The first white-collar job that AI can actually replace is the one that built the AI. Now coding is conversational. One dev is pleading his chatbot: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.” (Clive Thompson, New York Times)
I'm a journalist who builds stuff. At SPIEGEL, I launched podcasts, led teams, and shaped platform strategies. Now I'm into AI.
Three years after pivoting to AI, BuzzFeed says there’s “substantial doubt” it can keep going. (Victor Tangermann, Futurism)
Before you download a 35 GB model and watch your laptop give up: CanIRun.ai is a reality check for the local-AI-curious. Yes, there are options for an M2 with 8 GB RAM. Llama 3.1 8B is a “tight fit”, but Qwen 3.5 2B “runs great”.
Digg is dead, again. The former front page of the internet wanted a come back, but the beta collapsed under a flood of bots. Votes and comments couldn’t be trusted. Founder Kevin Rose is back for another reboot, but the team is gutted. Meanwhile Yahoo is launching a ranked, real-time front page, minus the community.
Three Questions with Alba Mora Roca, AJ+
Three Questions with Rignam Wangkhang, CBC
Three Questions with Shuwei Fang, Harvard-Fellow
Three Questions with Cecilia Rikap, University College London
Three Questions with Kemal Görgülü, Arte
Three Questions with Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots
Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla, Journalist and Advisor
Three Questions with Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal
Three Questions with Rubina Fillion, New York Times
Can you tell which passage was written by AI? This New York Times quiz is humbling either way. (Kevin Roose and Stuart A. Thompson)
Grammarly “cloned” Julia Angwin, Stephen King, and Neil deGrasse Tyson as AI editors, without asking. Angwin is now suing. The feature is gone, the apology is filed, and the AI Julia apparently gave bad advice. (Miles Klee, Wired)
Liquid content
It’s the death of the article. “With generative AI, we’re entering a new era: content is becoming dynamic again, flowing like water to adapt to you—your time, space, and interactions,” says Google’s Matthie Lorrain. Text-to-speech is just a tiny step in that direction. "What if news media were to let go of the artifact as...
34 projects, 24 contributors, 65 minutes: Hacks/Hackers held a vibe coding show & tell, and journalists shipped fact-checkers, salary surveys, power grid monitors, and a Discord clone.
Instant voice cloning, on a MacBook Air, for free, no Elevenlabs
Chinese e‑commerce giant Alibaba has released new Qwen models for generating and cloning voices earlier this year. Which means: With only a couple of seconds of recorded material, we can generate a cloned voice recording. On a four year old MacBook Air. Instantly. At no cost. This used to be the domain of Elevenlabs. The...
An editor gets a promising pitch, starts googling, and finds a byline that exists everywhere and nowhere. A podcast episode about a scammer – and that some sources didn’t care about being faked. (Question Everything)
A young reader got so frustrated with the FT’s news product that she built her own using Claude Code. She’s paying for a subscription, she wants personalized news, and she couldn’t figure out how to get it. (Jodie Hopperton, INMA)
The information ecosystem has four new rules: production is cheap, machines are the audience, content is liquid, and intention beats attention. Shuwei Fang buries the current publishing model, and somehow ends up optimistic: journalism needs to stop protecting the article and start selling the process. (Reuters Institute)
tropes.md is a one-file blacklist of AI writing tells for your system prompt.
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
