I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

So far this year, U.S.-domiciled investors have pulled $52 billion out of US equity products — “the most in the first eight weeks of the year since at least 2010.” 😔 @reuters.com #ByeAmerica www.reuters.com/business/buy...

This really is a great picture:

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further

wealth concentration is already 200% as bad at is was in 2020. think about that

lol this is gonna burst so fucking hard

Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

AI is not inevitable. If we had sane people in government that were not in thrall to billionaire tech CEOs, LLMs could be regulated, forced to obey existing copyright laws, and banned from places where their use is inappropriate, such as college classes. This should be a moderate position.

Ring is first and foremost a scheme to charge Amazon customers to deter crime that costs Amazon (not the customers themselves) billions annually in refunds, returns, double shipping, and customer service overhead.

“If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than AI. Authoritarian leaders & tech oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity.”

The top 10 most popular creators on YouTube and TikTok hardly changed in the past year, which means it's getting harder and harder to break through as a generalist creator and amass millions of followers. In the coming years, the newer creators who succeed will be the ones who niche down and develop

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.” hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

Bad Bunny's historical advisor is an assistant professor at UW-Madison. Hell of a flex for your tenure file.

Yes x 1000. I told my editors that all of the LLM drama came for romance (thanks to the Amazon marketplace) over a decade ago. Every iteration after that has been the same cycle over and over again. Can’t get serious people to treat it seriously, however, because it’s about women’s economic activity

Don’t know who needs to hear this but one of the puppies on the Puppy Bowl this year is named Chappell Bone

Mozilla will allow Firefox users to entirely block current and future generative AI features on the browser after user feedback revealed many who wanted an AI-free browser experience.

Published my first piece at @wired.com today, about a string of AI thrillers that have bombed (most recent being the hopelessly naive Chris Pratt vehicle 'Mercy'), the backlash to Darren Aronofsky's YouTube slop take on the American Revolution, and a grotesque nostalgia-bait Super Bowl ad:

Of course. Of course. How many times are we, as a people, going to kick this specific, stupid SV football??? Drives me nuts.

Yeah, I can't really think of a larger one off the top of my head. The Messenger was similar in raw numbers, though it was a complete closure rather than the gutting of a newsroom like the Washington Post yesterday. Even the massive CBS News layoffs this past fall are small in comparison...

Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him https://theonion.com/man-who-lost-everything-in-crypto-just-wishes-several-t-1848764551/

One third. apnews.com/article/wash...

Yet more enshittification

"When in doubt, draw a distinction." Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers taught me that. This (long) thread is about the key distinctions I rely on as a critic. There's a Twitter version from 2021. This one builds on that one. I will post them one at a time. Ready?

CBS News invites everyone who works for them to quit.

Documents from lawsuit claiming Meta & Google purposely marketed addictive & dangerous products to children reveal corporate strategies for pushing into a schools to force young kids into their ecosystems. Below slide from internal Google pitch deck. www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

“But what stood out to me as I listened to the recorded conversation between Nadella and Fink is that they have largely given up on organic adoption by consumers. They have moved on to a new dream of forced adoption mandated by government and managerial coercion.”

early industrialists adopted the power loom initially not because it was faster or cheaper than the workers it was replacing, but because increased precarity allowed harsher discipline of the workers who remained

Thinks are going great in AI world.

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

“business could falter without customers”

When I lecture to students about how the apparently thriving economy of the 1920s was really a house of cards just waiting to be knocked down, one of the points I stress is how much a small number of the very rich were essentially propping up consumer spending in unsustainable ways

This is quite a post www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/reality-is...

In a Brookings presentation about AI and education. Notes so far: -students have access to Wild West of AI -declining trust between students and teachers -AI divide opening up by economic class

@anildash.com on ai-washing: "Now, to be clear, those workers haven’t been laid off because their jobs are now being done by AI, and they’ve been replaced by bots. Instead, they’ve been laid off by execs who now have AI to use as an excuse for going after workers they’ve wanted to cut all along."

Doing research on an article about how streaming services’ unscripted TV strategies evolved and came across this gem of a tidbit from 2015: Ted Sarandos declared reality TV “off-brand” and told investors of its “disposable nature,” making it less interesting for streamers to invest in. 🤣

USPS quietly changed its postmark rules — mail is no longer dated when you drop it off. The “official” date is when it hits automated sorting — sometimes days later Which could have major implications for mail in voting — it’s a clever way to disenfranchise voters that’s going largely overlooked

Just learned C2E2 Comics Convention is happening the same time as #SCMS26 in Chicago for people who want more to do then…

Can’t see what could go wrong with the chatbot that tells people to kill themselves also pushing DraftKings

Just read this from @seanmcnulty.bsky.social in The Ankler: NETFLIX will have live TV programming on Sunday, Monday (RAW), Tuesday & Wednesday (Star Search) every week as of mid-January, plus their new mobile daily game show. The more things change…

👀

Find me a piece of ed tech from the past thirty years that's genuinely more about student learning than it is about extracting more labor from fewer teachers. Can't be done!

will also add - yes, this is my personal crusade - that turning podcasts into videos implicitly asks women to once again make more effort than men, as the bar for "camera-ready" for one gender is obviously higher than for the other

I know it’s been widely remarked upon but Netflix releasing eight episodes of STRANGER THINGS in three installments is so funny to me They’re so close to getting it

All of this thread. I understand the self interest that AI salesmen have to push their product, but the grasping way they’re doing it — the internet version of a traveling salesmen putting his foot in the door so you can’t close it — is only going to drive more people away.

Also: Their vice provost is named Michael Scott!?!

it's an interesting conversation in media as well when you consider all the link rot and intentional destruction of journalistic history that occurs at the hands of corporate power a narrow window of badly curated knowledge dictated by unreliable narrators forming the foundation of modern wisdom

Doing my part this holiday season to try to educate my parents about motion smoothing

Also good: @mattbelloni.bsky.social highlighting the wild amount of $ these WBD execs stand to make from a sale