Actually Useful

We chat with Jeremy Carrasco (@jeremyfindsai) about the most common uses of AI-generated video, what to make of the US-Iran meme war, and why beloved intellectual property can only be what it is when it’s created by humans. In Falcon Mode, we chat about the new DualShot Recorder iPhone app, made by @derrickdowneyjr to solve his own frustrating problem. 

Links:

@jeremyfindsai on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube

Jeremy’s publication, riddance.ai 

404 Media articles on the US-Iran slopaganda war and where Facebook’s AI slop comes from

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat with Meta whistleblower Kelly Stonelake about Meta’s toxic culture being encoded into their products, how much they’re willing to exploit kids for profit at any cost, and what meaningful social media regulation might look like – especially after the landmark trials Meta lost in the days before we recorded this episode. In Falcon Mode, we chat about tools to help gig workers discover which delivery app is the least punishing to them.

Links:

Kelly’s Substack, Overturned

Kelly’s website, kellystonelake.com 

Kelly’s documentation

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat about “human fracking,” how little we actually know about human attention, and the growing Attention Liberation Movement – a radical idea of agency that you’re probably already practicing! In Falcon Mode, we discuss platforms to strengthen renters’ rights.

All the books we’ve mentioned in this episode:

Attensity! by the Friends of Attention

Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakely

The Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat about the explosive rise of sports betting, the underlying tech that makes it especially insidious, and how relentlessly gambling products are marketed to young men. In Falcon Mode, we give flowers to a hobbyist developer who solved the problem of creeps with smart glasses.

Links:

VICE Sports’ Out of Bounds, “The Sports Betting Boom”

r/problemgambling keeps an incredible wiki of recovery resources (that aren’t funded by the gambling companies).

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat with Natalie Ponte from Libro.fm about generative AI abolitionism, the cult of early big tech, and why book people are so obsessed with Libro.fm, the audiobook platform that supports independent bookstores. In Falcon Mode, we chat about a crowdsourcing tool where people vote on whether or not something includes AI-generated content.

Links:

Libro.fm 

Natalie’s LinkedIn

NYT article about woman who “wrote” 200 romance novels using generative AI

Is This AI? subreddit 

Voice narration studio’s example of professional narration vs. AI (at about the 40% scroll mark)

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat with recruitment fraud expert Jay Jones about scam jobs, the grift of hustle posting, and how LinkedIn profits from unemployment. In Falcon Mode, an app Ariel has imagined for over a decade is finally brought to life.

Links:

TheProfiler.org and JonesDoYouCopy.com

NeighborCats - on iPhone, on Android

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat with AI strategist Allen Martinez about constitutional AI, the cost of multiple AIs conflicting with one another, and how operators tasked with implementing AI can do it without making their product worse. In Falcon Mode, we have another “give me Google but make it actually work” – this time for city cyclists frustrated with Google Maps.

Links:

Noble Digital, Allen’s personal site, and his book, The Brand Experience AI Operating System

From our news segment - 404 Media’s coverage of Palantir’s tech powering ICE

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat about Laura Bates’ incredible (and incredibly depressing) new book, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny. Between deepfakes and nonconsensual image abuse, the child predators propping up the metaverse, and AI “companions” being explicitly marketed as women who can’t fight back… the AI industry is even darker than we thought. In Falcon Mode, we lighten it up a bit with an idea around learning foreign languages through level-appropriate book recommendations. 

Content Warning: This topic is a heavy one, and we reference r*pe fantasies and virtual assault, including some involving children. A more detailed explanation of content warnings starts at 1:05 in the episode.

Links:

The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates

Laura Bates’ website

Resources:

Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s “Get Help Now” page has step by step advice for victims

StopNCII.org for non-consensual intimate image abuse

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

After six months and 12 episodes of Actually Useful, what have we learned? We chat about the worst patterns we saw in tech news this year, the most dangerous lie tech workers tell themselves, and the best heuristics for usefulness that we’ve discovered so far. And then, The Falkies 🏆 – Actually Useful’s first inaugural awards ceremony, where, among other categories, we do the important work of ranking which guest had this year’s best falcon sound. 

Links:

Brian Merchant’s “A Complete Guide to Quitting Spotify”

404 Media’s article about war betting on Polymarket

Brian Penny’s Threads account detailing his discovery of the government backdoor being scammed

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).

We chat with JP Candelier, a front-end developer and graphic designer, about how visually and artistically bland today’s tech has become compared to just a decade ago, why private equity firms seem determined to make everything look the same, and which Instagram filters shaped an entire generation’s aesthetic taste. In Falcon Mode, we dig into the pros and cons of a socially connected, gamified app that tracks whether we’re actually doing the virtuous things we say we want to do.

Links:

JP’s website

Meta’s page for their weird (and very false) “Building America” campaign

More Perfect Union’s short documentary on the health toll of living near a data center

One Sec

Check out our YouTube video at 20:11 to see examples of how fast food restaurant architecture has homogenized over the years

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok (reluctantly).