Pri Bengani

It looks like the MIT Technology Review did the equivalent of the dril candles post but for real open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...

The new pope signed up for Twitter in 2011 with a Hotmail email address that he also used for a lot of other stuff, which is how I know that he's probably the first pope on Zynga and almost certainly the first pope on Tumblr

this is not a dunk, but the fact that this detail is blowing up despite the book it came from coming out 2 months ago shows that if you want to bury a damning scoop, put it in a book

A cityscape at twilight, from the middle of a street.

1. Can you figure out where I was standing when I took this picture?

ChatGPT could. Given the photograph (scrubbed of all header information), the new chain of thought model, ChatGPT o.3, was able to pinpoint the location with a few meters.

On TikTok, YouTube, X, and everywhere, ‘views’ are lies You might think a “view” means you watched something. You’d be wrong.

Views are the only number anyone cares about on the internet anymore. I tried once again to figure out what views mean, and I got… nothing. Views are lies.

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This looks great, can’t wait to read it!

Some news many years in the making: My book EMPIRE OF AI, out May 20, is ready for pre-order at empireofai.com. It tells the inside story of OpenAI as a lens for understanding the moment we’re in: the tech elite's extraordinary seizure of power and its threat to democracy. 1/

Lovely chart from our pals at Chartr. It does appear we are at the peak of Streaming Mountain. What’s coming next?

sherwood.news/business/bri...

Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value

I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/

Setting The Last of Us S2 trailer to You Know You’re Right is all kinds of perfect (including perfectly complementing Future Days).

An excellent breakdown. What I take from Kevin's post is the need to understand the information people are exposed to at the content (not source) level.

This emphasis on content-level analysis is partly why I'm excited by the conscientious use of LLMs as tools for large-scale, yet nuanced enquiry.

How does Finder still not have a “recently closed” / “reopen recent” menu option?

Zuckerberg’s Meta considered sharing user data with China, whistleblower alleges Meta went to extreme lengths, including developing a censorship system, in a failed attempt to bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China, according to a whistleblower complaint.

“In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, Facebook will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data — including Hongkongese users’ data,” one privacy policy staffer wrote.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

BEHIND-THIS-WEBSITE-NICAR25 Who’s Behind This Website? Priyanjana Bengani Data Reporter Bloomberg Bluesky: @acookiecrumbles.bsky.social Mastodon: @acookiecrumbles@indieweb.social Jon Keegan Tech reporter / Data journalist Sherwo...

Here are the slides for our talk “Who’s Behind This Website?” that @acookiecrumbles.bsky.social and I just gave at #NICAR25.

Slides: bit.ly/nicar25-behi...
Repo with cheatsheet: github.com/jonkeegan/be...

And here’s experimental “NICAR Website Sleuth” GPT that can help you: bit.ly/nicar-sleuth...

I'm excited to be in Minneapolis for @ire-nicar.bsky.social #NICAR25 ! If you are here, please say hello!

@acookiecrumbles.bsky.social and I will be reprising our talk about website investigations "Who's Behind That Website?" on Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m.

schedules.ire.org/nicar-2025/

Screenshot of the Apple Sports live widget that shows the timer at 102 minutes even though the game was 90+4.

The Sports live widget is great…except that the timer keeps going even after FT.

This is a shocker. Apple is winding down Advanced Data Protection in the UK, company says in press email, rather than build a backdoor for that government, which is impossible to do safely.

Every Apple user in the UK is now less safe. Other countries not affected.

Apple removing end-to-end cloud encryption feature in UK, Bloomberg News reports Apple is pulling its most advanced, end-to-end encrypted security feature for cloud data in the UK after the government ordered the company to build a backdoor for accessing user data, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

yikes www.reuters.com/technology/a...

😍🤩

wikitok.vercel.app

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

Here we go again: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Periodic reminder to give apps limited access to Photos because, if not, well:

www.theverge.com/news/606649/...

It kind-of sucks that Apple forced the EU’s hand with some of its App Store policies, because there is an alternate universe where the alt stores just don’t exist.

“The screenshots and video previews are blurred-for-obfuscation by default, but Hot Tub’s website makes pretty clear that the content it aggregates is serious porn. Figuratively speaking, they’re not fucking around. Literally speaking, that’s exactly what they’re aggregating — including an in-app “teens” channel.”

I’ve had qualms about third-party app stores from the beginning and… well…

daringfireball.net/2025/02/hot_...

What is with Apple icons lately? First Playground and now Invites. They could’ve at least tried to do balloons instead of the random colourful circles.

(And, no, this isn’t nostalgia for the good ol’ skeuomorphic days.)

“Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency.”

I am a/an: Individual/family Entrepreneur Family office/UHNW Financial intermediary Female investor Student/other

This list of options is 🤨

OpenAI quietly funded independent math benchmark before setting record with o3 OpenAI's involvement in funding FrontierMath, a leading AI math benchmark, only came to light when the company announced its record-breaking performance on the test. Now, the benchmark's developer Epo...

I know the “open” jokes have been done to death, but…

the-decoder.com/openai-quiet...

For Americans who didn't follow it, the Schrems case -- much like the TikTok case -- was driven by concern about (1) sending platform user data to a country, and (2) foreign spies getting their hands on it as a result.

@margotkaminski.bsky.social beat me to posting on this :)

Sceeenshor from Apple News showing a WSJ story right now that was published on the 12th. The timestamp on it is “45m ago.” (It’s not a time-sensitive story)

Weird one on Apple News. I read this a couple of days ago and yet it shows up right now as “45 minutes ago.” Date on the story is 12th.