Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Shane Smith built Vice into a cultural behemoth by bluffing his way into round after round of funding — until he reached a dizzying $5.7 billion valuation from which only a precipitous fall was possible. That fall has been happening in slow motion for years, but things finally crashed to the ground in February of…
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a series of thoughtful yet straightforward questions that Murati failed to satisfactorily answer. When asked about what data was used to train Sora, OpenAI’s app for generating video with AI, Murati claimed it used publicly…
Is flying less safe? Or are we just paying closer attention? Dennis Stock / Magnum March 20, 2024, 1:03 PM ET Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in row 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to…
First, you have to gather the cash to preorder the game at the local GameStop, where your cousin works, and, even though he hooks it up with the employee discount, the game is still a bit out of your price range because you’ve been using your Taco Bell paychecks to help your pops, who’s been…
It takes some planning—and a good deal of patience—but railroad die-hards say nothing beats a long train trip through the United States. Here’s what to know before you embark. SOUND TRACKS Amtrak’s Coast Starlight service skirts the Pacific Ocean between Los Angeles and Seattle. PHOTO: AMTRAK IT WAS 4 A.M. and a toddler was relentlessly kicking the back…
A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country. The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, whose trustees…
Last November, Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, hinted at a big change in how the agency now operates. “The information that is available commercially would kind of knock your socks off,” Morell said in an appearance on the NatSecTech podcast. “If we collected it using traditional intelligence methods, it…
There are now 700 million CCTV cameras in Communist China. Those electronic eyes are attached to the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined. It has the ability not only to recognise faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured. Such capability can, and soon will, be augmented…
Almost a year after the industry outcry over made-for-advertising inventory and months since many ad-tech firms have devised solutions to address the problem, ads from large brands are still being served on spammy websites, new research from Adalytics has found. Adalytics found examples of hundreds of large brands advertising on made-for-advertising websites, facilitated by most…
You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams. People like Dakota Johnson, who have a Hollywood lineage deeper than the Mariana Trench, post only rarely. They post about social justice causes they care about, or personal announcements. Even someone like actress and musician Maya Hawke mostly posts previews of upcoming…