The scratchpad: quick notes that don’t need a full post.
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‘I’m Not Going to Have Blood on My Hands’
An award-winning ESPN producer resigned after 24 years over the network’s embrace of sports betting.
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“Are You Ready for Everything to Look Like TikTok?”
Mia Sato reports on Mark Zuckerberg’s concession that TikTok beat him. Facebook (Meta) is apparently testing the final stage of Instagram’s full transition away from your friends and into a discovery platform.
That will be my last active day on Instagram.
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The Instability of the AI Business Model: Exhibit A
Less than three months after token-maxxing rightfully got shredded by the press, the companies using AI, and starting with the CFOs, the need to get people churning on tokens (for some reason) hasn’t subsided.
Now AI companies are compromising their own harnesses to drive unnecessary token use. As I keep saying, this is a transformative technology with a highly unstable business model.
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Beautiful Michael J. Fox PSA
If you tell me that Harrison Ford released a Parkinson’s PSA with Michael J. Fox on behalf of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, I’m watching. Pitch perfect.
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Don’t Write Articles Like this
I regularly read this awesome newsletter from Superhuman on AI. The newsletter is great. I noticed they fell into a common slop journalism pattern on this OpenAI blurb they wrote.
If you’re a journalist, reporter, or newsletter publisher: Never write an article or blurb on a person or organization’s claim or reaction to news. If you find yourself doing this, reframe your article to “Company X is making a claim. Is this true?”
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Atlantic Tracks AI Slop Phrases in Financial Reporting
And you know what? They’re quietly winning me over. /s
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You become 100x better with AI when you realize it’s usually wrong.
Two articles crossed my desk this morning: this piece from CNN and this one from The Verge on law enforcement’s use of AI.
The misuse here is devastating. But it underlines something I keep telling family, friends, and clients: you get 100x better at using AI once you realize it’s wrong 75% of the time.
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AI is ushering in better products
I love stopping in my tracks as people solve real problems we encounter and don’t think about every day.
This guy on the /r/macapps subreddit hard launched a product that actually converts a file when you change its filename.
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talking to ryan
Ryan is my best friend from Towson.
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Hanging Talking about Website Stuff
Lariza and I are hanging chatting about website building!
