I would argue that reading discussion of "CEO says" "journalism" on HN will often better inform you than reading a mainstream journalist puff-piece interview of a CEO. Many journalists will not provide adversarial viewpoints, because to do so would stanch the flow of interview subjects.
"Access" is the filthy dirty word here. Can't be anything other than a stenographer because you might lose your ACCESS, with which you can do MORE stenography.
Humans are by far the most vicious animal species, because the sophistication with which they apply torture is off-the-charts. Felines and orcas may consume their prey alive or play with them, but it's not in their capacity to keep their victims alive indefinitely with the express goal of inflicting maximum suffering.
A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy.
In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.
Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.
I don’t know. Is a random YT channel more trustworthy considering their reliance on sponsorships? And once they do interviews, they face the same issue
I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …
It's not that the random YT channel is actually more trustworthy, but that it exposes the audience to adversarial perspectives which mainstream access journalists hide — thereby eroding the trust of young audiences for mainstream journalist outlets compared to previous generations for whom such adversarial perspectives were less available.
I miss when Christopher Hitchens could get on CNN as a self-identified socialist and have 10 minute discussions /in good faith/ with callers who disagreed with him. Sometimes he would put us silly Americans in our place, sometimes (less often) he would end up looking the fool. And he kept doing it regularly for a decade. Imagine that happening today
>when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.
sure because they're just making shit up. If you don't have access to a source you're by definition speculating. The fact that they can do it in an abrasive way or in attack mode is a performance of authenticity, not actual reporting. You believe them because they're "just like you".
It's the biggest curse of our time and emotional manipulation. Journalists sometimes have to navigate how they talk to people but a skilled reader can at least extract real information from it even if it requires reading between the lines. The Youtube 'reporters' add nothing, it's entertainment. They're popular to the extent that they reinterpret publicly available information in a way that confirms the biases of their audiences.
The journalist pays for access but the youtuber pays with audience capture, the difference is consumers of mainstream journalism are aware of it. Someone who reads an interview in the NYT with a mainstream politician know in advance that they'll have to be critical, 18 year old's watching youtube don't. Youtubers are infinitely more deferential to their audience than a journalist is ever going to be to an individual subject because the latter is professionally employed and the former is a cancelled subscription wave away from flipping burgers.
Mainstream journalism can't compete its way out of its malaise by insisting on an "impartiality" that demands journalists lie by omission. Such journalism is utterly incapable of meeting the moment and opposing the innovative incrementalist autocracy of Orban, Ergogan, Putin, and others.
Such feckless news organizations are destined to become tools of the state; perhaps that is in fact the smartest play for the profits of their ownership. Certainly Bezos seems to be taking WaPo down the path of collaborator, as are the Ellisons with CBS.
The illusion-of-impartiality model has its loyalists, but this article is about the young news audiences who have have been lost. At least some of them have been lost, not to YouTube and influencers, but to other news outlets (left and right) who have embraced their own biases and adversarial perspectives. You call that a "performance of authenticity", but in the marketplace it has beaten a performance of impartiality which is at least as inauthentic.
>but in the marketplace it has beaten a performance of impartiality
of course it does, the entire logic of market driven news is to cater to the attention and emotionality of a self-selected audience. Journalism cannot compete with that and still perform its function. When someone subscribes to a substack for 10$ they're not going there for facts or because the author is the equivalent of Plato, they're going there because they're sold a quasi-relationship. It's effectively Onlyfans for news.
A journalist at the WSJ say obviously has biases, but there is real impartiality both as an ideal and in practice. John Carreyrou who worked there brought Theranos down, despite Rupert Murdoch being heavily invested in the firm. (and I don't think Rupert Murdoch is the model of an ethical citizen).
'Alternative news', be it left, right, top, bottom or what have you would never do this. For one they don't engage in investigative journalism, but they also couldn't if the subject were the people their audience adores. And given that young people have been taught that the purpose of media is entertainment and gratification, you can't sell them critical analysis or factual information.
The phrase "spiritual successor to WordPress" is not likely to be judged a trademark violation, though. It doesn't create confusion in the marketplace as to whether Emdash is WordPress.
Linux distros and BSD ports did that since the 90's. When Linux distros had barely a PM or just tarballs, Infomagic sold 4 CD full of libre software. When I had no internet at home, back in the day I bought 3 DVD's of Debian Sarge for 20 euros, about $20. A bargain, it was the price of a hard-cover best seller book.
GB's of libre software, graphical install, 2.6 kernel, KDE3 desktop, very light on my Athlon 2000 with 256MB of RAM. It was incredible compared to what you got with Windows XP and 120 Euro per seat. Nonfree software and almost empty.
And, well, if for instance I could get read only, ~16TB durable USB drive with tons of Guix packages offline (in a two yearly basis with stable releases) for $200 I would buy them in the spot.
You would say that $200 for a distro it's expensive, but for what it provides, if you are only interested in libre gaming and tools, they amount you save can be huge. I've seen people spend $400 in Steam games because of the Holyday sales...
I’m cautiously optimistic that LLMs have a role in addressing that asymmetry to the side of good faith actors.
Gish galloping bad faith trolls aren’t new. LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But now, We Have The Technology, refuting a pile of poo semi-accurately should be cheap (or at least getting cheaper).
I don’t need an LLM on my phone that can do tax law in Georgia the country. But an “AI Assistant” that could highlight logical fallacies, shifting goalposts, non-responsive dialog, rhetorical obfuscations, etc, would be useful online, at the bar, and work (ie when HR tries to “HR” you, but also is lying and obfuscating about it).
We already have models and people that bullshit. Maybe refutation models are the cure… Chinese needle snakes to catch the lizards, Gorillas to catch the snakes…
This is a horrendous take. The only thing this is going to do / is already doing is increasing people's creation of their own reality bubble. LLMs are not some source of objective truth, they will inevitability lean towards reinforcing either (1) prompter's position, (2) the model trainer's position, or (3) the statistically average position, none of which are guaranteed to be logically correct. But people do take them as objective truth, so now we have a bunch of fucking morons going around saying "see, ChatGPT says so, I'm right!".
I just checked my Github settings, and found that sharing my data was "enabled".
This setting does not represent my wishes and I definitely would not have set it that way on purpose. It was either defaulted that way, or when the option was presented to me I configured it the opposite of how I intended.
Fortunately, none of the work I do these days with Copilot enabled is sensitive (if it was I would have been much more paranoid).
I'm in the USA and pay for Copilot as an individual.
Shit like this is why I pay for duck.ai where the main selling point is that the product is private by default.
It would be interesting to know whether that rule was onerous enough in practice that they had little choice but to break it in order to do their jobs effectively. They were responding to an emergency, seconds count, and they believed they had clearance from the controller.
> Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role.
And if it was the role of investigators to change policy, then there would be enormous pressure from industry to reach convenient conclusions, poisoning the investigation process.
In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again.
Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.
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