To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more
Music has emerged as private equity's recession-resistant darling, thanks to streaming's predictable revenue patterns and live entertainment's remarkable post-pandemic resilience.
What if that user base was steadfastly fixed to their own platform? If we could build a unified lobby of artists and fans, we would hold a much stronger hand in negotiation, and consequently may see more favorable deals negotiated in the use of sampled material and other roadblocks prior platforms have experienced. Legacy industry need association... See more
Altman claimed under oath before Congress that he held no equity in OpenAI. Technically, perhaps. But in substance, he held indirect stakes through vehicles like Sequoia and Y Combinator’s funds. When OpenAI announced a partnership with Reddit, Altman’s 7.5 percent stake in Reddit netted him a $50 million windfall. When OpenAI agreed to purchase... See more
Lawsuits from major publishers against Suno and Udio are not, as libertarian boosters, VCs and Tech Bros would say, an attack on innovation. They are a warning shot against a business model that turns creative labor into raw machine fuel under the pretense of fair use.
Wandering—i.e., embarking upon a walk or journey with no particular destination—is good for the soul, and by extension society, and we should all prioritize more of it. Empirical support: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9169417/
To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”
In this mirror one can see the terrifying nature of force, of this ancient human drive to turn others into things, which will never disappear, no matter how many smart professors comfortably say otherwise over coffee tables. Simone Weil knew we desperately need a clear mirror to deal with the horror of force in its most ghastly expression, which is... See more