because they shape our sense of what is reasonable, and what is unreasonable. What does AI as a "wave" imply is a reasonable course of action? (1/...)

Maybe Europe's problem can be summarised in one question - what does a continent do when its leading competitive advantage is that people from around the world want to be there but its electoral politics says that immigration must come down?

the overwhelming message the AI industry has sent to young people is “this will ruin any chance you have at a stable career”, of course college grads are booing it regardless of the reality of the claims, the way this technology has been sold is one of the greatest self-inflicted PR disasters ever

404 Media@404media.co · 3mo ago

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed throughout this commencement speech at the University of Arizona for his praise of AI. This comes just a week after another commencement speaker who mentioned AI was booed at a school in Florida. Read more: www.404media.co/ucf-ai-comme...

Also if you believe AI is going to take both white collar and manual jobs then what is the point of education and reskilling? Reskilled as what exactly?

We kind of knew this was going to happen but...Coldplay? Really?

Awful Announcing@awfulannouncing.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The World Cup Final is going to feature a halftime show, much to the world's chagrin. awfulannouncing.com/soccer/fifa-...

Maybe I’ll write about the Affordability Discourse one day but I think that one thing (among many both material and perceptual) that this hard to untangle is that everyone—including those who are doing fine in material terms—has a lot more visibility into how well the rich are doing than in the past

posting is not an alternative to organizing neither is populism

A great review essay on the benefits and limits of AI by @himself.bsky.social.

AI has limits, even if many AI people can't see them

On Ben Recht's fantastic new book

open.substack.com

Nate Silver pens an essay about how social media is dead as a way to build an audience because Twitter is now a right wing cesspool where Catturd gets more engagement than the New York Times. Weird that it never occurs to him that Twitter is the problem and there’s more to social media l. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Social media is turning into a freak show

The ecosystem is incredibly unhealthy, especially on Twitter. But if it dies, good riddance.

natesilver.net

This is a very interesting essay by @seva.bsky.social

The Incel Global Order

modern autocracy as a cult of masculinity

open.substack.com