“He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.” ~ Quotes by Epictetus | Greek Stoic Philosopher | From Slave to Stoic Philosopher |
It’s Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe—for NowForeign Policy
Wall Street Consensus a la FrançaisePhenomenal World
Nieman Lab: “…Gannett has eliminated 59% of its jobs in four years. It’s as if, instead of merging America’s two largest newspaper chains, one of them was simply wiped off the face of the earth. That’s a cut substantially deeper than the rate of newspaper revenue decline. Why? Well, one reason is that to get the merger done, Gannett had to take out a giant loan at high interest rates, meaning hundreds of millions in revenues have had to be redirected to debt payments. To put it in perspective: In Q4 2022, digital subscriptions at Gannett newspapers — all of them — brought in a total of $35.5 million. But the company spent more than that, $47.3 million, just on debt payments. (This may remind you of Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of Twitter, driven by the same sort of M&A debt.) You can also see the shrinkage in the number of newspapers Gannett publishes. In 2019, post-merger, it owned 261 daily and 302 weekly newspapers. By the end of 2022, those totals were 217 daily and 175 weekly newspapers. Some of that decline is Gannett selling a few newspapers to local buyers, but a lot of it is straight-up closures. Last spring, Gannett shuttered 24 weekly newspapers here in the Boston area alone…”
The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf Worries About Europe’s Future but Oddly Not the US’
Martin Wolf’s musings about what lies in store for Europe has a huge blind spot as far as the US is concerned.
ChatGPT for Data Science Cheat Sheet
KD Nuggets: “…The problem that we are currently grappling with is one of expectations: some expect that ChatGPT is nothing more than a stochastic parrot that produces rubbish and is completely useless, while others seem to think (either pessimistically or optimistically, depending on who you ask) that ChatGPT will be taking over the world, while either ridding us of monotony or laying waste to human civilization.
If we all tempered our expectations and recognized this technology for what it is, and what it could be useful for, we would all be far better off.
But in the era of outrage and hyperbole, nuance takes a back seat to hot takes. But I digress. ChatGPT (and, indeed, the most robust and latest versions of GPT3) is meant to assist (that’s right… assist!) humans that decide to use it as such, and with a little help from your friends at KDnuggets you will be able to hone your prompt engineering skills to do useful things like generate code, assist in your research process, and analyze data. For more on ChatGPT for data science, check out our latest cheat sheet.”
Key Agencies Missing from Central Freedom of Information Act Portal
