Boom, Bust, and Big Ideas

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss AI’s boom or bust, trying Github’s Copilot, and making time for good ideas.

JASON: When we started 404 Media, I bought a macro lens for my camera and used it to take pictures of leaked documents, things we had FOIAed, things like that. Sometimes I printed out the documents and took pictures of them, other times I took pictures of my computer screen. The thinking was that it was a cooler visual style than just screenshotting them, which obviously takes half a second. It wasn’t a policy or anything, but I took pics for the first few weeks, and they did look cool. I only have one camera, and I mainly use it as a webcam for our podcast. So it was definitely a pain in the ass to take it off a tripod, change the lens, take the photos, put them on my computer, and so on. So after a few weeks, I stopped doing it, and now we use screenshots like everyone else on the entire internet.