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New York Mag – Intelligencer [no paywall]: “Steven Rosenbaum started writing his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality in 2022, around when ChatGPT launched. Initially he didn’t use it at all, “But as the writing moved forward into 2023, 2024, it got better and I got better at using it,” he said. …
The Influenced Index scores every member on ten categories: direct contributions, outside spending, lobbying inside the policy areas they regulate, revolving-door lobbying access, vote alignment with funders, contribution timing around legislative action, dark-money concentration in outside spending, stock trades inside the industries they regulate, donor concentration, and foreign-interest lobby exposure. Evidence of capture — how …
Kottke: “How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them …
The Commonwealth Fund – U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2026: “Countries around the world are grappling with the shared challenges of rising health care costs, physician burnout, and aging populations. Yet the United States has long been an outlier in several respects. The U.S., on average, has the poorest health outcomes of any …
Via Crooked: A…New York Times review of federal documents found that $67 million in entry fees paid at national parks are now funding Trump’s D.C. construction projects. More specifically, $60 million is going toward repairing nine of the “capital’s ornamental fountains.” The last $7 million is going into the Reflecting Pool. [Note – no bid …
Digital Digging: “Google is rebuilding Search to answer instead of point. It still shows you the sources — it just decided, before you did, how few you’d need. Here’s the fix, and why the old operators matter more now than they ever did. On May 19 Google announced the biggest change to its search box …
Via Reddit – “This is what the storage of user information by an age verification company called FaceTec looks like, one of the big players alongside Persona and Yoti. They claim to be “privacy-friendly,” but they proudly allow companies that purchase their software/solution to store as much user data as they want. The company permits …
NiemanLabs: “On Wednesday, The Economist launched its own ChatGPT app — the first of its kind by a major consumer news publication. “The Economist – Graphs” runs natively inside ChatGPT and allows users to interact with the publication’s data visualizations. At launch, the app is focused solely on U.S. polling data. After installing the app, …
NPR: “A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area. [See the YouTube video here] The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished …
Wired: “So far this year, authorities have seized or demanded ballots from elections in four states. Experts fear the trend could throw the midterms into chaos unless courts draw a line. As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago …
Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues. Sci Adv. 2026 Mar 11;12(11):eadw5578. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adw5578 – Artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make autocomplete suggestions to people as they write text. Can these AI writing assistants affect people’s attitudes in this process? In two large-scale …
slop·py·pas·ta n. “Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves. You just got an unread …
