A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
Over the weekend, I wrote up a (modestly described) formal proof for the societal value of local news. You can go read Part I, but the important elements are below. It is an attempt to rethink local information needs from first principles. Many researchers have studied the social and economic
This is Part 1. Part II is here: Local News Innovation from First Principles. Euclid wrote Elements, his book of logical proofs in 300 BCE Alexandria, with five foundational postulates of geometry: You can draw a straight line between any two points. You can extend any straight line segment as
About six months ago I installed OpenClaw on a local Mac, and 20 minutes later deleted the software and was tempted to burn the hard drive to make sure nothing breached containment. (Read this if you are not familiar with OpenClaw ) Then last week I noticed my webhost ( Opalstack ) was
FYI: This is Part II of a discussion about this project: Part I is here . What always struck me when hiring news product managers was how distinctly strategic some candidates were, irrespective of prior experience." During Apple Keynote season, I would ask, “Tell me about ‘X’
Update: A full production prototype is here: Product Thinking Assessment Much of the daily work of news product management is translating critical thinking into business answers. That means challenging unsupported assumptions while drawing both inferences and conclusions from incomplete data. We often assume these skills develop with experience within a
“Part of what I want to convey here is that there’s not some ‘magic’ that’s necessary, that doesn’t exist for AI satellites,” Elon said. “A lot of this is technology we’ve already made for Starlink V3 satellites.
Great products and services minimize friction—reducing the effort, time, or cost to the consumer. In system design, this is governed by Tesler’s Law (the “conservation of complexity”), coined by Larry Tesler at Xerox PARC in the 1980s. The axiom states that at the core
AG Sulzberger used his keynote at the World News Media Congress in Marseille on Monday to plead the New York Times’ case against OpenAI calling the exploitation of journalism an “original sin” of generative AI and “a brazen theft of intellectual property.” Read cynically, the
Mizzou hosts an annual Scholastic Journalism "JDay" during our spring break, 1,500 high school students and advisors from around the state gather on campus for workshops and discussions. This morning I got to speak with a group of advisors about the practice of teaching the ethics of
The brain is an expensive tool to operate, and so human biology is hardwired to take the path of least resistance when making decisions. As newsrooms consider the most efficient and ethical means to integrate AI workflows , we must design for the human-in-the-loop as much as the LLM. Even when,
Immanuel Kant, born in 1724, developed the Categorical Imperative , which we can understand as: If a choice I make were to become a universal law, would I accept that outcome? For instance, If I decide to lie to gain an advantage, what if everyone were to follow that example? The
On the lecture circuit, I almost never repeat the same slide deck twice. Usually, events move too quickly for the exact lesson to be replayed. The one exception: a discussion about the ethics of journalism technology, which I have probably delivered 10 times, in class, online, in the U.S.
In 1937’s “ The Nature of the Firm, ” Ronald Coase introduced the idea that businesses exist as the most efficient way to manage information and activity in pursuit of an economic goal. The later Transaction Cost Theory argues that the internal growth (the addition and specialization of
The Guardian reported today on Substack’s willingness to amplify—and profit from—Nazi content. And yet, people launch new blogs on the site daily? There are a few cognitive biases wrapped up in why people voluntarily endure what Cory Doctorow named “enshittification,” or, in
Start with the obvious: Jeff Bezos ought to support the WaPo or sell it to someone who will. Putting it into hospice and calling it “reinvention” is a farce. It is doubly tragic because the Post and its kind are supposed to be the obvious survivors in the