Jack Benjamin

5. Trade losing money on your investment for political power by overtly appealing to Trump.

The formula is:

1. Undermine trust in traditional sources by appealing to an audience of alternative media consumers.

2. Get rich off back of grifting your followers.

3. Use money to buy traditional sources.

4. Undercut trust in that product by cutting staff and changing editorial policy.

What I see here is an admission that no one is using Grok and people prefer the 'woke' chatbots. 🤷

It's almost like Trump lies or something.

Someday the Telegraph will actually be sold. Surely... right?

Axel Springer backs new Telegraph bid from Dovid Efune New York Sun owner makes £500mn offer to rival DMGT’s agreed bid

Per @financialtimes.com, Dovid Efune is once again bidding for The Telegraph, this time backed by Axel Springer.

The consortium reportedly submitted a new £500m offer to rival the already agreed-to deal between The Telegraph and DMGT, which is being held up over competition concerns.

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w

Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?

www.techdirt.com/202...

Obama goes viral for saying one thing and Trump feels the need to immediately steal his thunder. Like clockwork.

Without your tunes I don’t know what else would break up the doomscroll. If anything, we need more people posting tunes.

It’s not her shame, it’s theirs.

This whole "live markets are more predictive/useful than journalism" argument that Polymarket has been pushing is completely nonsensical.

A gambling market can maybe measure public sentiment well - among a cross-section of insiders/interested parties.

But that's just.. not the point of journalism.

All-time great thread

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

The Trump administration is seeking to aid and abet hate mongers and terrorists because otherwise its attempts to spread its far-right project to Europe will be stymied by that annoying thing called the law.

When will Europe start treating America like a national security threat?

Apple Ramps Up Work on Glasses, Pendant, and Camera AirPods for AI Era Apple Inc. is accelerating development of three new wearable devices as part of a shift toward artificial intelligence-powered hardware, a category also being pursued by OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc.

Apple plans to launch smart glasses, a pendant, and AI AirPods, all powered by a Gemini-infused Siri.

Historically, Apple has leapfrogged the industry by making tech consumer-friendly, but this feels different. Instead of redefining the category, it feels like they're just playing catch-up.

Article: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Abstract: Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Figure 2. ITT estimates of feed-setting changes on engagement and political attitudes. ITT effect estimates of switching the algorithm on and off (in s.d.). Left, effect of moving from the chronological to the algorithmic feed for users initially on the chronological feed. Right, effect of moving in the opposite direction for users initially on the algorithmic feed. For each outcome, the results of two specifications are reported. Blue, unconditional estimates with robust s.e., controlling only for the initial feed setting and, where applicable, pre-treatment outcome levels. Orange: conditional estimates, controlling for pre-treatment covariates using GRFs; 90% and 95% CIs are reported. Numerical effect sizes and P values correspond to the conditional estimates (all tests are two-sided). The unit of observation is respondent. From top to bottom, sample sizes are n = 4,965, n = 3,337, n = 4,965, n = 4,965, n = 4,596, n = 4,596 and n = 4,850. Tests are described in Methods. Supplementary Information Table 2.16 reports the exact numerical point estimates, s.e., CIs and sample sizes for every specification. All outcomes are standardized. Additional results are presented in Supplementary Information section 2. PCA, first principal component from principal component analysis.

X's algorithm is in fact doing what you think it's doing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The left will start getting excited about new technologies when new technologies stop threatening the livelihood of practically all white collar labor, to the direct benefit of people that already have an unfathomable amount of wealth.

Also requires that same tech to actually, yknow, work reliably.

CBS today:

Had the FCC not Streisand-effected the show, I would guess this interview would have struggled to crack 500k YouTube views in its lifetime.

Of course, you do still have to contend with the loss of live broadcast ratings. But YouTube likely pulls a younger/more influential cohort anyway.

For comparison's sake, Colbert's interview segments typically garner between 150k-900k views on YouTube. Monologue is consistently between 1m-2m.

Interviews with politicians are usually on the lower end of the viewership spectrum relative to major celebrities.

"AOC gave a stark warning that Trump wanted to usher in an age of authoritarianism and tear apart the decades-strong transatlantic alliance. But Christopher Rufo said she made talk talk weird. Who's to say what to make of it all? Not us, apparently."

Repeat ad nauseum.

Colbert slams CBS for canning interview with Trump critic Stephen Colbert, whose "Late Show" is ending this year, wasted no time laying into CBS over a canned James Talarico interview: "FCC you."

Probably the most straightforward example of government censorship of the broadcast news in my lifetime?

They must really be scared of Talarico talking about genuine Christianity

www.usatoday.com/story/entert...

America's Richest People Are Not its Most Generous

Fascinating chart with one outlier: Warren Buffett.

At the low end, giving 0.06% of one's wealth is equivalent to:

Net worth -> Lifetime Giving
50K->$30
100K->$60
500K->$300
$1M->$600

Most folks give far more by % in a *single year*.

www.forbes.com/sites/forbes...

Have you ever once seen the New York Times quote Trump like this?

Might end up eating crow but I really doubt Labour will pass an under-16 social media ban.

None of the most prominent teen mental health organisations want a ban, and these are the key groups Government is consulting with. Starmer also probably doesn't want to piss off US tech if he can avoid it.

Writing is thinking.

It's not some marginal boring task you can skip. It's the heart of it.

PM: “No platform gets a free pass”: Government takes action to keep children safe online The Government will give parents and carers greater clarity and support as the Prime Minister announces immediate action to make the online world safer for children.

Starmer is laying out potential government actions to tackle online harms today. They include:

- Minimum age limit for social media.
- Disallowing infinite scrolling.
- Requiring safeguards around sharing of underage nudes online.
- Disallowing kids from using VPNs to skirt safety protections.

I mean, given the sheer vastness of the universe, the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is practically guaranteed. Obama’s just keeping it real.

You heard it here first, folks. It’s not a politician’s job to persuade you to change your mind about anything. They are just mere vessels through which public opinion must flow.

Indeed, no successful politician in human history has ever convinced anyone of anything.