ChatGPT is powered by these contractors making $15 per hour. Two OpenAI contractors spoke to NBC News about their work training the system behind ChatGPT. One worker, Alex Savreux, says the AI gig work helped pull him out of homelessness.

Steven Spainhouer’s son was working at Allen Premium Outlets when he received the phone call no father ever wants to hear.

“He said, ‘Dad, we have a shooting … I’m pulling people into the break room, and we’re going to lock the door,’” Spainhouer told CNN on Sunday.

The former Army and police officer raced to the scene, called 911 and “started counting the bodies on the ground … one, two, three, five, six, seven bodies.”

Spainhouer said he saw devastation unlike anything he had seen in the Army.

“I never imagined in 100 years I would be thrust into the position of being the first responder on the site to take care of people,” Spainhouer told CNN affiliate KTVT.

“The first girl I walked up to … I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side, and she had no face.”

He said one child survived after his mother shielded him from the bullets. But the mother was struck and killed.

“When I rolled the mother over, he came out,” Spainhouer told KTVT. “He was covered from head to toe, like somebody had poured blood on him.”

Texas mall massacre gunman identified as witnesses describe horror of the shooting spree that killed 8 people

Marissa Mayer says she wishes she’d bought Hulu or Netflix instead of Tumblr. She also talks about the AI search race, technology fears, and other Yahoo regrets. (Tech Brew)

AI text generators are writing more of the internet. More AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content. By Will Oremus at The Washington Post.

This seems to affect content mills paying pennies. I’m not worried—and I’m learning to use AI to make myself a more effective writer.

TikTok tracked users who watched LGBTQ content. (WSJ) Imagine what a backward religious dictatorship like Saudi Arabia or Alabama could do with that information.

Elon Musk’s goal for Twitter is “unregretted user-minutes.” (WSJ) A good idea, but how do you measure that?

Republicans have the answer to food insecurity in America: More guns, ban abortion, and stamp out drag shows.

Lines stretch down the block at food banks as costs go up and pandemic aid expires.

The line outside Boston’s American Red Cross Food Pantry on a recent Saturday morning stretched the length of two football fields. The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.

His organization, like food banks across the country, has been flooded with requests for help since food-stamp recipients were hit with a double blow: the expiration of a temporary boost in benefits put in place during the pandemic and onerous grocery prices, which are running 24% above pre-COVID levels.”

Parents are depriving their children of food to make the food budget last longer.

By Michael Dorning at Bloomberg News.

The oats only need to soak two hours and I have an excellent battery case for the phone. Me vs. Monday is a tie so far.

I’ve been awake less than a half hour and already found I forgot to make overnight oats last night and my phone is only 7% charge. Does Monday have a reset button?

Corporate greed, not workers, is the cause of inflation. We know this because CEOs tell us:

Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it’s reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.

Amazingly, this is a controversial position!

Cory Doctorow: “Look at all the great stuff we lost because of inflation scare-talk: We swapped pandemic aid, new spending and minimum wage hikes for wage suppression and mass layoffs.”

“Insufficiently Caffeinated” would be a good name for a band.

“… when you refuse to learn why something weird is happening online and just stop and gawk at it, you miss what is always a more interesting story.” — Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day

A good rule, online and in the world.

Dave Winer: “I definitely want Bluesky to just go away. I don’t like it because if it gains traction it has potential of replacing Twitter as the festering turd in the middle of what should have been a vibrant growing market that keeps anything else from rising in competition with it."

Dave Winer: “As a user, I no longer want to have to visit five sites to see what’s new. I no longer want to have to copy/paste my writing into those same five sites." Preach it, Dave. I’m sick of that copy-pasting.

Ostromizing democracy: Cory Doctorow discusses a proposed new subdiscipline of political science, Analytic Democracy Theory, that studies collective decision-making—a/k/a “democracy”—and particularly how it goes wrong.

Also: Libertarians are claiming democracy never works because it doesn’t always work. And the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons and other anti-democratic misconceptions.

A new study by researchers at Duke University looks at the bumpy rollout of AI in healthcare systems, and describes what it’ll take to make AI into a useful tool for healthcare providers.

Meanwhile, a study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that ChatGPT “decisively bested doctors at providing high-quality, empathic answers to medical questions people posed on the subreddit r/AskDocs.” The responses were judged by a panel of three physicians with relevant medical expertise.

(Ars Technica / Beth Mole)

Nature red of tooth and claw came to the backyard: I was hanging here at my desk doing my thing and I looked out the window and saw a big bird of prey on the ground. I think it was an osprey, perhaps one of the ones I’ve seen at the park. It was 18 inches to 2 feet high, with something brown and lumpy at its feet, which I took to be dinner.

I got out the Nikon, which lives at my desk because we occasionally do get wildlife in the backyard. But the battery was dead! Curses!

I watched for a while, as the bird attempted to get off the ground with the carcass in its clutches. A couple of big crows were making a fuss too.


Finally, I went out on the deck and the bird skedaddled.

The brown lump turned out to be an ex-rabbit.

Julie tried to scoop up the rabbit with a couple of rakes, and into a trash bag, but that didn’t work, So she finally just picked up the rabbit with her hands covered in a plastic trash bag, the way a person does when picking up dog poop. After giving the rabbit a proper ceremony (“Bye-bye, bunny,” we said) he or she went into the trash bin.

And that was the excitement this afternoon.

Things I post that people seem to enjoy:

• Original stuff I write or photograph
• Memes, vintage ads, and other found media from the Internet.

On the other hand, very few people seem to care about links to articles, and I’m starting to get a strong “what’s the point?” feeling about my doing that kind of thing. I started linkblogging 15 or so years ago, when social media was very different and my boosting the signal–even in a small way–seemed to matter.

I will continue to post links to my own articles, but what’s the point of my posting a link to an article on The Washington Post, The Atlantic, or even to articles by people like Cory Doctorow and John Gruber who are a hundred times more widely read than I am?

I have been using Grammarly for a few weeks, and I am extremely impressed.

Today’s insight: I can toggle checking for the Oxford comma. I can switch it on for clients that like the Oxford comma, and off for clients that don’t.

Self-appointed virtue police at the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) are putting the heat on Reddit to ban porn.

“If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it’s not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they’ll just nuke porn out of convenience,” a moderator for … a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. Like many adult subreddits, posts focused on a specific fetish come from both adult performers promoting their work, and other users who are reposting adult content they lifted from other sites without permission. “Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It’s just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I’m very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic.”

The moderator pointed out that bills like FOSTA/SESTA—which NCOSE supported and which is largely considered a failure—drive sex workers further underground to one effect: causing more precarity to workers.

“If they win, everyone loses, including themselves,” the mod said. “Likewise, in getting all the big, well-moderated porn sites taken down, these demented religious perverts will inevitably drive all porn underground into closed communities where there is no moderation or control whatsoever. It’s completely backwards. Big sites like Reddit are significantly safer and better moderated than the internet in general. Driving all porn underground is profoundly dangerous and stupid. These anti-sex religious groups are all alike: they’re all depraved, repressed perverts. Absolutely demented, brain-damaged imbeciles, absolutely self-defeating, too stupid to think two seconds in front of their faces.”

Emphasis added by me because I so, so love that quote.

Another porn moderator said:

“Do I particularly care about the fate of my subreddit should such a ban be applied? No. I don’t make money here, and moderation takes a time out of my day. I’ll start collecting post stamps, like my father before me.”

— Samantha Cole and Emmanuel Maiberg at Vox.com

I saw these baby geese and momma goose at the park this morning. Gosling photos will continue until morale improves. 📷

Using the word “risible” makes you a pompous weenie.

Optimism Optimized & Pessimism Prodded

“An interview about THE FUTURE with Hugo Winning author CHARLES STROSS! Fumblingly carried out by John Shirley:”

• The Singularity “uncritically subsumes patterns of belief that originated in Christianity…. “

• The Singularity’s origin in “the writings of the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov in the late 19th century…. “

• “… it looks from where I’m standing as if many self-avowed atheists and rationalists are actually replacing the religion they rejected with an elaborate framework of beliefs that are structurally indistinguishable from it.”

• Also: The slowing rate of IT progress, “information pollution,” and how hackers could create armies of assassins using smart light bulbs. “We’ve created a hideous grifters paradise, where everybody needs to know stuff that only network security administrators needed to be aware of a couple of decades ago, and made it a terrible time to be a paranoid schizophrenic.