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PBS News: “Project 2025, the conservative policy project, became a flashpoint during the presidential campaign. Angelo Carusone of Media Matters studied the 900-page document and spoke with Geoff Bennett for our series, On Democracy, where we hear a range of perspectives on how government should function, what led to this moment in American history and …
The Contrarian: “There’s something pretty interesting happening on Dictionary.com and its sister site, Thesaurus.com. Scroll down to the example usages of a given word and you’ll see what I mean. Among the example sentences for “democracy” at time of publication: “It seems this 248-year-old experiment we call American democracy may very well rest in the …
Washington Post via MSN – The proliferation of artificial intelligence tools and overreliance on software such as ChatGPT is making the job market increasingly surreal. “The speedy embrace of AI tools meant to make job hunting and hiring more efficient is causing headaches and sowing distrust in these processes, people on both sides of the …
Ars Technica: “Forcing the use of general search terms can help people change their minds. People are often quite selective about the information they’ll accept, seeking out sources that will confirm their biases, while discounting those that will challenge their beliefs. In theory, search engines can potentially change that. By prioritizing results from high-quality, credible …
NPR: “…That is the Internet Archive,” said Mark Graham, the director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, pointing to the server stacks. Graham was leading about a dozen visitors on a weekly public tour of the headquarters on a recent Friday in March. He projected his voice to be heard over the drone of the …
BBC: “There’s a secret side of YouTube, just beyond the guiding hand of the algorithm – and it’s nothing like what you know. The vast majority of YouTube’s estimated 14.8 billion videos have almost never been seen. Until now. This year marks YouTube’s 20th birthday. From its humble beginnings as a venue for amateurs, today …
The Contrarian: “The most comprehensive post-mortem on the 2024 presidential elections—by Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic polling firm that collected 26 million responses from voters of all ages, demographics and party affiliation in 2024—has been making the rounds of podcasts, newsletters and political media recently. Donald Trump won among young white men, and also …
Society of Authors: “Meta has used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programmes. Yesterday (20 March 2025), The Atlantic published a searchable database of over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. This data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has …
TechCrunch: “Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it …
The Atlantic – no paywall: “…Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen …
Privacy Guide: “There is a growing sentiment that the US shouldn’t be relied upon for the technologies that many people and businesses use every day. Lately, the US has been unilaterally cutting off access to critical technologies to European countries, prompting calls for “radical action” to bolster European tech stacks from EU lawmakers. At Privacy …
Three Things to Know by Fred Rocha: “These are exciting times to be on Mastodon, one of the flavours of the Fediverse. Things are evolving fast, towards a space worthy of healthier online debate and exchange. Some of these conversations can be found on my own profile, if you’re curious. Here are some of the …
