FeedCity

Pavel Durov’s arrest over the weekend was shocking. It was also inevitable

Molly White after speaking at XOXO:

I mentioned that I’ve been feeling this a lot over the last few years, even as I too am witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. Working outside of that rot pile, and perhaps motivated by it, there are so many people who are excited about the potential for a better web.

New AI-based Alexa set to launch in October, possibly as a $10 subscription:

The revamp of the voice assistant, which documents say will include a daily AI-generated news summary, would come just weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

I think this price will be a tough sell, but running AI does cost money. It’s just that Alexa is not a productivity tool in the way ChatGPT Plus can be.

When the state of New York became the first in the nation to require public schools to test their drinking water for lead in 2016, students learned that dozens of water fountains across the district were contaminated. Since then, a group of students and parents have banded together to fight for clean water in the schools.

Host Martine Powers speaks with investigative reporter Silvia Foster-Frau about her reporting in the East Ramapo Central School District and what people everywhere need to know about keeping kids’ drinking water safe.

Today’s show was produced by Emma Talkoff, with help from Bishop Sand. It was mixed by Sean Carter and edited by Monica Campbell. Thanks to Rosalind Helderman. 

Subscribe to The Washington Post here.

We’re starting to know more about Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest:

Durov was being temporarily detained on suspicion of involvement with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime, according to a press statement released by French prosecutor Laure Beccuau.

When news broke yesterday, I noticed several bloggers write that we didn’t know enough yet to really judge, a restrained take that I appreciate. I figured this might come down to refusal to honor search warrants, but could be deeper too.

John Gruber blogging about the AI-enhanced photos in Google Pixel 9:

Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.

This is it. If we want authenticity, we have to be intentional in what we read and watch. “For you” is a trap.

Due to the popularity of e-commerce, New York City supers are having a rough time dealing with cardboard boxes from their tenants' purchases in their apartment buildings. Liam Quigley, reporter covering parks & sanitation for Gothamist and WNYC, discusses his reporting on sanitation woes from NYC's supers and explains how to properly sort your trash if you live in one of the city's buildings.

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As our centennial series continues, Ashley Stimpson, Maryland-based freelance journalist who writes about science and conservation, takes us through the past 100 years of kids going to the woods for summer camp.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but he's complaining that Harris is forcing him to run as an incumbent, so he might as well take credit for all the things Biden did.

Stanford Medicine researchers recently found that we undergo two periods of rapid molecular aging during our life span, averaging around age 44 and age 60. Listeners call in to share how their bodies changed during these time periods.

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I know it doesn't matter why the NYT are so fucked up about covering the election, but I can't stop thinking about it anyway. Then, Greg Sargent's podcast gave me an idea. The oppressor in a fascist state doesn't need you to love them, so long as you don't love anyone else. The NYT isn't trying to make us love Trump, that's impossible. But they are trying to make us not fall in love with Harris. I doubt they foresaw that possibility. But our feelings about Harris are very much love. The NYT is our only master, they must think. There's no room for us to love someone else, because we might listen to them. In a sense they respond like a first born child on the arrival of their little sister or brother. I don't know. As I said it doesn't matter why. That's their problem. Our problem is to get them out of the way.

Philip Bump, national columnist for The Washington Post and the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America (Viking, 2023), talks about the latest national political news.

 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Updates from @Mtt for folks using these themes:

I just pushed out updates for both Tiny Theme and Sumo Theme with some bug fixes. Nothing major, but a couple of things that needed to be worked out.

It’s a good idea to stay current on themes. Nothing auto-updates, so just click on Plug-ins to see if there are new versions.

The NYT et al aren't even doing a fair job of covering the election as a horserace, because they're making sure it's a virtual tie, so even if our team has overwhelming power, speed and depth, and gets on base in every at bat, and plays by the rules but and in spirit of the game, our odds are no better than the other team.

The Twitter API still works, with some serious limits. Not easily incorporated into products, but useful for individuals with developer accounts. Not an insurmountable hurdle, it seems, though I was a developer from before. A few bullet points. My linkblog now reliably work...

Doing the investigation into getting UserTalk running in 2024 has been a trip. The last time I did any work on this code, or even in this area of computer science, was approx 1990. It comes right back, like riding a bike. I saw a tremendous amount of potential fun here, but I had to move on to runtime, object database, verbs, user interface -- for Frontier. In the 34 years between then and now -- a lot of software has been written, and I'm only looking at a fraction of it, limited to stuff that runs in Node, the browser and Electron. And I have to say I'm totally enjoying reading about what they've done. I'm learning about evolution of technology, a facet of development I am extremely drawn to, in a whole new way, as if viewed through a tunnel in time.

Joe Crawford blogs about open web themes at XOXO:

During XOXO, Andy Baio said “Every one of you should have a home on the web not controlled by a billionaire.” Cabel Sasser recommended that we all “put up the dang portfolio.” Molly White asked us to think back to “when was the first time you thought the web was magic?”

As the 2024 presidential race enters the homestretch, former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are putting economic policy at the center of their pitches to voters. Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy for The New York Times, evaluates both of ...

Over the weekend, Politico reported that Donald Trump has privately suggested to advisers that he knows he’s in danger of losing without dramatic changes to his campaign. Trump also raged over reports that he called in to Fox News during Kamala Harris’s convention speech to deliver an on-air response, whining that Fox had called him instead. We think Trump is rattled because the aura of his inevitable victory has been shattered. We talked to global affairs expert Asha Rangappa—author of a good new piece on her Substack about the sources of Harris’s momentum—who explains why the puncturing of that aura is critical to defeating authoritarians like Trump. Listen to this episode here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A brand new demo site