Before you get your backs up, this is not about politics, and sung to the tune of ‘Let’s Talk About Sex:’ It’s about tech, baby, it’s about you and me, it’s about all the good things and the bad things that can be, It’s about tech. Let’s talk about tech.
At the dawn of the Age of Social, it was widely proclaimed that we, the users, were the product. Is a shift underway at a tectonic level?
Two men engaged in a conversation on X’s Spaces last week and the audience numbers were off the charts. Live, watched later, or simulcast over various sites, it was reported that between a quarter billion to a billion people tuned in.Read More...
There’s an old German proverb that says that all things have an end, except for a sausage, which has two. Well, all things have a beginning, too, including environmental issues. Especially since it seems everyone’s concerned with solving the problems, but that perhaps we’re quickly offered solutions that aren’t.
PFAs
Example: plastic straws were outlawed/removed from many fast-food establishments as they tended to end up in the oceans, endangering marine life. Enter paper straws, but as xatakaon reported, “Paper Straws Are Often Touted as a Great Alternative to Plastic, But There’s a Small Problem: They’re Toxic… After analyzing 39 brands of straws made of various materials such as plastic, paper, glass, stainless steel, and bamboo, a team (of scientists) found that paper straws contain the most perfluoroalkylated and polyfluoroalkylated substances, also known as PFAS. These synthetic substances are considered harmful to humans, animals, and the environment.”
PFAs are ‘forever chemicals’ that “can lead to health problems such as liver damage, thyroid disease, obesity, fertility issues and cancer,” according to the European Environmental Agency, and they’re also found in packaged foods, fabrics, paints, electronics, and pizza boxes, to name just a very few.Read More...
It’s August, a time when our part of the world kicks back to enjoy the last gasps of summer and the warm weather. The crickets are chirping, the mosquitoes are drawing blood, and make sure to check yourself for ticks, if you’re spending time in the great outdoors. The last thing you want is Lyme Disease – take it from someone who’s been there, done that.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot going on in tech, from what we’re seeing reported, but since it’s August, it’s a good time to kick back a bit and take a look at reporting itself.
We know about disinformation/misinformation. Old news. What we’re talking about is the media’s focus on non-news and even obfuscation, or as we like to call it, to take a page from a once-venerated news organization: all the news that we feel is fit to print.Read More...
We were in an online webinar recently, with a young investor as the guest speaker on the virtual dais. He is a former founder with several failures and one success under his belt. Given the fact that he has sat on both sides of the table, we were particularly curious about his investment approach, especially since he is a partner in a quite large fund.
While he is new to the investment side of the table, he has already developed his philosophy: if he is predisposed to investing in a company, he advises the founder to get some traction – meaning paying customers – and check back with him in a few months, whether the founder had achieved this or not. After said time, provided the founder is in the same position monetarily, he advises a pivot.
He does position himself as a very early-stage investor. Maybe not back-of-the-napkin, but fairly close.Read More...
“In what will go down as the most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen, a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. crashed countless Microsoft Windows computer systems around the world on Friday,” Yahoo!finance (and all other publications on the planet) reported. “The catastrophic failure underscores an increasingly dire threat to global supply chains: The IT systems of some of the world’s biggest and most critical industries have grown heavily dependent on a handful of relatively obscure software vendors, which are now emerging as single points of failure.
Those are the facts. And then there’s CrowdStrike itself, emerging again as a problem in yet another election year, and if ever there was a company appropriately named…Read More...
We’ve found that in tech, founders/the tech press, etc, in many cases, have a bad habit of stretching the truth, let’s call it, or at least of altering a narrative to suit their purposes. It’s top-down and the members of the tech cabal do it constantly – often with the willing assistance of the tech media, who let’s say tend to shy away from presenting the full picture.
Last week, “Microsoft and Apple (gave) up their OpenAI board seats,” MSN reported. “Microsoft reportedly told OpenAI that it’s confident in the direction the company is taking, so its seat on the board is no longer necessary.”
That’s the snapshot, which is often as far as many readers get, and let’s not forget that MSN, or Microsoft News, is a Microsoft property.Read More...
The Chevron Doctrine Reversed: Tech Shows Its True Colors
Did you feel it? Tech’s tectonic plates shifted last week when the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Chevron Doctrine, as it’s known, 6-3.
“Since the New Deal era, the bulk of the functioning US government is the administrative state — think the acronym soup of agencies like the EPA, FCC, FTC, FDA, and so on. Even when Capitol Hill is not mired in deep dysfunction, the speed at which Congress and the courts operate no longer seems suitable for modern life,” said The Verge, and spoken with the myopia/agenda of a true tech publication.
The same has been said of the U.S. Constitution, but never mind that for our purposes here, and which we only mention as an homage to U.S. Independence Day this week on July 4.Read More...
The social networks love kids. That especially seems to be the case with Meta nee Facebook, with its many social platforms. The company has a long history of engaging children – the more the merrier and cha-ching!
Just how engaging and by what methods is at long last coming under scrutiny. How Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Failed Children on Safety, States Say, the New York Times reported. The C.E.O. and his team drove Meta’s efforts to capture young users and misled the public about the risks, lawsuits by state attorneys general say. That’s not exactly a news flash, but then again, it’s the New York Times – all the news that’s fit to print…eventually.
There were more than a dozen lawsuits filed since last year by the attorneys general of 45 states and the District of Columbia, the Times reported. “The states accuse Meta of unfairly ensnaring teenagers and children on Instagram and Facebook while deceiving the public about the hazards.Read More...
So, Apple has at long last stepped into the AI game, and appropriately named at least part of their offering Apple Intelligence, a designation that, in our mind, harkens to ‘Army Intelligence,’ ‘Military Intelligence,’ and in Apple’s case, rightly so.
Apple’s AI solution is a partnership with OpenAI, who last week announced the addition of Paul M. Nakasone, a retired US Army general and former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors. FYI, as the National Pulse reported, “Prior to his departure from the NSA, Nakasone authored an op-ed advocating for the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The FISA legislation reauthorized a controversial provision that allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant as long as they’re communicating with noncitizens in a foreign country.
“Not everyone is thrilled about Nakasone’s new role at the AI firm, which will also see the former general seated at OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee,” Futurism reported. “The NSA has long been associated with surveillance of US citizens, and AI-embedded technologies are already renewing and escalating existing surveillance concerns. With that in mind, it might be unsurprising that former NSA employee and famed whistleblower Edward Snowden is among the OpenAI appointment’s outspoken detractors.Read More...
The Thing That Should Be Eating Us (Besides GenAI, of course)
It’s nearly summer – feels like it already in many parts of the world – and let’s face it: food just seems to just taste better in summer, no doubt due in no small part to the fact that local produce is more readily available.
Speaking of food, notice how many recalls there have been lately?
Just last week, “More Than 800,000 Units of Cream Cheese Have Been Recalled,” according to The Kitchn via MSN. “The recall has extended to a number of states across America: California, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. Some of the products were also shipped to Puerto Rico.”Read More...
