Sam Biddle

Sony Music Sues Napster Over Missed Royalty Payments The company is claiming $9.2 million in unpaid royalties and a potential $36 million in damages from copyright infringement.

Something is in the air pitchfork.com/news/sony-mu...

Perhaps the quintessential image of the pre-9/11 era. A better world still seemed possible.

A scheduled tweet from 1999?

food-grade

Generative-engine optimization - also known as answer-engine optimization, GEO, or, if you're feeling limber, LLMGEO - is best understood as an aspirational term, a way for marketers to assure their employers and clients that, in a world where people spend their days chatting with fast-developing Al chatbots that have eaten the entire web and can regurgitate it on demand, there are still ways to get an edge for their brands. Chatbots are trained on the web, continuously scrape the web, and often still link to the web; some have search features built in or call on search engines in the course of conversations with users. In other words, the optimizers still have hope, and early folk wisdom is taking shape, making the rounds, and finding its way into practice. "LLMs, like Google Al mode or ChatGPT, will use what is called a fan-out technique with lots of queries covering every angle," says Solis. "Then they will match these variations not with whole pages but with passages, or chunks," she said. In response to a question, in other words, a chatbot will tend to summarize and excerpt, with citations rather than prominent links. If you want to get cited, she says, you should publish content with that in mind. A lot of SEO-driven content "was very wordy," she said, which doesn't help with being scraped by AI. Now, she said, publishers should "structure the content in an easier way to be grabbed" - in citable chunks, with clear authorship.

Mass-pivoting SEO specialists have a partner in venture capital: In the last two years, dozens of startups have popped up and collectively raised hundreds of billions of dollars around chatbot analytics, optimization, and marketing. Profound, an analytics platform that promises to help clients get "mentioned" by Chat GPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Perplexity, and others - including Deepseek - has raised tens of millions of dollars from major VC firms and counts among its clients major international brands. "We're at the inflection point where people don't need to visit websites," says CEO James Cadwallader. "ChatGPT visits on my behalf, a new webpage is created, these are the citations, this is where it came from, and no one cares," he says. "Answer engines hijack, or steal, the relationship."

To help play it better, Profound offers something else to its clients. "Using a rote human brain to look through the data and do the content is no longer the path,, Cadwallader says. "You need to use technology now to create this content." That means Al-generated content created with new metrics and formats in mind. "We'll use state-of-the-art reasoning models to go crunch that data and replace client workflows, to create the content that's Al-optimized, very highly schemaed, and information dense." (For an idea of what AI-assisted, GEO-friendly content of the future might look like, look no further than Profound's own website or the outputs of virtually any "deep research" tool on offer by AI companies - it all reads roughly like the output of a chatbot). Al will help solve the problem of Al, in other words. With a "human in the loop," still, of course.

How is the SEO industry responding to the AI-driven collapse in Google traffic? By pivoting to "GEO," and thinking up ways to influence, trick, or introduce bias into chatbots — and, of course, by using AI themselves nymag.com/intelligence...

The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information.

I'd just end up losing an arm

Sad to see you in the pocket of Big Mineral Oil.

As a hobby or a profession?

I just realized the feeling it's giving me: defragging a hard drive. I haven't felt this since 2003 or so.

r/Cuttingboard is already delivering

absolutely

It's a fidget spinner-like experience. You can just deeply zone out and create the simulacrum of work and effort while accomplishing basically nothing.

I wasn't even aware this was a thing you could do until like a week ago. I gotta join a cutting board subreddit now and swap oil strats.

My new thing is oiling my cutting boards. As far as I can tell it's completely pointless but it's very gratifying. No discernible benefit. I feel like a samurai sharpening a blade just gently, methodically rubbing mineral oil into a big piece of wood like an idiot. It's terrific.

Yeah I dunno. I don't get it but I think grief does things to people that go beyond our understanding.

wow yeah, but with intact ears

He seems satisfied, but then again he always seems satisfied

I can only guess extreme grief.

yeah it's heartbreaking.

I feel fundamentally unqualified to review this product

I don't generally care to get preachy about "journalism" and what it is or isn't but I feel like a good baseline is the people a reporter interviews ought to exist

nw

this entire made up controversy is driving me nuts. I have a genetic disease. I’ve written about eugenics. Not everything is eugenics!

Disco Elysium is one of my all-time faves but only played it once—can anyone speak to whether it stands up a second time through?

"additional radioactive nests," the three most beautiful words in the English language

lol it's one of my favorite games ever and I can't imagine anything less enjoyable than watching someone else play it

Few brave enough to say this

I already forget the original context.

Sometimes when I'm trying to get my cat to exercise, I'll wave his string or shoelace or whatever near him and he'll idly bat at it while refusing to actually move. Reminds me of that.