Tessera

You’re allowed to use the Computer to perform certain tasks but you must never use it to perform one of the Forbidden Tasks. The Computer is there to make certain tasks easier, but if those tasks become too easy then you are one of the laziest scumbags to walk the Earth.

David Ellison took to the New York Times op-ed page to argue that the antitrust case launched against him by 12 state attorneys general is purely political and that his critics are wrong about his own personal politics. Ellison’s claim that he’s not overtly political is plainly dumb. His family con

Opinion | David Ellison: In Defense of the Paramount-Warner Deal

The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of CNN

nytimes.com

Bluesky’s new CEO Toni Schneider sat down for a long interview with the Verge, and he talked about his goals for the platform to break out of its left-of-center bubble and be embraced as a more general interest social network.

Bluesky’s new CEO wants to grow it all

Bluesky is many different things in a trenchcoat.

theverge.com

I know it’s impossible to predict when a bubble will pop, but we’ve been hearing claims for 2+ years now that the AI bubble is on the verge of popping any day now.

It turns out the key to converting free subscribers into paid is actually locking a lot of content behind a paywall. It somehow took me 6+ years to learn this.

Could you rebuild 60 Minutes from the ground up? simonowens.substack.com/p/could-you-...

Could you rebuild 60 Minutes from the ground up?

PLUS: Why I send every non-relevant PR pitch to spam

simonowens.substack.com

Will we soon see a new 60 Minutes competitor?

A network of rightwing YouTube channels are using AI avatars to spread misinformation about California in an effort to damage Governor Gavin Newsom. Many of their videos are centered around fake news stories of major retailers closing down their stores in the state. Newsom’s office has worked with Y

Exclusive: The AI ‘news’ accounts hyping a blue-state dystopia

AI-generated videos are flooding YouTube with fake narratives about chaos in California and New York.

semafor.com

lol. Show this post to any software engineer and they'll burst out laughing.

Futurism reports on how an army of AI-generated PR reps are flooding journalists’ inboxes — not only with their initial product pitches, but also with constant follow-ups. This is why I’ve been forced to get extremely harsh in how I manage my inbox. I send out a newsletter just about every weekday,

A PR Firm Is Using Fake Publicists With AI-Generated Headshots to Spam Journalists With Pitches for Its Clients

A PR firm called Movchan Agency operated a roster of fake PR representatives, some with AI faces, to pitch journalists on stories. Why?

futurism.com

With content saturation at an all time high, social media influencers who used to publish simple lifestyle videos have leaned into content meant to enrage their viewers — usually by doing something completely wasteful. They claim it’s the only way to stand out in an algorithmic feed that only reward

The Influencer Recession

Once upon a time, lifestyle influencers could post cute photos and make millions. Now they are forced to pivot.

vulture.com

How FAST streamers will help scale up the Creator Economy simonowens.substack.com/p/how-fast-s...

How FAST streamers will help scale up the Creator Economy

PLUS: The biggest threat facing Paramount

simonowens.substack.com

The New York Times went deep on the astronomical amount of debt Larry Ellison raised to fuel Oracle’s AI expansion and the threat that debt poses in popping the AI bubble. That debt also poses a huge threat to the future of Paramount, what with its ongoing acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery b

Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?

Inside the 81-year-old billionaire’s risky, debt-fueled scramble to transform his data empire into an A.I. juggernaut.

nytimes.com

I’m so thankful I never grew up to be the sort of person who screams impotently at internet strangers for expressively relatively mundane opinions.

I see this dumb take a lot. Using this logic, then most information sources on the internet are unusable because most information sources have mistakes. The New York Times publishes hundreds of corrections a month.

I’m surprised that this kind of experimentation isn’t more widespread in the publishing industry. So many book publishers are sitting on huge catalogues of books that were published years ago and aren’t generating many current-day sales. So why doesn’t every publisher have an ongoing podcast where t

Podium to Publish Fiction Podcasts as Audiobooks

The catalog, which begins rolling out August 4, comprises audiobook adaptations of 35 serialized podcasts currently hosted on the Realm network. The L.A.-based Podium has enlisted such celebrity narra...

publishersweekly.com

A decade ago, Amazon generated less than $1.5 billion from advertising. Now it’s the third largest advertising company in the world, behind only Google and Meta. And that’s not even its primary business. Incredible.

Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 6d ago

Hank Green is trending on Twitter because he mentioned in a tweet that he used ChatGPT as part of his research process and a huge hoard of anti-AI crusaders are melting down.

Masked ICE thug just casually shooting pepper spray at a few old ladies standing peacefully on the sidewalk filming them in uptown Manhattan today. Just because these monsters are quieter now doesn’t mean they’re not still out there violating people.

How traditional media outlets can succeed on Substack simonowens.substack.com/p/how-tradit...

How traditional media outlets can succeed on Substack

PLUS: Disney should just consolidate into a single streaming app.

simonowens.substack.com

Seriously, WTF is going on?

Why are the voters we’ve been relentlessly spamming multiple times a day for the past 10 years not donating to us????

This is an extremely niche post, but the reason Molly Jong-Fast has a huge audience despite producing the blandest possible content ever is that she figured out long ago that if she simply quote tweets everything she could draft off the popularity of the tweet she's quote tweeting.

Not every popular podcaster is waiting around for Netflix to roll up and dump a ton of money on their lap; some are proactively uploading their huge libraries to FAST channels that are hosted on platforms like Amazon Prime Video, Sling TV, and Samsung TV Plus. Basically, the podcast episodes play on

Podcasters Are Building Businesses Off Free TV Channels

For podcasters delving into video programming, YouTube isn’t the only game in town

bloomberg.com

Sometimes I get a little bitter that other creators and outlets in my niche absolutely pummel their audiences with barely-disclosed sponcon and yet probably bring in 10X the revenue as I do. It really does not pay to be principled about creating a good user experience.