dirtside 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (38)

• On the post: The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 01 Oct, 2025 @ 12:46pm

  Failure to mention media ownership

  How can you write an article like this without even once mentioning that the reason big media outlets are all failing at their jobs is that they are all owned by billionaires who do not want a well-informed populace? Saying "the media is failing" without explaining why, plays right into the vague and widespread belief that "the news" is just kind of this thing that exists and happens by magic, rather than being the deliberate product of choices by oligarchs who really, really don't want people to think about where their information comes from. You want to talk journalistic malpractice? Complaining about how bad the legacy news media is without mentioning who their owners are is journalistic malpractice!

• On the post: Defense Department Will Only Allow Access To Journalists Who Promise Not To Obtain ‘Unauthorized Material’

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2025 @ 11:11am

  If someone in a position of power has any control over who reports on them, those people's reporting is automatically compromised. That's why "press credentials" have always been nonsense; if you can revoke my credentials because I accurately report things you'd rather I not, then that's a gigantic and irreconcilable conflict of interest. Real journalism doesn't actually come from reporting what powerful figures say in press conferences, anyway; it comes from leaks by mid- and low-level staff, and deep research. Having access to powerful figures is essentially worthless.

• On the post: Trump Admin Tells Expecting Mothers To Avoid Tylenol Due To Unproven Link To Autism

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2025 @ 05:14pm

  So (to oversimplify) Tylenol correlates with autism, because Tylenol use and autism both correlate with high fevers. In other words, the high fever causes both the autism and the Tylenol usage, rather than the Tylenol usage causing the autism. I'm sure it's more complicated than that (and what I just said might not even be correct) but it's an entirely plausible explanation that's ignored by everyone who says "well if there's a correlation, that MUST be causation!"

• On the post: DC Circuit Makes Rookie Mistake In Actually Following Binding Precedent In A Case Involving Donald Trump Firing People

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 14 Sep, 2025 @ 05:15pm

  Y'know, like in that book. Roots.

• On the post: Wired, Business Insider Editors Duped By Completely Bogus ‘AI’ Using ‘Journalist’ Who Made Up Towns, People That Don’t Exist

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2025 @ 08:45am

  Also, your "Contact Us" page form is broken. It does an AJAX call to submit the form, which returns a 302 Found response (which, what?), then issues an AJAX request for the user profile page, which does nothing useful, and the page also displays an error "Connection issue while submitting the form. Check that you are connected to the Internet and try again." Which, no.

• On the post: Wired, Business Insider Editors Duped By Completely Bogus ‘AI’ Using ‘Journalist’ Who Made Up Towns, People That Don’t Exist

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2025 @ 08:22am

  Any journalistic outlet owned by billionaires or big corporations is already corrupted and should not be relied on by anyone who wants to be well-informed. Journalistic outlets should be small, independent, owned by the employees, and should only allow outside writers based on personal experience and interaction so that you know who you're dealing with.

• On the post: Politico Management Insists “AI” Shouldn’t Be Held To Any Sort Of Human Editorial Standards Because It’s Built By Coders, Not Journalists

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 25 Aug, 2025 @ 03:03pm

  I can't believe I have to keep saying this, but: The ownership of a news outlet cannot be divorced from its output. The first question about any "news" you see should always be, who paid for it? Politico is owned by Axel Springer SE, a German multinational owned in turn by the billionarie investor class. So I'm sure they have the best interests of an informed public at heart.

• On the post: Trump’s Military Campaign Against American Cities Expands

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 15 Aug, 2025 @ 10:26am

  "Despite all the statistics saying otherwise, we know crime is high because vibes. After all, individuals never suffer from confirmation bias or selective memory! We should just trust when people say 'crime is going up' even though literally all the hard evidence says otherwise!"

• On the post: Politico’s Rushed Adoption Of Half-Cooked ‘AI’ Continues To Go Terribly

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 08 Aug, 2025 @ 01:41pm

  “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.”

• On the post: Don’t Vibe Check Me, Bro; Or How To Deal With Comments In An Era Filled With Post-Factual Nazis

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2025 @ 03:18pm

  Using the word "regime" instead of "administration" will make no difference to anything, so fucking let it go and focus on more important messaging, like explaining to all your family and friends why democracy is important, or how billionaires controlling 99.9% of the media is a big factor in how we got here.

• On the post: What Liberal Media? Axios Thinks Being Neutral Means Kissing Trump’s Ass

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2025 @ 12:56pm

  Axios is owned by Cox

  Cox Enterprises, who also own a giant ISP, owns Axios, and is a giant multinational conglomerate controller by the Cox family, who are billionaires. It is entirely unsurprising that Axios functions as a mouthpiece for their bullshit. At this point no one can argue with a straight face that it's possible to divorce the ownership of a news outlet from the content that outlet puts out. I liked Axios when I first started following it a few years ago, specifically because of its terse format that hit the high points. But over time it became clearer and clearer that they were firmly pro-big-business, and since I abandoned them a year ago they've only gotten worse and worse in terms of being nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece. Get your news from independent sources not owned and controlled by billionaires. There are a lot of them.

• On the post: Creativity, Freedom Of Speech & Freedom Of Thought

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2025 @ 11:54pm

  "If AI is going to live up to its potential as a partner in creativity and a tool for learning" [footage not found]

• On the post: Baltimore Shows You Can Bring Down Murder Rates Without Throwing More Cops At The Problem

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2025 @ 12:36pm

  What's even more infuriating about the "more cops" approach is that not only is it less effective than treating the social, economic, and mental health issues as a way to reduce crime, it's also much more expensive! Baltimore's approach costs LESS than adding more cops and is far more effective!

• On the post: National Guard Troops Aren’t Thrilled About Being Part Of Trump’s Performative War On Protesters

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 22 Jul, 2025 @ 11:34am

  "I can guarantee no one got into the military hoping one day they’d be deployed to engage in a war against their fellow Americans." This seems like a catastrophically foolish thing to believe.

• On the post: How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It)

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2025 @ 01:05pm

  Thank you for writing this; I had the same thought. I've been doing web development since the mid-1990s and professionally since 1999; this whole article is basically gibberish, trying to invent the "same origin paradigm" out of thin air. But it doesn't describe any tech or principles that actually happened, it (as you said) is coopting the name "same origin" from the well-known Same-Origin Policy to cover a dubious, unrelated set of technologies and practices.

• On the post: Assaults On ICE Officers Are Up 700%… Which Just Means There Have Been 69 More Assaults Than Last Year

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2025 @ 11:37am

  To clarify, I believe that the 2000% number is for the next ten years. Its annual budget is only going up, like, 200%. That's still super bad, of course.

• On the post: Elon Musk’s Starlink Adds $750 Congestion Charge

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 02 Jul, 2025 @ 07:56pm

  "rural broadband is a real problem" True! And one that would be more effectively and more cheaply solved by just running municipal fiber everywhere, than by relying on a difficult-to-expand satellite network owned by a petulant fascist.

• On the post: Trump’s Immigration Enforcement: Free The Criminals, Jail The Innocent

  

  dirtside ( profile ), 02 Jul, 2025 @ 01:22pm

  Just joined

  Off-topic, but I just started subscribing to Techdirt on Patreon, and finally created an account here. $5 a month is more than worth the insight and info I get here. Oh yeah: Fuck fascists, and fuck Trump.