The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research

Google's TPU Paradox

Why the massive Anthropic deal ($50-80 billion over six years) is a map to a thousand-customer problem.

Job Posting: Reddit Research Czar

Job postings are a kinda weird phenomenon. For one thing, they’re very modern. It used to be that most people either inherited a job (I’m a baker because my pa was a baker and our tiny hamlet needs…

Cleaning Up the Streets: Understanding Motivations, Mental Models, and Concerns of Users Flagging Social Media Content

Social media platforms offer flagging, a technical feature that empowers users to report inappropriate posts or bad actors to reduce online harm. The deceptively simple flagging interfaces on nearly all major social media platforms disguise complex underlying interactions among users, algorithms, and moderators. Through interviewing 25 social media users with prior flagging experience, most of whom belong to marginalized groups, we examine end-users’ understanding of flagging procedures, explore the factors that motivate them to flag, and surface their cognitive and privacy concerns. We found that a lack of procedural transparency in flagging mechanisms creates gaps in users’ mental models, yet they strongly believe that platforms must provide flagging options. Our findings highlight how flags raise critical questions about distributing labor and responsibility between platforms and users for addressing online harm. We recommend innovations in the flagging design space that enhance user comprehension, ensure privacy, and reduce cognitive burdens.

“CEO said a thing!”

A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like

The 15-minute city isn’t a conspiracy: it’s already here

Conspiracy theorists have the plot wrong but the symptom right: economic hardship is already limiting how far people can go

After OnlyFans, will sex workers find a new home on the web? - Los An…

archived 24 Aug 2021 23:07:36 UTC

Independent journalists are mission-driven, but financially strained, a new report says

"Journalism isn't immune to the larger trend of the gig-ification of labor."

Controversial ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ billboard campaign takes to the skies over SF

(KRON) — Anyone glancing upward while walking around San Francisco in the past few days might have noticed a now-familiar three-word marketing tagline circling overhead. On several days this …

No Jobs for Horses

In the face of automation, the free market failed completely to provide horses jobs that paid a living wage. Why this happened is critical…

Living with two clocks

Staying with unbearable thoughts, and searching for a politics that’s equal to these times.

OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco

SF chief economist warns of an 'uptick in evictions' as AI companies wreck the city.