The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.
Here’s what happens to your money when you buy a book through Amazon but from a third-party seller: Amazon gets 15 percent of the total sales price, including shipping, plus a flat rate of $1.85 per item. The rest goes to the third-party seller. Not a single cent goes to the publisher, which means nothing goes to the author — but Amazon has made a profit either way, and without having to shoulder the expense of shipping and warehousing.
Adam Goldman, Matt Apuzzo, Michael S. Schmidt, & Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times
The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.
Google made on thing abundantly clear at this week’s big I/O developer conference: It is an AI-first company now. The brass spent hours explaining how artificial intelligence will touch every product—Google Lens! A new AI chip! Smart Reply! Heady stuff for sure. But Google already offers a simple, ridiculously fun way of understanding what this future holds: games.
The next few months will be full of bitter dissent regarding the FCC’s net neutrality rules, how they should be enforced, and indeed whether they should exist at all.