Luc Lewitanski

Tech journalist. Environmental podcaster. Covered online regulation for @WeDemain + @LSA. Interested in 🇪🇺🇫🇷🇺🇸 policy on digital rights. En FR: @LucLewFR

[Luc Lewitanski @LucLewitanski]

.@Google killed its Reader in 2013 because RSS as a format gives readers agency, doesn't track browsing to sell ads, and lets the user chose what they want to read. As opposed to algorithmic personalisation which siloes us into increasingly homogenous demographics for advertisers https://t.co/YAThAP6bdO

[Joshua Bailey @JoshuaBailey184]

Apolitical gamers are really being forced to learn previously niche, left-wing-coded concepts such as rent extraction & enclosure of the commons because of Playstation

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Google’s founders, Sergey Brin & Larry Page, paid $0 in California income taxes in 2019, 2020 & 2023.

Since 2019, Brin & Page got $400 billion richer & are worth $573 billion.

Today, Brin is spending $57 million to defeat a tax on billionaires to save healthcare for 3 million.

[Annie Wu (all socials: @annie_wu_22) @Annie_Wu_22]

8 years ago today, a 28-year-old organizer took on one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress… & she won

1 year ago Zohran

2 days ago Darializa + Claire

Movements don’t just happen overnight. They compound. & each upset expands what we believe is possible for the next one

[Praise @tufpraise]

Socialism is so sick I love when tax dollars go to schools instead of wars

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

Pretty sure this is all coordinated between key Western states that want to end online anonymity

[LM Sacasas @LMSacasas]

This remains one of the most concerning aspects of ordinary AI use, its use tends to erode the formation of the virtue and expertise required to use it well. And as, Narayanan notes here, even well-formed experts are not immune to the degrading effects.

[Daniel Wortel-London @dlondonwortel]

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be.

I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

[Sridhar Ramesh @RadishHarmers]

The defining principle of our society is that people who were lucky during the dot com boom or Web 2.0 should have vast and ever-growing individual power over the entire world. The only acceptable check on their power is their squabbles with each other.

[GL @gldivittorio]

Bar

[Zito @_Zeets]

Genuinely ruined the internet

[Sam Haselby @samhaselby]

If New York City ran its schools like you ran Amazon, the teachers would be on welfare and the students would be peeing and pooping in plastic bags under their desks. What an idiotic thing to say.

[Stephen Smith @SteveNickSmith]

In one of his final acts, Keir Starmer has decided there isn’t enough aristocrats and public schoolboys undemocratically making our laws

[helen @helen]

news outlets and reddit have banned the internet archive’s access to preserving their content bc they’re afraid AI will scrape it. if the archive — essentially a modern day library of alexandria — falls, it will be another casualty of the AI bubble. it’s collateral damage

[onion person @CantEverDie]

it’s hard to illustrate how it felt at the time if you were too young, but this happening right after the shock bernie primary win in michigan was a nuclear hopium bomb. it felt like the world was on the precipace of something better

[Bobby Wagner @bwags]

Inefficiency rocks. “Productivity” at the expense of creativity is responsible for the degradation of so much in modern life and art

[g a b y @gabydvj]

sorry for harping on this but the problem of “knowing what you want to say but not how to say it” often means you haven’t yet figured out what you want to say. if you turn to an LLM to help organize loose thoughts into prose, you’re outsourcing your cognition to a machine

[g a b y @gabydvj]

if you're using LLMs to help "edit" your book you have no business writing a book or really anything at all

[Eduardo García-Molina @eduardo_garcmol]

What a dystopia, the Humanities without the human.

[Meacham @MeachamDr]

Imagine thinking this is a flex.