What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers. When I’ve spent hours scrolling through my never-ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something that was written just for me.
British Library boss: We%u2019re still healing emotionally from 2023 hackAfter two and a half years recovering from a cyberattack likened to a %u2018dirty bomb%u2019, the new interim boss hopes it%u2019s finally starting to turn a corner
Jack Kerouac%u2019s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctionedThe draft %u2013 one of the Beat Generation%u2019s defining artefacts %u2013 will be part of a wider sale of pieces from the Jim Irsay Collection at Christie%u2019s in March
English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readingsAmid the rise of artificial intelligence and concerns about distraction, more English professors are turning to no-technology policies that prioritize physical books and reading packets
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
Does that mean that people are less literate in general? Counterintuitively, there has never been a time in history when people have spent more time reading words, even if it’s just text messages on their phones. We can agree that most of this reading is less edifying than books are, but I do wonder if the downturn in book reading, and its relationship to our online habits, might be more complicated than we are inclined to conclude. It is, for instance, much easier to find information now—information we might once have looked for in books, say, and also information about the books we might consider reading. Maybe, in the age of the internet, many of us, as informed readers, only want to read one book, tailored very specifically to our interests, every couple of years.
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.
Generative AI tools are becoming increasingly capable at helping people organize, analyze, and make sense of complex information. For many performing arts organizations, low-cost AI-powered tools are now within reach and unlock features that make emergency planning more efficient and consistent.
Spoiler: the nine-person team works for Anthropic.
People’s jobs, their brains, their democratic election process, their ability to connect with others emotionally — all of it could be changed by the chatbots that are filling every corner of the internet. Many team members believe they’ll do a better job guiding how that tech is developed from the inside rather than externally. But as the exodus of engineers and researchers elsewhere shows, that idealism doesn’t always pan out for the broader AI industry.
The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition
At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I. Could we also ask Gemini to formulate this broader understanding? Sure we could, but that’s the line that we, and our students, should resist crossing. The richness of life lies in the communion with other humans through speech, the written word, sounds, and images.
A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress
The bill is set to be discussed in a hearing before a powerful House committee that’s considering the large package of kids online safety bills. It comes just as the bill has picked up a new industry supporter, Pinterest. “We need to ensure that our kids are safe and parents have peace of mind from the moment their device is first turned on,” CEO Bill Ready says in a statement. “By making app stores the center for age verification, the App Store Accountability Act sets a clear standard for youth online safety.” Companies like Meta, Snap, and X have also expressed broad support for the app store approach and applauded the federal bill when it was introduced.
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