2025-10-08 15:57:30
Our World in Data compared causes of death in the United States against how much those causes are covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News. The results are about what you would expect, based on coverage data from Media Cloud.
Rarer events, like homicide and drug overdose, are reported more heavily, whereas everyday causes, like cancer and heart disease, are reported less.
This, of course, is because the news covers things that are out of the ordinary, which is what readers and viewers are looking for on a by-the-minute timeline. Not many people care that mortality rates, which take more time to estimate than reporting on single events, are the same as yesterday.
But, as residents of this planet, it is beneficial to know that life is not always getting worse. It’s good to get a reminder sometimes.
Tags: mortality, news, Our World in Data
2025-10-08 06:09:17
Matthew Inman, the cartoonist who illustrates The Oatmeal, breaks down his feelings towards AI-generated art. When you remove the work, pain, mistakes, intention, and ultimately, the person from the art, the true value is lost.
2025-10-08 02:27:41
OpenAI released Sora, which lets users easily generate videos with a prompt. The videos present in a TikTok-like feed and provides us with another source of endless scroll. Thank you, internet gods for your benevolence. Casey Neistat, known for his YouTube-ing, voices his concerns.
2025-10-08 01:43:08
As many of us have learned first-hand, TikTok (and its scrolling video ilk) is addictive and can pull people in to stare at their phones for hours. However, TikTok is secretive about how their viewing algorithm works. So the Washington Post recruited readers to track usage and send the data, which gave WaPo a sample of how the infinite scroll kept people watching over a six-month period.
New users start with general music videos and the feed grows more specific. A few minutes per day can easily increase to hours. Your brain craves the dopamine all the time. It gets harder to interact with others. You can’t concentrate on bigger tasks. All in all, pretty amazing.
Check out the full project, and then maybe delete TikTok.
Tags: TikTok, usage, Washington Post
2025-10-07 16:19:34
Dell Cameron, for Wired, on the system currently in its planning phase:
Throughout, ICE has leaned on Palantir’s Investigative Case Management system to combine disparate streams of data into a single investigative platform. Recent contract updates show the system lets agents search people using hundreds of categories, from immigration status and country of origin to scars, tattoos, and license-plate reader data. Each surveillance contract ICE signs adds another layer—location trails, social networks, financial records, biometric identifiers—feeding into Palantir’s hub. ICE’s new initiative is about scaling up the human side of the equation, stationing analysts around the clock to convert the firehose of data into raid-ready leads.
I hope people really are realizing that our gift of data and attention to social media is not in our best interest.
Tags: government, privacy, surveillance, Wired
2025-10-07 01:34:04
Suzanne Smalley reporting for The Record:
Social media giant LinkedIn on Thursday filed a lawsuit against a company which it says operates a network of millions of fake accounts used to scrape data from LinkedIn members before selling the information to third parties without permission.
ProAPIs, a software company, and its CEO Rahmat Alam allegedly run an operation which LinkedIn says charges customers up to $15,000 per month for scraped user data taken from the social media platform.
Millions.
I drop in to LinkedIn sometimes, and it often feels like bots talking to bots or people using bot-generated “content” to fill the void. I wonder how much data ProAPIs scraped was bot-generated, which was then flipped for a monthly fee so that other bots can push more “content” into the LinkedIn machine. That seems like a terrible feedback loop to get stuck in.
