draglikepull

Also, I don't care about any of these dumb buzzwords like "Canadian-centred AI adoption", but as far as it goes, in what sense is using models from large American companies a "Canadian-centred" approach?

I know I am preaching to the choir here but statistical models are very much *not* unbiased. They are, in fact, excellent at reproducing biases at scale.

Am I the only one who did not know this was a thing?
"Towing-related violence has been a major issue in Toronto. In 2024, there were 63 shooting and firearm discharge incidents related to tow-truck disputes, accounting for almost 13 per cent of all such incidents that year. "

9 Toronto police officers facing charges related to tow-truck violence: source | CBC News Nine Toronto police officers are facing charges related to violent incidents involving tow trucks and operators across the Greater Toronto Area, multiple sources tell CBC News.

Wait, what?
"[Toronto police] officers are accused of trafficking, leaking addresses to hitmen, and leaking police officer addresses, the sources said."

Does Apple News let you pay a fee to a specific outlet per article? My understanding was that it was a subscription service that gave you access to a bundle of news sources for a set fee.

I also think it would be hard to make the payment infrastructure work (at least on PCs; a company like Apple could plausibly make it work on their own platform).

Every time there's bad news about journalism, a lot of folks propose that one solution is letting people pay per article, and I very much understand the appeal of that idea, but I don't think the economics add up, which is why no one's done it.

Oh hey. It's me. I'm back. I wanted to talk to all the devs who took the war chest from their popular games (and YouTube careers!) and turned it into a publishing studio to find out what they're doing differently and if its working out for them.
Turns out...yeah seems like its going good!

Also true of musicians. Too many people view music (and news) as a thing that magically shows up on their computer, and somebody somewhere should probably pay for it I guess, but not me.

journalists are workers who deserve to be paid fairly for our labor and I think that far too few consumers of media recognize or even care about this fact

The UK’s biggest union just passed a motion in support of proportional representation Delegates at UNISON’s National Delegate Conference have just backed a motion calling on the UK’s biggest union to ‘reject First Past the Post’ and for the adoption of PR

The two biggest unions in the UK have also expressed support for changing the electoral system.

So it turns out I was wrong about this. There actually is a pretty big movement in the UK to move to proportional representation. PR polls very well in the UK, Labour's party conference has voted to endorse it, as have a majority of their MPs. But the party leadership doesn't want to do it.

A lot of people cannot just start a paid newsletter or become freelancers to sustain their careers. The sports, metro, and international desks did work that requires *team* resources, like legal checks, documents, access to archives, and long-term beat experience.

The NY Times still has over half a million print subscribers. I doubt it will go out of print any time soon. But lots of local newspapers will, if they haven't already.

Remember last year when the absolute incompetents that run the Washington Post set a completely unrealistic goal of 200 million paid subscribers? Who wants to wager on whether they lost their jobs today? www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/b...

It isn't profitable, but driving all your readers away isn't going to fix that.

I subscribed to the Post until Bezos started picking it apart last year. Even living outside the US, it had lots of great reporting on international politics, one of the best climate change beats around, etc.

Really sad what Bezos is doing to the Washington Post. At this rate you wonder if there's going to be a newspaper at all 5 or 10 years from now. Who even is their target audience at this point?

Good thread from George. Like many leftists who went to college around the turn of the century I was once a keen reader of Chomsky, but for all the reasons laid out here I don't think anyone who is committed to progressive ideals should view Chomsky as an ally.

Now I want some garlic bread.

DHS Hunts Down 67-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Who Criticized Them in Email The Department of Homeland Security is using a little-known tool to go after its critics.

Floored by this story. A man wrote a pollite email to a federal prosecutor objecting to the deportation of an Afghan seeking asylum. DHS responded with an administrative warrant to get the man's info from Google, then visited his home to intimidate him.

That's been on my wishlist for a while but I still haven't played beyond the demo.

I've been playing the Dragon Quest VII demo, and I appreciate how much of the game they let you try (I'm 3 hours in and still not done), but I especially appreciate that I don't have to replay the game's opening 3 hours if I buy the game (which I will, because the demo's a lot of fun).

One of the best innovations in video games in recent years: The demo save file that lets you pick up where the demo ends if you buy the full game.

Some of their argument seems to require real cherry-picking of data. "Housing stock relative to the adult population alone has grown, from 477 dwellings per thousand adults in 1971 to 510 in 2023." OK but their own chart shows it's been flat or falling for 30 years.

I hate when that happens.

I don't know anything about the NBA salary cap but every NBA trade is something like "The LA Lakers are acquiring John Doe for fourteen first round picks. They will be invoking the Tiberius Clause in order to avoid triggering Proxima Ceiling penalties."

There are 194,999 bands registered in the Encyclopaedia Metallum, and somehow not one of them is called Render Unto Caesar. So, someone should get on that. Great band name just sitting there, unused.

From magic to malware: How OpenClaw's agent skills become an attack surface | 1Password The same capabilities that make OpenClaw a groundbreaking tool also make it an urgent security risk. This blog contains confirmed examples of agent skills being used as malware vectors, and advice on ...

The security risks of agentic AI seem pretty substantial.

But what are we supposed to do with the medians and modes of production?