Pluralistic: Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon" energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss (20 Oct 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon" energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss (20 Oct 2023)"

Pluralistic: Stellantis wants to make scabbing woke; The Lost Cause prologue, Part V (11 Oct 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Stellantis wants to make scabbing woke; The Lost Cause prologue, Part V (11 Oct 2023)"

Pluralistic: Union pensions are funding private equity attacks on workers (05 Oct 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Union pensions are funding private equity attacks on workers (05 Oct 2023)"

How the Writers Guild sunk AI’s ship

No one’s gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can’t fire their workers.

A wrecked, listing, rusting tanker whose side is emblazoned with the menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ In the foreground, a woman dressed in a natty 1930s skirt-suit holds a WGA picket sign that reads, ‘I asked ChatGPT to write a sign and it SUCKED.’”
Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

After a grinding, 148-day strike, the Writers Guild of America ran the table, conceding virtually nothing and winning virtually everything.

The most consequential outcome will be data on streaming viewership. For the studios, these numbers are state secrets, revealed on a need-to-know, burn-before-reading basis, even within the studios themselves.

Continue reading "How the Writers Guild sunk AI’s ship"

Pluralistic: Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (25 Sept 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (25 Sept 2023)"

Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit

“I want to do it, now make me do it.”

A vintage photo of strikers in front of a factory. The image has been altered to insert a 'Dank Brandon' image of Joe Biden with red laser eyes, a UAW pin on his lapel. He looms over the strikers, who have been altered to carry UAW ON STRIKE signs. A General Motors sign has been inserted onto the factory. A sunrise emerges over the factory building. Image: Fabio Basagni https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sahara_desert_sunrise.jpg CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Fabio Basagni/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified)

Joe Biden will join striking workers on a UAW picket-line in Detroit on Tuesday.

No sitting president in US history has ever walked a picket line with strikers.

This is a big deal.

It’s great.

Continue reading "Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit"

Pluralistic: Down in the (link)dumps (23 Sept 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Down in the (link)dumps (23 Sept 2023)"

Pluralistic: "Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (21 Sept 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: "Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics (21 Sept 2023)"

Pluralistic: Biden should support the UAW (18 Sept 2023)


Today's links

Continue reading "Pluralistic: Biden should support the UAW (18 Sept 2023)"

How To Think About Scraping

In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best.

A paint scraper on a window-sill. The blade of the scraper has been overlaid with a ‘code rain’ effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis’ ‘Matrix’ movies.
syvwlch/CC BY 2.0 (modified)

Web-scraping is good, actually.

For nearly all of history, academic linguistics focused on written, formal text, because informal, spoken language was too expensive and difficult to capture. In order to find out how people spoke — which is not how people write! — a researcher had to record speakers, then pay a grad student to transcribe the speech.

The process was so cumbersome that the whole discipline grew lopsided. We developed an extensive body of knowledge about written, formal prose (something very few of us produce), while informal, casual language (something we all produce) was mostly a black box.

The internet changed all that, creating the first-ever corpus of informal language — the immense troves of public casual speech that we all off-gas as we move around on the internet, chattering with our friends.

Continue reading "How To Think About Scraping"