Nieman Lab: “…LinkedIn has been experimenting with newsletters as a way for individuals and companies to connect with readers. There are more than 143,000 newsletters on the platform, with over 500 million subscribers. At least 150 news publishers send newsletters out regularly, said Keren Baruch, LinkedIn’s director of product. “Social media platforms feel particularly volatile… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: December 2023
ChatGPT Is Turning the Internet Into Plumbing
The Atlantic [read free]: What does life online look like filtered through a bot? By Damon Beres: “…Earlier today, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a partnership with the media conglomerate Axel Springer that seems to get us closer to an answer. Under the arrangement, ChatGPT will gain the capacity to present its users with… Continue Reading
The U.S. Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database
“The United States Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (USPVDB) provides the locations and array boundaries of U.S. ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) facilities with capacity of 1 megawatt or more. It includes corresponding PV facility information, including panel type, site type, and initial year of operation. The creation of this database was jointly funded by the U.S. Department… Continue Reading
Cheating Fears Over Chatbots Were Overblown, New Research Suggests
The New York Times [free to read]: “…According to new research from Stanford University, the popularization of A.I. chatbots has not boosted overall cheating rates in schools. In surveys this year of more than 40 U.S. high schools, some 60 to 70 percent of students said they had recently engaged in cheating — about the… Continue Reading
Legal Implications in the Brave New AI World: Copyright Infringement and Training Sets
“Keeping up with the many legal implications in our post-ChatGPT world is increasingly challenging. Stories abound with legal suits filed against OpenAI, Meta, and others for training AI models with copyrighted content. In this lunch and learn discussion October 23, 2023 [YouTube with accompanying full transcript], Mark Gross, President of Data Conversion Laboratory, and his… Continue Reading
How to Get a Satellite View of Your House Using Google Earth
MakeUseOf – Want to go beyond Google Earth’s satellite view of our Earth? “Google Earth (and Google Maps) is the easiest way to get a satellite view of your house and neighborhood. This enables anyone to go to any part of the world, get instant geographic information for that area, and even see your house… Continue Reading
FCC Closes ‘Lead Generator’ Robocall Loophole & Adopts Robotexts Rules
December 13, 2023 — “The Federal Communications Commission today adopted new rules to further protect consumers from scam communications by directly addressing some of the biggest vulnerabilities in America’s robotext defenses and closing the “lead generator” robocall/robotexts loophole. The new rules allow blocking of “red flagged” robotexting numbers, codifies do-not-call rules for texting, and encourages… Continue Reading
Proton Mail Now Has a Desktop App
How to Geek: “Proton now makes a whole suite of software geared towards privacy and security enthusiasts, following the strictest standards of encryption, but it all had its start back when the company launched Proton Mail. It was the company’s first product back in 2013, but there still hasn’t been a true desktop client. That’s… Continue Reading
How to Ask ChatGPT and Google Bard to Not Use Your Website for Training
EFF: “Both OpenAI and Google have released guidance for website owners who do not want the two companies using the content of their sites to train the company’s large language models (LLMs). We’ve long been supporters of the right to scrape websites—the process of using a computer to load and read pages of a website… Continue Reading
How Twitter Broke the News
The Verge: “Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while,… Continue Reading
Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Choi, Jonathan H. and Monahan, Amy and Schwarcz, Daniel, Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (November 7, 2023). Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-31, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4626276 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4626276 : “We conduct the first randomized controlled trial of AI assistance’s effect on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned sixty students at the… Continue Reading
Your Browser Has a Hidden Setting That Will Speed Up the Web
Gizmodo: “A lot of us now spend much of our work and leisure time peering at the web through a browser—and for that time to be spent as productively as possible, the browser in question needs to run swiftly and smoothly. There’s actually an integrated browser setting to help with this, too: Hardware acceleration. While… Continue Reading
