is ai anything more than a shakedown at this point?
aside from a few very specific corporate backroom use cases, the pitch for the product currently sold as “ai” is loaded with vague, unclear benefits, marginal utility, and limited real world adoption.
then there’s another product, “ai risks”, many of which are easily identifiable to an average person (layoffs, deepfakes, calculated and miscalculated state violence without accountability), and to the c-suite cause fear and panic, resulting in massive overspending to mitigate these risks, most likely by investing in a “good” ai tool to counter the “bad” ai tool.
how long can the grift continue without any actual positive product to purchase?
He is a pretty important guy who does a lot of stuff all of the time that causes ripples throughout the entire world! I don’t read much about him beyond the headlines since I feel the same way about everything he does, but I understand why it fills up so much space.
Tbf it was different during his first term when every word he uttered made front-page news but rarely set off an actual major chain of events. That’s when I learned to tune out.
tl;dr: It sounds like we agree that the UX is good but the aggregation is bad.
To call the problem unsolvable is dismissive and makes the whole endeavor of aggregating news pointless.
The mainstream sources are in fact manufacturing the exact same consent by defining the acceptable polarity of discourse on any given topic. There are plenty of non-major news sources that offer a different perspective from the mainstream but aren’t fringe in any sense. Someone as plain as Amy Goodman comes to mind. By ignoring them all and saying the mainstream sources are of “better quality” leaves me curious to know which alternative sources are on your radar as well as your overall satisfaction with the news presented on the site.
The problem with this site specifically is it is not mashing everything together to get a general direction. It curates a specific set of sources to provide a center-right direction while explicitly ignoring the left of center POV.
Let’s assume this takes off and people find it an easily digestible way to read the news. Readers trust the product and decide that if they want to learn more about a story they can click the source links, since those must also be trustworthy. And by extension, alternative sources may not be trustworthy. Based on what you’re saying I think we both agree that these are bad conclusions, since mainstream sources routinely lie or create narratives that allow for war, death, antisemitism, Islamophobia, etc., while alternative outlets may have heavily sourced, deeply detailed reporting that wouldn’t get picked up by major press. Facts presented in a story from either type of outlet may be doctored in many ways for any number of purposes, so it’s not so simple to say a number or a survey result or anything else is “wheat”, or that any analysis is “chaff”.
UX is nice enough but suffers from same curation (center-right leaning, tech industry-directed) that makes anything like this fundamentally pointless in the long term. Designed to keep readers within the acceptable window of mainstream media that manufactures consent for war, genocide, income inequality, and other suffering at home and abroad. For example: this site taught me that there is only one (unnamed) sticking point on the Gaza ceasefire agreement! Gee, I bet it’s really going to happen this time. Also to offer an Israel section at all, let alone without a corresponding Palestine section, is dubious.
Right wingers love inventing new ways to say the same tired bs. Tbf I stopped reading somewhere between “wither the struggling landlord” and “demonstrating consistency in your worldview makes you a sheep” but did I really need to see any more?
I respect them for not immediately renaming the Gulf of Mexico in their product to cater to the whims of the current administration, enough to download the app as a situational replacement for Google Maps. But I’m confused by this. It seems even more insulting in some ways, especially since they don’t even include the most basic moderation / blocked word list.
Tried this app last week w/ an EPUB. It read all of the drop caps as individual letters, before moving on to the remaining portion of the word. It said “tilde” before each item in an unordered list. Too distracting to be of any practical use for me, unless there’s a setting I missed.