Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Screenshot the from “Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative Memorandum” You have probably heard it said that bitcoin is really bad for the environment. You might have heard it said that mining it — ie the computer processing that is required to produce new “coins” — is more energy-intensive than [insert increasingly large nation state]. It’s one…
We don’t need to tell you that things are skewing shitty right now. Thanks to the current pandemic, Americans are losing long-loved relatives, , and losing the freedom to do most things . Understandably, plenty of folks are undeniably than they’ve been in recent memory. Another bummer? It turns out that the folks being hit…
The scope of the privacy changes coming to the digital landscape is so vast, with dominant corporations skirmishing not just with each other but with foreign governments, it may seem like local news publishers have no way to be proactive. But a few of them are hoping to find strength in numbers, using a product…
A working theory of how major brands ended up in bed with War Room: Pandemic Here’s what’s new with us: How do your ads end up on Steve Bannon’s TV show? Hi folks, Nandini here. Last week, I was checking in on Steve Bannon’s latest media venture War Room: Pandemic when an odd commercial break…
Heads up, fellow T-Mobile customers: You might want to take a look at your mobile carrier’s privacy policy. As by the Wall Street Journal, the company’s latest update to its privacy policy is set to automatically enroll paying phone subscribers into an ad-targeting program that will see their data shared with unnumbered advertisers starting next…
About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…
We just think we are. A few days after the January 6th insurrection, shareholders at two major companies filed a resolution asking that Home Depot and Omnicom undertake audits to prove that their ad budgets haven’t been funding disinformation and extremism online. This, as far as we know, is the first time the link between…
On journalism, ideas, “ideas”, free speech, and tech. A while ago, I did a Q&A with a venture capitalist who had formerly worked in media. The conversation took place on Clubhouse, the explosively growing audio-driven social network. The topic was the tech industry and journalism, and the discussion had been precipitated by a few weeks…
This weekend, the New York Times published a piece by Cade Metz about Scott Siskind, the brilliant blogging psychiatrist formerly known as Scott Alexander, and the so-called “rationalist” community that grew up around his former blog, Slate Star Codex (SSC), which Siskind sunk to the bottom of the sea this summer because Metz was working…
How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times. Illustration by Ben Wiseman On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog of considerable influence, discovered that the site’s cerulean banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a barren white…