Alisa Perren

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

r/analytics • IOh We just found out our AI has been making up analytics data for 3 months and I'm gonna throw up. Support So we've been using an Al agent since November to answer leadership questions about metrics. It seemed amazing at first fast answers, detailed explanations, everyone loved it. I just found out it's been hallucinating numbers this entire time. Our VP of sales made territory decisions based on data that didn't exist. Our CFO showed the board a deck with fake insights. The Al was just inventing plausible sounding percentages. I only caught it by accident when someone asked me to double check something. I started digging, and holy shit, it's bad.

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.”

Hitting the social media jackpot is harder than ever TikTok dances won't make you an A-list celebrity anymore. But niche content creators make substantial incomes and are having a moment.

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

Chappell Bone playing on the Puppy Bowl. It’s a puppy chewing on a blue and orange puffy thing

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

New Mozilla Firefox version to allow AI features to be blocked Mozilla will allow Firefox users to entirely block current and future generative AI features on the browser.

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.

Hollywood Is Losing Audiences to AI Fatigue Entertainment about or made with artificial intelligence has been missing the mark with viewers over the past year.

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.

These stats are admittedly a little funky, but it’s possible today’s @washingtonpost bloodbath was the single-largest one-day layoff of journalists in American history. The Messenger’s closure in 2024 (~300 or so staff) is probably closest. Either way, puts it in perspective.

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

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/

Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments is being laid off The Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments, not just the newsroom, is being laid off.

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

Though this point is key

bsky.app/profile/jayk...

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-...

Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless Independent research identifies few learning gains

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

Quote of sam altman over a post of sam altman saying they are testing adding ads to chatgpt "I kind of think of ad as like a last resort for us as a business model"

Thinks are going great in AI world.

Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"

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...