Can mushrooms prevent mega fires? WaPo
Why many men reject the mode of discourse found in therapy
The Last Social Network Ed Zitron, The Last Social Network. “Social media companies have been trying to recreate the magic of Facebook’s endless revenues without realizing that the only way to create the rotten economics of Meta’s stock is to abuse the user into submission.”
Meta Threads engagement has dropped off since red-hot debut, tracking firms say CNBC
Threads Emerge Tools. A software teardown. “Threads team wanted to move fast and took whatever code it could from Instagram and shoved it where it needed to go.”
* * * “Artificial Intelligence Will Destroy Truth”(interview) Amitai Etzioni, Der Spiegel (Furzy Mouse).
AI’s dark in-joke ABC Australia. Not only does AI = BS, AI = cheating. Very profitable, and perfectly in line with Silicon Valley values. So it’s a two-fer.
Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct for Freedom? Matt Taibbi, Racket News. Well worth a read
JournalistsToolbox.ai
Created by Mike Reilley, Founder and Editor of Journalist’s Toolbox Ai: “A few years ago, I was doing a digital tools training for a group of journalists in Phoenix. One of the attendees took me to task for saying that a surge of AI tools would be coming in the next few years. “Google uses AI all the time,” he said. “This is nothing new.”
He was partly right: Google and other companies have used AI components for many years. But he was clueless about the gold rush of AI tools and resources that were to come. So when the gold rush hit in late 2022 and early 2023, I began to think about a stand-alone website dedicated only to AI tools, ethics and best practices. Journalists would need help navigating the complex, often troubled waters of artificial intelligence tools. Where could they turn? So in June, I built JournalistsToolbox.ai.
The site includes links to hundreds of AI tools for writing, editing, image and video creation, data visualization tools, productivity, and, most importantly, ethics and best practices. I’ll be adding more resources – at least five a day – in the coming weeks and months. I also have been publishing this free, twice-monthly Substack newsletter…It features new tools, exercises and training videos that also appear on our free YouTube channel.”
Data scientists predict stock returns with AI and online news
Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science – “For years, the financial press has helped inform investors of all stripes. Cornell researchers have discovered it can also inform the algorithm behind a new financial predicting model. In their paper, “News-Based Sparse Machine Learning Models for Adaptive Asset Pricing,” published in Data Science in Science in April, the researchers draw from interdisciplinary fields such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and finance to build a new, interpretable machine-learning framework that captures stock- and industry-specific information and predicts financial returns with greater accuracy than traditional models.
“One of the knocks on machine learning is it’s not interpretable,” said Martin Wells, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Sciences in the Cornell Ann. S Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the paper’s senior author.
“Often when researchers use big models such as these, they may not know what the outputs mean or what is underlying the model. This research leverages text data from the news to build interpretable machine-learning models where you can see the important features explicitly.”
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs body doubling edition
Consultant Micha Goebig scrolled through her phone to find receipts and bill clients while on her home computer on Friday afternoon. Nine strangers quietly watched her on a video link while also doing their own solo work.
The small group was gathered online by Flow Club, a subscription service that says it can help home-based workers stay on task and be productive by quietly working in tandem. The online session was built around body doubling, a productivity strategy gaining traction among remote and hybrid employees who say they get more done if others are looking on.
Body doubling, initially adopted by and coined by ADHD therapists, is one of several ways that workers are trying to regain focus and accountability when they aren’t working under the watchful eyes of bosses and colleagues in the office. A number of companies have sprung up to offer what they say is positive peer pressure that can boost productivity.
Here is the full WSJ piece, interesting throughout. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
