📡 – 2023-12-29
image via dall•e
🖋️
Friends, hello – a brief pre-New Year 📡 to get the new Buttondown system up and running (check the last email for details if you need them).
I believe I've managed this in such a way that everyone who wanted to stay subscribed did, and anyone who wanted out wasn't brought over from Substack.
If you meant to unsubscribe, and are getting this email: my bad! There is an unsubscribe link at the very bottom of this email if you need it. <3
👂
📚
The NY Times Lawsuit Against OpenAI Would Open Up The NY Times To All Sorts Of Lawsuits Should It Win
In the end, though, the crux of this lawsuit is the same as all the others. It’s a false belief that reading something (whether by human or machine) somehow implicates copyright. This is false. If the courts (or the legislature) decide otherwise, it would upset pretty much all of the history of copyright and create some significant real world problems.
Part of the Times complaint is that OpenAI’s GPT LLM was trained in part with Common Crawl data. Common Crawl is an incredibly useful and important resource that apparently is now coming under attack. It has been building an open repository of the web for people to use, not unlike the Internet Archive, but with a focus on making it accessible to researchers and innovators. Common Crawl is a fantastic resource run by some great people (though the lawsuit here attacks them).
All games affected by China's monetization ban
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/all-games-affected-by-china-s-monetization-ban/ar-AA1lVHjs
In a surprise move, the Chinese government has released a series of heavy restrictions on games, affecting their monetization techniques. These restrictions include an outright ban on events such as daily log-in bonuses, top-up incentives, and loot boxes. The ban impacts all titles, regardless of their release date-past, present, and future-within China. If enforced, it could lead to significant consequences for established industry leaders like Tencent.
Let’s Rescue Book Lovers From This Online Hellscape
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/opinion/goodreads-books-reviews.html
If you have not kept up with the latest scandal in the world of young adult publishing, it is a doozy. It involves a debut author with a lot of buzz, lies, clumsy alibis, “review bombing,” a long and sordid confession — and, of course, Goodreads. Because whenever there is a meltdown in publishing, Goodreads, the Amazon-owned site that bills itself as “the largest site for readers and book recommendations,” is reliably at the center of it.
You might wonder if Goodreads isn’t just an enabler of scandal but the problem itself.
Do users want platform moderation or individual control? Examining the role of third-person effects and free speech support in shaping moderation preferences
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448231217993
This study examines social media users’ preferences for the use of platform-wide moderation in comparison to user-controlled, personalized moderation tools to regulate three categories of norm-violating content—hate speech, sexually explicit content, and violent content. Via a nationally representative survey of 984 US adults, we explore the influence of third-person effects and support for freedom of expression on this choice. We find that perceived negative effects on others negatively predict while free speech support positively predicts a preference for having personal moderation settings over platform-directed moderation for regulating each speech category. Our findings show that platform governance initiatives need to account for both actual and perceived media effects of norm-violating speech categories to increase user satisfaction. Our analysis also suggests that users do not view personal moderation tools as an infringement on others’ free speech but as a means to assert greater agency over their social media feeds.
📹
Phill Niblock 90th Birthday Winter Solstice: 24 Hours of Music and Film #2
CAN YOU BUILD A RHODES?
🕹️
Normally this is the period of the year when I start (and never return to "finish") A Big Dwarf Fortress Game, but we've just moved and the Videos Games are still packed up. There's a little bit of downtime in what feels like a particularly-bizarro Bizarro Period of the year – so maybe I've just inspired myself to dig out the Steam Deck.
What're y'all playing?
There are no comments on Buttondown – at least not without an integration, perhaps, and I haven't dug into those yet – but if you reply to this email it'll go straight to my inbox.
😎
Last RIP Corp of 2023! In which Ingrid talks to writer and researcher Tim Hwang of the Institute for Progress, Trade Journal Cooperative, and more about the Corps We Lost This Year. Get it wherever you get your pods. Spotify embed follows because it's what Buttondown currently supports:
✌️
That's all I have for you for now, and for 2023 – I hope you have a fun and safe end to your year doing exactly what you want with exactly the people you want to be doing it with. Thanks for everything in 2023, and here's to more in 2024! 🍾 See you there. xo