Sam Liebeskind

Thus, the effectiveness of deliberative processes is threatened by what British political theorist Marit Hammond describes as “processes that may have the appearance of empowerment, but only serve to pacify democratic demands without actually submitting to their bottom-up force.”

The death of the obituary matters because local features can be an antidote to the trends of polarization and demonization. Cable news dehumanizes. Community news can rehumanize.

We can immediately rule out reproducing the current system in which a tiny number of companies govern permissible speech and what safety means for billions of people. We don't want social media that's like Twitter except without a demented owner. You cannot fix social media by having a non-profit run it or by guiding it with some ethical principles... See more

The two-tower era: efficient but static

The two-tower architecture has been the workhorse of modern recommendation systems, and for good reason: it’s elegant, scalable, and remarkably effective at learning patterns from massive amounts of data. Here’s how it worked for us once we deployed it in early 2024.

The system had two neural networks working... See more

The cold email script that never stops working (adjust as needed) https://t.co/3Id4odD4yi

When we buy a physical product, we accept that it won’t change in its lifetime. We’ll use it until it wears off, and we replace it. We can rely on that product not evolving; the gas pedal in my car will always be in the same place.

However, when it comes to software, we usually have the ingrained expectations of perpetual updates. We believe that if... See more