Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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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 "Pluralistic: Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (25 Sept 2023)"
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"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Down in the (link)dumps (23 Sept 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Biden should support the UAW (18 Sept 2023)"
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.
The last time I saw the late, great Eric Flint was at the 2018 World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, where we both participated (along with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Olav Rokne and Eileen Gunn) in an excellent panel about the working class in sf.
Eric was an extraordinary writer and an even more extraordinary character. A Marxist meat-packers’ union organizer whose whole labor career was spent in the brutal trenches of Chicago Machine politics, Eric was also a towering figure in the subgenre of historical military science fiction, a field that is otherwise dominated by right-wingers, including numerous out-and-out kooks who endlessly fantasize about Bronze Age battles being re-fought with jets and mustard gas (for the record: Eric isn’t the only progressive voice in this field; others, like Harry Turtledove, bring a humanizing, leftist view to their work).
Continue reading "The proletarianization of tech workers"
