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abekatz.bsky.social
Life: stand outdoors and play music Job: fight epistemic crises at a computer Product Policy at Discord Teaching public policy at Duke Former Meta feed integrity, misinfo, and governance (oversight board) Views are my dog’s; I am a vacuous mouthpiece.
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This piece is a beautiful model of the libertarian view of social tech- strongly recommend reading. Inserra argues for a discrete “free speech” team in the content policy org, as if the very firm’s raison d’etre isn’t already to maximize sessions and engagement.

AND WE'RE HATCHED! ROOST launches at the #ParisAIActionSummit, bringing together tech companies and philanthropies to deliver free, open-source safety tools. Join us 👉 roost.tools

In my self-defense classes I focus on how most people are socially conditioned to follow the norms of a civilized, polite society — and there is a MENTAL SHIFT required to use violence to defend from violence. I'm reminded of this while watching our elected officials dithering and delaying. 1/

Great reporting and another example of the “Klepto-Pluto Null Hypothesis.” There is no ideology driving these actions but greed.

Is there a good, non-proprietary alternative for web indexing other than Google Search?

Great synopsis of a fast-moving development. AND good assumptions about Stargate (bs) and VC incentives for market-creation (inflate value), more examples of the klepto-pluto null hypothesis.

All coverage/analysis/discussion of Trump actions must start from the kleptocracy assumption. The null hypothesis is that everything he does can be explained by “self-enrichment by any means” (lies, threats, misdirection, fraud).

The fact that Jonathan Greenblatt is still in charge of the ADL is strong evidence that cancel culture hasn’t gone far enough.

@willoremus.com in today’s Tech Brief you look at what DOGE portends, compared to USDS. How did you decide to treat DOGE as a substantive, good faith Exec initiative, like USDS, rather than as a rhetorical/propaganda strategy for hurting public views of Gov’t? s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?tra...

Is there a ATproto server and client not owned by Bluesky yet? Or are we still just going on faith that that this social tech will be the good guy this time?

Trump is a walking gish gallop. “Gulf of America” and Panama Canal and Greenland is noise - Editors need to dramatically raise the threshold on what they’ll cover. This is noise - maybe purposeful, to distract from H1-B and sentencing news cycles - but we should spend zero neurons on it.

Excellent piece synthesizing a lot of the key structural problems (and opportunities!) in our field.

I like @mmasnick.bsky.social writing on the fediverse, especially in the last ~1.5 years. But the ActivityPub (Mastodon) v AT Protocol (BlueSky) gap: can inter-operating these happen, or are we fragmenting the social web such that the Big Incumbent Walled Gardens will always win the network effects?