jaredwiener

I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.

Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.

AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.

My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.

Theres a difference between users seeking out AI, and PMs cramming AI into previously existing products.

Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense.

Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.

That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.

The government is very big. They can have multiple priorities. The Dept of Justice does not provide medical care, education, or anything else you listed -- they prosecute crimes. And using classified military plans for personal gain while potentially putting fellow soldiers at risk seems like a crime that is worth prosecuting.

I have a little bit of a bias here, as I am building forth.news, which is an AI-powered news platform -- but I am also a former journalist.

It's not necessarily contradictory. I see this more like giving your employees cars, but telling them they are responsible if they get into accidents.

All of this is entirely predicated on expectation and responsibility. First, mark something as being AI if it cannot be verified, and verify everything that you can.

Forth is using AI so we can detect and push out stories as quickly as possible, getting breaking news out there as soon as it breaks. Our summaries are AI, but marked as AI. Our underlying source information is right there and cited. We try to be as transparent as possible about the tools we are using, and the tradeoffs.

Every journalist should instinctively and reflexively double check everything, regardless of the source. There's an old maxim, "if your mom tells you she loves you, check it out." Being from an LLM doesn't change that.

And live coverage with the reactions of various AGs: https://www.forth.news/stories/Ca6C8cj6TyNe7TMMKUnFX

And you would (rightfully) be angered if your stock broker sold your shares and pocketed the proceeds, because you own them.

Thank you -- yes, the non-signed in front page needs some work. There's a lot of flood warnings, but if you choose topics with an account it should be a better experience.

And thank you for flagging the scroll thing. I hadn't seen it, but will check.

AI isn't really the draw, it's more of a tool that helps on the backend.

That said, it's both combining various updates into a cohesive timeline of a story, writing the summaries, and assigning it an urgency level which helps in sorting and some other tasks.

thank you -- great to hear!

Building a new kind of news site, featuring updates from primary sources.

We're constantly pulling info from official sources, and using AI to group and summarize into stories, and continue to share reporting from trusted, vetted journalists.

The result is news with the speed and breadth of getting updates straight from the source, and the perspective and context that reporting provides.

Still ramping up, but I'd love to hear feedback:

https://www.forth.news

But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.

For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.

Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)

Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.

If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)

It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.

Very old and needs an update/refresh, but https://www.jaredwiener.com

Does it have value to the customers using/paying for it? Would someone want to acquire it?

The food pyramid was phased out in 2011: https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/nov/07/food-pyramid-...

My point really was that it seems odd that this information isn't readily available on the website. Why hide it?

This also appears to be from USDA, as per their other website with the same info: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/

This is the first .gov website I've seen that does not list any sort of agency, branch of government, commission, whatever, that's behind it.

Yes, I see the National Design Studio built it -- but presumably they aren't the ones writing nutritional guidance. Is this FDA? HHS?

Free Law Project also has this open source tool to detect bad redactions: https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray

Why would you have anything for the backend in an APK? Wouldnt that be an app, that by definition runs on the client?

Most frameworks also by default block ALL environment variables on the client side unless the name is preceded by something specific, like NEXT_PUBLIC_*

Verizon's status page says it's "multiple fiber cuts"

They have job postings that include NYC-based network operations engineers. https://www.txse.com/meet-the-team#careers

Original article the link cites: https://www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-tool-that-tracks-location...

FYI, In addition to being able to download straight from fonts.google.com, Many (if not all?) of the fonts are also on Github, including TTF/OTF/WOFF2 files.

For example, here's Roboto Mono WOFF2s: https://github.com/googlefonts/RobotoMono/tree/main/fonts/we...

There's a difference between what is technically feasible and what is allowed, legally or even morally.

Just because it is possible -- or even easy -- to essentially steal from newspapers/other media outlets, doesn't make it right, or legal. The people behind it put in labor, financial resources, and time to create a product that, like almost every other service, has terms attached -- and those usually come with some form of monetization. Maybe it is a paywall, maybe it is advertisements -- but it is there.

Using an adblocker, or finding some loophole around a paywall, etc, are all very easy to do technically, as any reader of this site knows. That said, the media outlet doesn't have to allow it. And when it is violated on an industrial scale, like Perplexity, then they can be understandably upset and take legal action. And that includes any AI (or other technology, for that matter) that is a wrapper around plagiarism.

Sites opted in to Google originally because it fed them traffic. They most likely did not opt in to an AI rewriter that takes their work and republishes it without any compensation.

It should hopefully go without saying that as shocking as this is, this is not the legally binding version of the Constitution. Nor is it the only version hosted on a US Government website.

NARA's, for example, still seems complete: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

So is the Senate's: https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-...

PBS and NPR do not operate like the commercial networks --

ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/Etc are big corporations that produce (or commission/license, it gets...weird) shows to be distributed on their affiliates, that, depending on the city you are in, can be owned by the network OR another company that operates it like a franchise. Their affiliate agreement governs how much of the network programming they play -- though there are other agreements for non-network programming -- Jeopardy/Wheel of Fortune, for example, are syndicated and NOT network.

PBS on the other hand is more of a consortium of public TV stations around the country. Shows that you might think of as "PBS Shows" are actually produced by these individual stations and then distributed to other stations that want them. Even PBS Newshour and Washington Week are produced by WETA in DC.

Radio gets even more complicated. Many of the shows I've seen referenced on this thread aren't even necessarily NPR. Marketplace, for example, is American Public Media, which is sort of an outcropping from Minnesota Public Radio.

So funding going to ACTUAL PBS is a tiny part of this. What happens to the money going to various stations? What happens to the grants to produce and run these stations, especially in rural areas?

My in-laws use Siri/voice interactions almost exclusively, dictating text messages out-loud, searching for shows on Roku using the voice remote, etc.

Even my 2.5 year old will ask Alexa and Siri to do things, sometimes far away from any device that could respond.

Honest question as I try to wrap my millennial brain around this --

for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?

Not to mention, the reporting that went into the headline or blurb is what is expensive. You got the value by reading it for free.

https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...