Why There Are No Weird Blogs Anymore

At the same time, though, the scope of private life itself seems to be shrinking. Our experiences are flattened by the mass culture that everyone consumes, regurgitates, remixes (and that AI is now beginning to remix for us). Social science and marketing—combined with coercive technology—turn what seem, from the first-person perspective, like deeply personal choices into statistically predictable and controllable behaviors

The company even went so far as to partner with music library services and production companies under a program called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. This saw the creation of fake or "ghost" artists that flooded Spotify with songs that were specifically designed to be pleasant and ignorable. It's music as content, not art. [...] Artists, especially new ones trying to break through, actually started changing how they composed to play better in the algorithmically driven streaming era. Songs got shorter, albums got longer, and intros went away. The hook got pushed to the front of the song to try to grab listeners' attention immediately, and things like guitar solos all but disappeared from pop music. The palette of sounds artists pulled from got smaller, arrangements became more simplified, pop music flattened

Neom -- Saudi Arabia's hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project -- is floundering and close to collapse

I have contributed to the Support over 20 years, before the beginning of support.mozilla.org.

Today, November 4, we decided to end our SUMO Japanese community

A home where "technology is always in the background, working and listening, feels anxiety-producing" instead of restorative, architect Yan M. Wang tells Axios

Steil. Diese Aussage nach nur 3 Jahren Beta-Software-Veröffentlichungen ist richtig, richtig steil.

Willkommen zurück 80er...

study from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna finds that as people's close social circles expanded from two to five friends around the rise of social media (2008-2010), polarization in society spiked

Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes — no wonder we’re addicted

LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"

study reveals that foreign suspects are mentioned three times more in German media than their actual share in police statistics, influencing public perception of crime and migration

Die japanische Regierung hat offiziell gefordert, dass OpenAI die Urheberrechtsverletzungen durch sein Sora 2 Videogenerierungs-Tool einstellt

New York City Sues Social Media Companies Over 'Youth Mental Health Crisis'

meine Stadt ist gerade so pleite, Silvester fällt dieses Jahr einfach mal aus

Inzwischen ist Neon offline, weil die Aufnahmen samt Transkripts und Useridentitäten allesamt frei im Netz gelandet sind

Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path

Meta Launches Vibes, an Endless Feed of AI Slop for Your Viewing Displeasure

Neon, the No. 2 social app on the Apple App Store, pays users to record their phone calls and sells data to AI firms

Der am Dienstag vom UN-Hochkommissariat für Menschenrechte veröffentlichte Bericht beschreibt weit verbreitete Misshandlungen wie Schläge, Elektroschocks, Scheinhinrichtungen und sexuelle Gewalt gegen ukrainische Zivilisten seit der russischen Invasion im Februar 2022