Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month? Maybe you just want the exclusives which even then they often break stuff (at least Gurman on Bloomberg, especially if you care about Apple/OpenAI).
> Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month?
They do! And I did test a subscription to Bloomberg, and subscriptions to various other sites, but I have never found it compelling enough to visit for the price on a regular basis. I get my news from a large variety of sources. I have never found it valuable to only subscribe to one source, and I simply do not have the capital to justify subscribing to all of the places that sometimes publish good articles.
Yes, so does Economist, The Verge and many many other sites.
But I'm interested in maybe 3 articles a month. If I were to pay for them it's like paying for Netflix and watching a movie a month. Or subscribing to a dead-tree newspaper and only reading the comics.
I do get that micropayments are hard, but it's not a technical issue - it never has been. It's all about credit card costs and legalese.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
I think that sort of journalism has largely been purged from the traditional sources and has ended up on Substack, or their own site. It's transitioned from "I can trust Brand X" to "I can trust that individual because of their track record and the way they reliably report things that don't align with their own world view", etc. Glenn Greenwald is an example. The story around why he had to depart The Intercept (which he helped found!) is everything that's wrong with modern journalism that has pushed people like Glenn to places like Substack.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
the parent's argument is that those companies don't really do journalism anymore, not the the companies themselves went out of business. they are more like entertainment networks.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
I think there should be more of it. Negatives for the Apple News model is that it's Apple only and there is no ad-free tier. It's also app locked so you can't use ad-blockers.
But yes, something like Apple News with an ad-free tier that works with standard websites. E.g. the participating news sites should recognize whatever service token you have and serve unpaywalled content.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
Somebody’s got to be paid to write the basic news articles. Maybe we could have a government funded “basic news” (although there are obvious concerns that that might turn into a propaganda service).
We could call it the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it could directly fund local news stations. It could be a hybrid public/non-profit where the government funds some, members stations fund some, and donations fund the rest.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
> Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
That’s ok I was already doing the whole “obliquely reference things that already exist in the abstract as if they were a novel idea” bit; you doubling down on it kind of makes it better.
There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.
The small handful of news sites I willingly subscribe to are in my RSS reader (where stories are even more de-junked than is possible in a browser), so paywalled sites showing up in search adds no value.
If a news site wants to join the ranks of my RSS feeds they need to be of high enough quality that their reputation does more work than paywalled search results do.
I'd actually want to know if it is a paid website BEFORE clicking on it.
Nothing worse than clicking on it, and after 5 seconds you get the naggy pop-up that disables the scrolling. Now I need to send it to archive.ph to read it.
I'm fine with a paywall, but put it above, don't interrupt me as I am reading.
Not all news sites are paywalled (reuters for e.g) and if I use a paid search engine like Kagi I'm not looking to experience unwanted advertisement (paywalls are an ad.)
I have this same idea about why it's hard to remember dreams, but even more so, why it's hard to remember my kid's or spouse's sleep-talking.
Sometimes I'll check in on my sleeping kid and she'll sit up in bed and say some utter nonsense. I'll find it hilarious, giggle silently to myself, and kiss her goodnight again and she'll close her eyes and lie back.
Why I try to tell her about her sleep-talking in the morning, though, I find that the words she said have completely disappeared from my memory, no matter how funny I thought they were at the time.
In my head-canon, this is because it's dream language, and slips away as easily as dreams. But, like the AI art, it could be because it's bullshit: completely devoid of content, all signifiers and no signified.
I went through a phase of leaving notepads next to my bed to try to write down my dreams and it simply never worked.
I stopped after I wrote something on the pad while I was still asleep. Woke up to text with letters that were backwards, upside down, weird words — so close to real words that I was sure I ought to know what they meant and had really meant to write them down.
Scared me. Literally too weird to keep. I tore up the page.
In a way I think this is one part of the same continuum. There are thoughts that have meaning and can have no words, and words that look like they should have permanent memorable meaning and don't.
Genuinely unsettling. Can’t even begin to explain why. Like a terrifying glimpse into how fragile our grasp of reality is. Because whatever it is I wrote down wasn’t my dream, it was something my dream self thought profound or important.
Nearest I can say to how unsettling it was is to nudge you towards the video of the angry cockatoo who doesn’t want to go to the vet. Everything he says sounds just like it’s on the edge of having meaning.
Imagine something like that, something important, so close to symbolic meaning, only writing. In letter shapes that we don’t use. And you wrote it while semi-conscious. If that’s something you would want to keep, you’re a braver person than me.
This explanation again doesn’t get it across. Too weird.
The memories of dreams evaporate remarkably quickly. Much faster than anything else. It can't be accidental; I think our waking brains must be purging those memories as a matter of urgency. If we remembered them, we'd "learn" from them, which would be a catastrophe.
You know how you try to run in a dream, and you don't get anywhere? Imagine if your motor cortex started to expect that, when you're awake. It would destroy you.
That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment.
Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?
The food “photography” I’ve noticed in our local area - and many have started putting up these AI images - all have a weird distribution of shapes to them, a strangely uniform rhythm of same-sized features with almost blue-noise spacing. Every texture looks unnatural in the shapes it presents as, similar to this picture.
This is a quirk of the last gpt image model (gpt-image-2). It put this sort of high frequency noise on all of the image especially if it's in a "drawn" style. There is often lots of other tells that this model in particular generated it.
Image models somewhat watermarking the image in a way that's very easily identifiable by a human seems present in all the image models of the big labs, since DALL-E 3 on OpenAI's side and the first nano banana on Google's side. I have no idea what they did to reach this and why they don't try to fix it.
It doesn't look like a quiche but more like a cake to me, and the top would be torched meringue, not mold. Although it's probably some weird ai mix of quiche and cake.
I never understand why I can get better results, with less thinking about it, than some of the Tier1 companies.. Modern diffusion models can easily render the image onto a white background, center it, crop it, relight it, but keep the same item, at no cost, or low cost.
These kinds of images are disingenuous. Modern image generating models have way higher quality of output, and in most cases you wouldn't even know it is generated.
That's not what we're exposed to, though. I've seen AI-generated postcards, t-shirt decals, logos and wall murals in shops and restaurants. They don't use the "good" models, because why would they? If they AI-generated it, it's because they didn't care about the quality anyway.
> If they AI-generated it, it's because they didn't care about the quality anyway.
No? There are far far more AI generated images you see daily, than the awful stuff from 2024 that you immediately discern as AI-generated. You could as well pass by somethimg like this (https://ideogram.ai/g/d6YzZ5XQQ56TU3Tc8eZw6w/0) believing it is a genuine photo or human made art.
> That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup
[One paragraph later]
> the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015.
So.... It did dissuade them away from their original vision and towards something suggested by critics and experts.
I hate it when people cite someone changing their mind about something as a gotcha or a fault. So they switched towards a better direction seven years ago! But the rest of the article is still about how terrible the old idea was, and how it proves that people have an "only I can fix it mentality," when it actually proves the exact opposite!
> their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.
I'm curious to know how many animals die from the plastic. This article seems to think that any deaths caused by cleanup are reason to stop. Just like people who point to dead birds as reasons to ban wind turbines, despite far more wildlife being at risk from a warming planet.
It's quite possible that ocean cleanup efforts do more damage, I don't know, but the article doesn't even try to grapple with quantifying it. It's just a fear-mongering screed.
I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers.
Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."
But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.
Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.
Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.
But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.
I think this is one of the more important points in this thread.
The problem is that too many pieces require experiences that the majority of the classroom just doesn't have.
It's not that students don't venture far enough into the cave to find the treasure, it's that the treasure literally isn't treasure to them yet.
The venturing that needs to happen for them to find the treasure isn't time spent in the material, it's time spent gaining life experiences.
Ex - there was nothing you could have done to make a book like "The Great Gatsby" good for me as a 15 year old. It's filled with themes that I had no experiences to connect with - no lost romances, no wealth (or even really a sense of wealth and money), no major life regrets, nothing at all to make this book hit. It's a dreary book about miserable, unlikable people when read from the perspective of a 15 year old student.
So why are we asking 15 year old students to read this book?
And that doesn't mean we can't throw students in over their heads every now and then (ex - exposure to the unfamiliar is fine). But if that's all you give them... they decide reading is pointless. You have to strike a middle ground with material that hits home.
And there's a range of teacher quality here as well - some are genuinely good at pushing students towards understanding the value in material, even if they lack experiences. But most aren't (at least in the US educational system I went through, which was a mix of decent public schools and expensive private schools)... they're passionate and well intentioned, but fail to empathize with the emotional maturity and world view of their young students.
This is tough, because as this newsletter gets at - sometimes things will simply smack you in the face. The only way to get that underlying experience is through experiencing more.
My two favorite books I read in high school were "The Crucible", and "The Sun Also Rises". Neither had an ounce of relatability to my life, I had no prior experience that should let me connect with a disillusioned generation of WWI vets or puritans scared of the woods. But I did have a phenomenal AP Lit teacher that conveyed the context enough for me to have a starting point and then get lost in the characters and environments and let the quality of the work carry it from there.
I found Gatsby less appealing, but at least two of my friends fell in love with it that year.
No book is going to do it for everyone, especially in a class like that where the point is working your way through cultural history.
I think you nail it with the range of teachers being the crux. There's just so much riding on whether or not you really connect with a teacher's way of conveying excitement or not.
That pedantic ship has sailed. In everyday communication people use "AI" as a shorthand for saying "LLM," even if they know perfectly well that other forms of AI exist. You can tell this by context, no need to tell people that there are other kinds of AI.
Right, it's a small little intro that goes a long way.
I checked the habhub website and found this blurb:
"habhub is the home of high altitude ballooning tools developed by UKHAS, and the SondeHub team. The habitat database was retired in 2022, replaced by the SondeHub database and tracker."
This intro was also quite helpful, which I found on the Sondehub github page:
"SondeHub started out in 2019 as a database and mapping system for tracking meteorological radiosondes. It's hosted in Amazon Web Services, so it is scalable and reliable (though does cost more to run...). SondeHub is run by a small team lead by x, y and is currently funded through Patreon Sponsors and a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications. SondeHub handles many millions of radiosonde telemetry packets a day, with telemetry contributed by over 700 unique receiver stations."
I didn't include the names because it wasn't the purpose of the comment, just a nice way to introduce the story.
I understand that the habhhub shutdown is part of the story that they later reveal, and now folded into/adapted into Sondehub:
"HabHub, the Habitat database, and associated utilities have been hosted on a server donated by Nevis (name) since 2011. However, due to ongoing issues with server maintenance and rising power prices, continued hosting has become untenable. In addition to this, the software behind the Habitat servers has become extremely difficult to maintain, and a very large amount of work would be required to port it to a more modern operating system."
Do they even have any idea that their ads are showing up for the specific competing doctor? Isn't Google the one deciding where the ads are most valuable?
If they don’t know, showing up and telling them will let them know.
If you excuse the effects that people’s actions have because they didn’t realize they were causing them, you guarantee that those effects will never stop.
Yup. If every person that got misdirected by an ad went into the offenders business and raised hell, they would probably decide that it wasn’t worth it.
