It’s not the intended effect, but this just made me sad:

That really matters. Not because the internet is the most important issue facing us today. Far from it. Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet is the terrain upon which these fights will be waged. It is the communications medium we will use to organise to save our species and planet from their imminent eradication. We can’t win these fights without a free, fair and open internet.

It’s become increasingly difficult to imagine the sort of wide-scale change needed to achieve that vision actually happening.

The short paragraphs thing predates smartphones and the collapse of print newspapers (here’s a paper from 1996 that does it), so fwiw I don’t think it’s that. I assume it’s some sort of stylistic / presentation thing that’s just normalized in news reporting. Maybe it’s an outdated holdover from print media somehow (where presumably more spacing = more expensive, so it presumably wasn’t a financial motivation) but I think orgs would’ve moved on by now if it was purely done for unnecessary legacy reasons.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty common for news sources.

E.g.:

• Associated Press: https://apnews.com/article/minot-city-north-dakota-ground-squirrels-dde22d2fa10140191a168687a5aa4daa
• Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/technology/intels-new-ceo-plots-overhaul-manufacturing-ai-operations-2025-03-17/
• ABC (Australia) you already saw
• BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwqewyrw57o
• CBC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/carney-first-nations-summit-c5-1.7586758
• Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/europe-assumes-financial-burden-of-ukraine-war-alarming-russia

All use this style of paragraphs. It’s not universal but I’m surprised that it’s surprising anybody!

That’s… pretty common for news sources?

An empty stomach
Hungry for my beloved starch
Life in Latvia

Knock at door. “Who is?” “Free potato”. Open door. Is secret police.

https://xkcd.com/221/

We just sent the code

Somehow this phrase triggered a memory of this short comedy sketch: https://youtu.be/LButXcZ57pc

Tbh I thought it was a bunch of non-lemmy platforms (e.g., mbin which fedia.io runs - anecdotally it usually happens due to some types of edits not federating well), but if someone from infosec.pub (which runs lemmy) also had the problem then I’m actually not sure what the common factor is lol

edit: the common factor might just be instances that have blocked lemmy.ml, which currently includes fedia.io (my instance) and infosec.pub (the other commenter’s instance), though I’m surprised links to lemmy.ml’s hosted images are included in the block

Yes! It still maintains some features not in mainline Mastodon, which I guess is why infosec.exchange runs it

Image link for those on platforms that don’t see it (e.g., me): https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/745658dd-60ef-44f9-bcf9-290aa9f23573.webp

Nice to see he took it in stride given how… aggressive the post was about him lol

Searching for the phrase, documentation matches for Taiga so maybe you’re right!

computer sad

I can get behind the general idea, but in this implementation specifically it seems like the low modulation example isn’t distinct enough from simply lower-quality audio, but the higher modulation example (where the effect is more distinct as an intentional effect), is just not nice to listen to. Maybe there are other ways to distort the voice that don’t have as much of that downside?

Archive Options Failing

This one worked for me, useful if wanting to share the story elsewhere:

https://archive.is/20231224184755/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-openai-protected-by-silicon-valley-friends-f3efcf68