Matt Pearce

no

This was great

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half.

“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed." Here's my story on the accelerating growth of systemic research fraud--aka paper mills. Gift link: nyti.ms/45rDirw

So Long to Tech’s Dream Job

Silicon Valley today is dramatically changed from a year or two ago. We wrote a series of stories looking at how AI is transforming labor, landscape, innovation, and even religion. Here's my story on the 'shut up and grind' crackdown sweeping through big tech: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

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 sense of wasted intellect shrouds 2025 like a halo of wildfire smoke that won't dissipate."

Silicon Valley Is in Its ‘Hard Tech’ Era

Nice @mikeisaac.bsky.social on the vibe shift in Silicon Valley

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

Thank you!

ill read this but the title alone is so beautiful I had to say something about that aspect.

The catastrophe of knowledge work waits to be beautiful again, and interesting, and modern From "Mad Men" to the AI era, the problems of underconsumption.

I wrote about why the vibes feel so weird for knowledge workers right now. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-catast...

An aerial view of what the Gaza City area looked like this week. Taken from a Jordanian military aircraft, by our colleague Heidi Levine.

Pro Soccer Player Who Spent 125 Days At CECOT Gives Chilling Account Of His Time There “Both the physical and mental abuse doled out by the officers made me think sometimes that I would never leave that place,” Jerce Reyes Barrios said.

Trump sent Jerce Reyes Barrios to CECOT without charge, indefinitely, over a Real Madrid-inspired tattoo and a "rock&roll" hand signal. Jerce told us his story. (& he wants the world to know: “I’ll always be a fan of Real Madrid”)

w/ @jessicaschulberg.bsky.social www.huffpost.com/entry/pro-so...

tweet by @lakeeater the essence of being a marxist is reading the financial press in the morning and muttering stuff to yourself like "bold moves from Brussels.. will Washington stand for it? The situation is serious indeed.." on the way to your very normal and boring employment or education

me reading punchbowl

anime sword though

Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official

For months, people have been asking me whether I still trusted gov’t data. My answer was always the same: The stats agencies faced longstanding challenges, some of which Trump was making worse. But there was no sign of political meddling.
I can’t say that anymore.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/b...

In Defense of the Traditional Review Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future.

"There’s a special pleasure for critics in hearing from readers who are unsure whether to take a particular review as positive or negative" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Bandcamp scolds vindicated

Plato’s “Republic” is structured like a manosphere podcast, Socrates is the host and Thrasymachus is the guest and they just sit around wildly bullshitting for a few hours about the perfect society.

My plan to help young men involves telling them “go read the classics, there’s lots of great stuff full of meaning and heroism in there just for you” and also to join a union. The next big thing.

reject YouTube, embrace HEGEL

Wood siding
Naturita, CO

no need for jobs data, just put up AI barns where the rural hospitals used to be and the economy will fix itself

the news journalist in 2025 is a miner, digging up the anthracite powering the info ecosystem while nobody lays eyes on who’s actually keeping the lights on

Defunded, after decades of public service, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting its doors.

cpb.org/pressroom/Co...

Bring back blogs

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a bad blog is many more good guys with bad blogs.

Well I mean I sort of agree (I think Dr. King is one of our greatest Americans up there with Lincoln) but also Jim Crow was torn down by federal intervention, which was only possible because Abe had already drawn every drop of blood by the sword that had been drawn by the bondsman’s lash.

(Disclosure: I’m a nonviolent liberal who does essays and posts)