Geeking with Greg

Most underestimate how easy it is for social media to become dominated by astroturf. It's easy. All you need is a few people creating an...

(This is an excerpt from drafts of my book, "Algorithms and Misinformation: Why Wisdom of the Crowds Failed the Internet and How to Fix...

(This is the Table of Contents from my book, "Algorithms and Misinformation: Why Wisdom of the Crowds Failed the Internet and How to Fi...

(This is an excerpt from the book proposal for my unpublished book, "Algorithms and Misinformation: Why Wisdom of the Crowds Failed the...

(This is an excerpt from drafts of my unpublished book, "Algorithms and Misinformation: Why Wisdom of the Crowds Failed the Internet an...

My book is the untold story of the algorithms that shape our lives, how they went terribly wrong, and how to fix them. Most people now have...

(This is an excerpt from my book. Please let me know if you like it and want more.) It is usually unintentional. Companies don’t intend for...

(This is an excerpt from my book. Please let me know if you like it and want more.) The first email on the internet was sent in 1971. Back...

Another good piece by Cory on enshittification, with details about Facebook, some on how A/B testing optimizes for enshittification, and up...

(this is a version of an excerpt from my book, if you like it please let me know) There's a lot of discussion of removing disinformati...

(This is an excerpt from the draft of my book. Please let me know if you like it and want more of these.) “The Algorithm,” in scare quotes...

(This is an excerpt from the draft of my book. Please let me know if you like it and want more.) Let’s say you are in charge of building a...

An article in Wired, " A Letter Prompted Talk of AI Doomsday. Many Who Signed Weren't Actually AI Doomers ": A significant nu...

Someone (not an AI expert) was asking me about applying large language models (LLMs, like ChatGPT) to a particular product. In case it's...

We see so many scams and so much misinformation on the internet because it is profitable. It's cheap to create bogus accounts. It's...

Many companies that think of themselves as data-driven underestimate how easy it is for metrics to go terribly wrong. Take a simple example...

Wisdom of the crowds summarizes the opinions of many people to produce useful results. Wisdom of the crowds algorithms -- like rankers, rec...

I was wondering how well Netflix's new ad-supported plans are doing. There hasn't been a lot of criticial reporting on it, and I...

The Washington Post reports on the data used for ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs): We found several media outlets that ran...

Nico Grant at the New York Times writes that Google is furiously adding features to its web search, including personalized search and perso...