Dave Lee

Everything tagged #bloomberg

A horror lede from Bloomberg's Olivia Carville:

When TikTok tweaked its algorithm in 2021 to stop users from being overwhelmed with harmful content, the company didn’t roll out the safer version to everyone, a confidential internal document shows. Instead, to see if the change might reduce the app’s stickiness, the company conducted an experiment. It created a control group of 10% of US users — at the time, that would have been about 15 million people — who kept the old version of the app. This group, according to the document, included 16-year-old Chase Nasca. TikTok’s algorithm pushed him thousands of videos about suicide, sadness, hopelessness and loneliness, right up until he killed himself.

TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature From Millions. One Died by Suicidebloomberg.comA confidential document says an algorithm adjustment was kept from many users “by design,” as part of an experiment to measure engagement.

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What's a podcast?

In an age of content blurring across multiple platforms at once, Ashley Carmen on industry efforts to define what exactly constitutes a "podcast":

Here’s where the group ended up: “A podcast is an on-demand show rooted in the spoken word and fully intelligible as audio. Typically episodic and conversational, podcasts cover wide-ranging themes and formats. They are accessed as audio or video via open RSS feeds and other distribution methods.”

A shorter version boils down to: “If it works with your eyes closed, it’s a podcast.”

Finally, Podcasting Has a Definitionbloomberg.comAfter months of secret meetings, a group of industry heavyweights are releasing a white paper codifying new podcasting frameworks

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Column: Alphabet Investors Sound a Warning for Profligate AI Spending

Alphabet Inc.’s impressive second-quarter earnings release on Wednesday seemed on course to go down mostly well with investors. Until the earnings call, the Google parent’s share price was up marginally in after-hours trading, buoyed by cloud growth that smashed estimates.

Then executives disclosed their projection that capital expenditures would increase again, sending the stock down by as much as 4.6%. Let it be a warning to the other hyperscalers preparing to report next week: Even with a quarter as good as this one, you’ll still be punished if you announce yet more spending in pursuit of artificial intelligence.

Alphabet Investors Sound a Warning for Profligate AI Spendingbloomberg.comAlphabet Inc.’s impressive second-quarter earnings release on Wednesday seemed on course to go down mostly well with investors. Until the earnings call, the Google parent’s share price was up marginally in after-hours trading, buoyed by cloud growth that smashed estimates.

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As of today, the bloc of four conservatives who would have gone full Trump deserve to be called “the Four Horsemen.” On the court, the nickname goes back to the 1930s, when journalists evoked the Bible’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as a way of describing the four hard-core conservative justices who blocked progressive legislation for years.

How Was the Birthright Citizenship Decision This Close?bloomberg.comThe good news about the landmark birthright citizenship decision the Supreme Court issued today is that it correctly holds that children born in the US automatically become citizens. That’s the right interpretation of the 14th Amendment and reaffirms the 1898 precedent that the president tried to upend with his executive order purporting to deny citizenship to children of undocumented people.

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Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product

Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Shortbloomberg.comFord Motor Co. took an unusually human approach to fixing its stubborn quality problems: It brought back what it calls “gray beard” engineers to help train younger staff and to reprogram the artificial intelligence tools that weren’t getting the job done.

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