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Category: Advice

Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up

Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up

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Image by gt39 from Pixabay

Thank you, Eminem, and who’d have thought and how could you tell?

The multitude of falsehoods and over-promises of AI aside (Instagram’s AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists), Deep Fakes, that other wonderful outcome that AI hath wrought, is fast becoming a huge problem thanks to the improvements in AI. We’re currently witnessing The Rise of AI-Powered Deepfake Scams and as CNN  reported, “Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer.’”

Of course, AI savior, Sam Altman, has a solution: capture the digital identity of, well, every human on the planet.  He first rolled out his orb (nee World Orb) iris scanner in 2023 to create a unique digital identity as proof of being human, which it seems “More than 12 million people have already verified their identity using Orbs, which are available and free to use in more than 20 countries,” said CNN. Not a huge number considering the billions of people on the planet, what to speak of the fact that there are those who are “worried the project could centralize too much power under Altman, who already has an outsized role in what’s expected to be a revolutionary tech transformation.” Read More...

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

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Image by Rudi Arlt from Pixabay

Disclosure: this is not a new product promotion but rather a study in how to potentially disrupt a very crowded vertical.

“A new American electric vehicle startup called Slate Auto has made its debut, and it’s about as anti-Tesla as it gets,” TechCrunch reported, once again missing the forest through the trees, and proving yet again that the tech media loves to get their digs in, whether it’s appropriate or not.

While there are current Tesla owner who are experiencing buyer’s remorse, or as the New York Times wrote, “In Marin County, There’s Trouble in Teslaville,” is the main selling point of the Slate the fact that it isn’t a Tesla? Or maybe the fact that “It’s affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog. It has manual windows, and it doesn’t come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn’t even painted. It can also  transform from a two-seater pickup to a five-seater SUV,” as TechCrunch pointed out. Read More...

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

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Image by Dušan from Pixabay

Easter is coming and speaking of resurrections, dire wolves, made famous by HBO’s Game of Thrones, have been extinct for around 12,500 years, but “thanks to genetic engineers at biotech company Colossal Biosciences, these majestic predators are back,” Live Science reported. The pups were even named after the dire wolves from the HBO series: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

“The company claims to have achieved this by extracting DNA from dire wolf fossils in 2021, isolating and growing gray wolf cells, and “tinkering” with the genes. They then transferred that DNA into empty canine eggs and transplanted those into fertile dogs,” Daily Dot explained.

As for this being a resurrection event, “Colossal’s critics have pointed out that, out of thousands of genetic differences that distinguish dire wolves from gray wolves, the company made only a handful of edits focused on recapitulating obvious physical traits such as fur color and texture,” Science.org reported. “Many researchers were also quick to note that according to a 2021 genetic analysis published in Nature, the dire wolf might not even be a wolf at all, belonging instead to a North American lineage of dogs that diverged from the ancestors of gray wolves more than 5 million years ago. As that study’s lead author Angela Perri told Science in 2021, the dire wolf was more closely related to the African jackal than the gray wolf and may have resembled “a giant, reddish coyote.” Read More...

The Case for 360 Degree Thinking

The Case for 360 Degree Thinking

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New York City has a composting mandate that’s been in effect since October, but now the powers that be are getting serious about implementing it, meaning, they’re levying fines on buildings/landlords who don’t comply and separate organic material from other detritus.

“But despite the mandate, the participation rate is abysmal: Public data indicates less than 5% of the city’s organic waste is actually being composted,” Gothamist reported.

Meanwhile, NYC landlords fume over new composting fines turning them into dumpster divers: ‘Detached from reality, wrote the New York Post. Read More...

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

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Image by Victoria from Pixabay

Variations on a theme and in case you missed it, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Privacy, “leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy,” as 404 Media et al reported.

“Once valued at $6 billion, executives have yet to find a bidder for the $50 million gene testing company that has never turned a profit,” Reddit noted, but that’s a whole other story.

“This strategic shift coincides with the resignation of its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who stepped down to spearhead an independent bid to acquire the company after facing repeated rejections from its board,” said Reclaim the Net. “For the millions who entrusted their DNA to 23andMe, the assumption might have been that such intimate data enjoys the ironclad protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law designed to shield sensitive health information from unauthorized disclosure. Yet, 23andMe operates outside HIPAA’s reach, leaving it tethered only to its own privacy policies — rules it can rewrite at will.” Read More...

Covid at Five: Following the New Science

Covid at Five: Following the New Science

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photo by testalize-me at unsplash

This month marked the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, and we thought it might be interesting and instructive to go over some of the developments since that time.

During the Covid Era, we were instructed to follow the science, and now that the novel mRNA vaccines have been out in the population for a while – in other words, studied over at least some time, which historically has been done before new vaccines are released to hundreds of millions of people, here are the results, and we’re just reporting, so don’t shoot the messenger: The Largest COVID-19 “Vaccine” Safety Study Ever Conducted, on 99 Million Individuals, Confirms the Injections Are NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN USE. We do realize that there was a pandemic afoot and lives at stake and the vaccine was rolled out for emergency use, but as Dr. Peter McCullough reported, In fact, 100-Year-Old BCG Vaccine Outperforms Novel mRNA Injections Against COVID-19.

““We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” says the headline on a New York Times piece that looks back at one of the deceptions promoted by government health officials during the Covid panic of 2020. The story appears in the opinion section but also notes that New York Times news reporting was subject to spin from what we might call the medical branch of the Beltway swamp,” said the Wall Street Journal. Read More...

AI and the Written Word

AI and the Written Word

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A subject matter expert friend of ours is being pressed ad nauseam to write a book, but his free time is in short supply. It has been suggested to him, again ad nauseam, to  have an LLM do it for him. The book would be generated in days!

Before deferring to a generative AI, some things to keep in mind: “AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News,” Columbia Journalism News reported.  “We found that…

• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses. Read More...

Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Om Malik wrote an amazing piece (Skype is dead. What happened?) on the demise of Skype and there are lessons to be learned here for founders – and investors.

At launch, Skype was a seminal technology that upended communications. Prior to the launch of the peer-to-peer network, long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive. Suddenly, one could call anywhere in the world for free, as one can do with so many services today – now, even video, of course. At one point, like Zoom, Skype was a verb.

As for the lessons: Read More...

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

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Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay

Startups are often put under the microscope when they go belly-up. The press is quick to do the forensics on what went wrong. What about the investors who put in the money? Where’s the scrutiny there? We’ve seen the bar raised for founders, but what about that other side of the table?

“Here’s the problem: this entire system optimizes for investor survival, not startup success,” said Paul O’Brien in a LinkedIn post. “A 90% startup failure rate? That’s not an inevitability…But no one in venture has an incentive to change. The funds get raised, the 2% management fees roll in, and the game continues. If investors actually cared about optimizing startup success, they’d be applying First Principles thinking, not just playing the same old VC lottery. They’d be using frameworks like the Bell Mason Diagnostic, which systematically assesses startups based on real, stage-appropriate criteria, rather than some partner’s gut feeling on whether the founder has “the right energy.”

“But most firms don’t do this because, why fix a system that already benefits them? Read More...

A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years

A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years

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Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

Again, the headline is courtesy of a poem by Ogden Nash
“A flea and a fly in a flu
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”

It’s winter. It’s the height of flu season, and it’s being reported as one of the worst flu seasons in years. We’re always curious as to why and while we’re not a conspiracy theorist at all, it’s always interesting to connect the dots and to separate truth/science from media talking points. If you believe that the latter is an exaggeration, we came across this, and it’s worth a watch.

We’re hearing from more and more of our readers who took the Covid vaccine about what we’ll call ‘buyers regret,’ and this just in: Yale scientists link Covid vaccines to alarming new syndrome causing ‘distinct biological changes’ to body, the Daily Mail et al reported. Read More...