404 Media on Project Lily, the ChatGPT project where humans read users’ prompts – including sensitive and personal information – to better train the product.
Eli Lilly redux: Thinking about the democratization of information and the removal of gatekeepers alongside this story I saw first at Boys’ Club. This Harvard PhD is vibe-manufacturing schizophrenia drugs in his garage. Are we vibe-coding medicine?
Extra credit
The university is back in session, so the city’s lineup of food trucks are back in formation. Some tips:
- El Wiscorican is a perennial fav, offering a short but very customizable menu. Vegetarian and vegan options are regularly available for those among us who like to keep it light. They’ll ask if you want it spicy – but whatever your expectations are around spice levels, dial it back. The great north is suspicious of the virtues of capsaicin. (I recommend the fried plantains.)
- Saigon Sandwich has one of the best banh mi sandwiches in town, which is pretty wild given that this sandwich is produced by a single person in a box trailer. But with fresh bread and ultra-fresh ingredients, it’s a really good one. Nothing beats a fresh banh mi with good bread and snappy veggies.
- Madison boasts (at least) two great fresh juice trucks – Fresh Cool Drinks and Natural Juice – and you’re as likely to find them at the end of State Street as you are at the Saturday farmers’ markets. They both make excellent juice concoctions on the spot, and sell delicious, fresh vegetable spring rolls packed with fresh, local produce.
Several years ago, many people were weighing the possibility that the Madison food truck economy would struggle to recover after the long shutdown, worried because this scene is one of the things that makes the urban food desert more livable during the workday and supports a great deal of local culture with it. This makes your participation in the little treat economy practically a civic responsibility.
This 2013 essay is circulating widely this week. In it, cartoonist Tim Kreider reflects on having anxiety, and in particular the anxiety he feels while interacting with an increasingly watchful stack of digital tools and on how they provide him with social feedback he’s not prepared for.
TechCrunch reports on the problems inherent to AI-generated restaurant advertising - it looks wrong.
Return to markdown?
Finished reading: Suffer a Witch A Memoir by Joy McCullough 📚
Cap Times on Electric Heart, the new EP by Madison songwriter Whitney Mann.
In plain language, this suggests that the way search is reoriented around AI revalued long tail search strings, so there are big incentives to link deeply and widely across the corpus, especially if you have access to an authoritative platform.
Manton on AGI: “As we reach AGI… I’d like to set some ground rules for myself — beliefs that won’t change as technology changes. AI will be smarter than us, but consciousness and ‘a soul’ can’t be created from computation.”
Where we’ve been: “Today’s young American women were born into a world of unfinished feminism. We have freedoms our great-grandmothers couldn’t have imagined, but also fewer rights than we did just a handful of years ago.” Plus, some examination of how ad tech and algorithmic sorting set the table.
Traditional search favored common keywords, while LLMs favor (extremely) long tail search terms because of the idiosyncratic and conversational way people write to chatbots. Suggesting that a small group of writers on the open web could move the corpus on any coordinated subject in no time at all.
In honor of Gloria Steinem’s passing (rest in power), an article on the business and activist tensions present in, and the long-tail value of, feminist publishing efforts. And a 2019 dissertation on organized literacy education as a civil rights effort. A trip to the bookstore is in order.
This first-person essay from The Baffler is circulating in writerly crowds this week. It’s a ripper and a must-read, enough to convert me to a print subscriber.
For reasons, I was reminded of the list of Geek Social Fallacies that first circulated on Plausibly Deniable, then took root as an entire body of advice at Captain Awkward.
A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy after the Revolution”, the essay version of his 1996 CCCC Chair’s address. In it, the author argues that the economic impacts of the digital revolution had begun to undo an older commitment, formed in the Civil Rights era, to teaching literacy as a path toward equality. He further argues that writing instruction was being reorganized around tools owned by a few firms (then: Netscape, Microsoft) at a moment when wealth was concentrating upward. Faigley left us with the question of whether educators can hold onto literacy-for-equality while the tides run against it.
Thirty years later, the worry has a new face: AI will do young people’s writing for them and their thinking with it. Ultimately, Faigley believed the need for the skills that composition teaches will keep growing, not despite, but because of our need to convey information in and around that technology and the humanity it serves in a complex society.
In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:
- Dolly Parton’s America: This nine-episode podcast offers a deep dive into the Dollyverse, covering Dolly’s biography and lore and her role as an icon within a broader story about American ideals. This series swept the best-of lists of 2019.
- Professor and NYT contributor Tressie McMillan Cottom has long been the public’s expert on Dolly Parton, and her memorial tribute to Dolly does not disappoint. She reads Dolly as an auteur who held up the juxtapositions of American culture in a way that made them safely legible to the rest of us. Bonus read: Dr. McMillan Cottom on the enduring culture of blonde.
- A cool embroidery of Dolly Parton by Jenny Hart.
I found out about a hyperlocal newsletter in my neighborhood and had to share. The Monroe Street Tattler offers print delivery and email distribution, and reports only on the hard local news, such as dog walk water bowl locations and the best fries in the neighborhood, among other ephemera.
“Students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school’s gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus. A 2023 NCAA survey of 18- to 22-year-olds found that 51% of the women and two-thirds of the men have bet on sports.”