Both @benshapiro and @realDailyWire absolutely dominate Facebook, driving more traffic than any other network.
And yet, per Shapiro, recent moves by Facebook have made their engagement numbers decline, favoring once again legacy media.
We did agree that the entire narrative around the Russians somehow throwing the 2016 election via Facebook was patently absurd, a cope for a political side that didn't want to accept an electoral defeat.
We switched quickly to Judaism...and Israel.
We've both visited the Temple Mount, a while ago for me and two years ago for Ben, both were struck by such a big deal made about a pretty ordinary-looking public square.
We also discussed the anti-Zionist wing of the Democratic Party. If that becomes the prevalent view of the American Left, American Jews will be forced to decide just how Jewish (if at all) they really feel.
Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaism are like 'the lazy, the hazy, and the crazy' (as a rabbi once joked to me).
So we got into where my movement (Conservative) is these days, and how it's smack in the front lines of the bigger culture war.
Then...Ben asked me if I keep kosher, and I had to confess I'm not 100% there yet.
He recommended I move to Florida....
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I wrote about this ages ago back when I gave a damn about media.
It's very simple: US journalism (unlike other Western countries) adopted 'objectivity' as a standard, less because of moral probity, and more because Macy's needed unpolarizing content across a large audience.
Techies who think the NYT only as smart as some its dunderheaded writers are mistaken: there's a whole biz and tech team there, and they felt the winds changing.
They know they're in the compelling stories biz, not the news one anymore.
I'm as excited about AI as the next guy (and even more excited these days), but I think AI people are being a wee bit delusional (on two levels) about how the whole AI builder vs. publishers with training data saga will play out.
Do we really think that AI builders (in the West) will be able to get away with egregiously copying and using copyrighted materials (and make money off of it!) with zero recompense?
This is from the Stability/Getty Images suit. The AI even reproduced the watermark!
Even assuming that AI wins (in the OAI vs. NYT suit for example), and only strict bit-for-bit copying is protected and the rest is fair use.
Let's fast-forward this movie a few years: AI replaces the way most users consume the Internet, i.e., @perplexity_ai replaces Google.
90% of the disconnect between the West and Israel is Israel still living in the capital 'H' History of ethno-nationalist struggle and war, and the West having resigned itself to the Fukuyaman End of History: life as virtue-signaling LARP, and the UN/US/EU as the global HR dept.
They raped our women, took our children hostage, and murdered our elders, so we flattened their cities, killed or captured their fighting men, raised our flag and prayed to our God on their land.
This was the entirety of human history. The Torah recounts the story many times.
The West in 2023 AD cannot abide the wheel of History spinning once again: after the triumph of liberalism in WWII and the Cold War, such a reversion to historical norm is unthinkable and revolting. The heavily Christian roots of liberalism expect a messianic age of peace.
I was in Israel shortly after the recent Hamas attacks, going everywhere from the scenes of the atrocities, to the preparations for war, to the techies in Tel Aviv supporting the war effort.
Thread with both text highlights and on-the-ground photos.
Our story begins with your humble correspondent having rifles pointed at him by jumpy reservists as he tried to enter Mefalsim, one of the kibbutzim brutally attacked on 10/7. A few words from my driver and an Israeli press pass cooled things down. South Israel is a war zone.
The adjoining parking lot, like most we'd encounter, was a mix of reservists' cars, shot-out cars from the attacks, and a tank unit waiting to enter Gaza.
You'd think a 60-ton thing would be hard to hide, but it was hard to spot the Merkavas pulling in.
Debate at an AI dinner last night. Everyone floats their shaky theory about morality and the AI bots. I point out there's a lack of overt religious reasoning here, and one guy confronts me:
Why are humans special? If the AI has sentience, why should we treat them differently?
"Judaism would say tzelem elohim (the image of God) sets humans apart, which is basically saying humans possess an intrinsic and transcendent good that exceeds the material."
"But that's ridiculous. I don't believe in God."
"Say we had two sentient AIs running on two servers, and I told you you had to choose between blowing the head off of some human or unplugging the machines. Which do you do?"
Like many things in Web 3 marketing, it's a reboot of a Web 2 practice: quests are like the offerwalls of old where users got free virtual goods for engaging with a game or app.
@spindl_xyz@layer3xyz@Galxe@QuestN@rabbithole_gg Quests are fairly unique in that they're 'wallet aware': it's a standard Web experience, but the publisher knows the user's wallet (both as an anti-fraud measure and to pay out the giveaways).
Thus, downstream measurement is *much* easier than having to join via Web 2 clicks.