An Archive of the SOS Email Lists.
We follow Max Levchin on Twitter. Last week, he posted an interesting series of tweets, based on an Edelman Trust Barometer Report that was released at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
For the record, Levchin was co-founder and CTO of Paypal; former Chairman of Yelp; founder/CEO of Slide (acquired by Google and shut down); currently, founder of Affirm, and a long-time WEF attendee.
It’s that time again! When thousands of techies will descend on Austin for SXSW, aka, Spring Break for Geeks and time for us to remind you that are some general rules of thumb for navigating South By – or any other huge conference that also happens to be an excuse for a drinkfest.
First, a few SXSW-specific points: For the uninitiated and we have no firm statistics to confirm this, Austin may well be the Stomach Pumping Capital of the World. Seriously. You’ll even notice ambulances posted at certain street corners at night, ready to service those who’ve over-imbibed, and that’s not SXSW: that’s just another night in Austin.
Since memos seem to be top of mind these days, why fight it? Of course, we refer to the one that former Google employee James Damore wrote a while back, that led to his being terminated from the company, and the impending lawsuit that threatens to out a lot of practices and perhaps unwritten policies that Google would prefer not be aired in public.
It seems that memos will do that, once they’re out in the wild, and certain memos are harbingers of a deeper and more far reaching issues.
Elon Musk has been warning us about the dangers of AI for quite some time now, saying that we need to regulate AI before it becomes a danger to humanity, “famously comparing work on AI to “summoning the demon,” and (warning) time and time again that the technology poses an existential risk to humanity, according to The Verge.
The tech community has a bad habit of shooting first and asking questions later, also known as ask forgiveness, not permission, which has led to data collection and invasion of privacy. And in case you missed it, If you’re using an Android phone, Google may be tracking every move you make.
In case you missed it, in his annual address/personal challenge of the year, Mark Zuckerberg committed to “focus(ing) on fixing… important issues. We won’t prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we’re successful this year then we’ll end 2018 on a much better trajectory.”
His past personal challenges have included “visit(ing) every US state, run(ning) 365 miles… and learn(ing) Mandarin.”
From Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley and everything in between and near and far, including Silicon Prairie, Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Desert, Silicon Wadi, Silicon Slopes, Silicon Hills, et al, the world has seen some amazing tech – and some moments in tech that were somewhat less than shining. Or at least, equally memorable, but not in a good way.
It was a year that the tech industry proved that it does have its fair share of visionaries, as well as hipsters and outsters, heroes and zeroes, goodniks and bad players. While the industry is heavily peopled with brash young men and bad boys, it was a year that gave the latter a whole new meaning.
Last week, the FCC reversed the 2015 Net Neutrality Act and contrary to popular misconception, the internet did not disappeared. In fact, there has been a lot of disinformation or phacts as we now like to call them (in print, at least), as they bear little or no resemblance to the real thing, surrounding NN.
As for that so-called last mile, as Wired pointed out in 2014, prior to the first NN vote, in What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality, “The net neutrality debate is based on a mental model of the internet that hasn’t been accurate for more than a decade. We tend to think of the internet as a massive public network that everyone connects to in exactly the same way. We envision data traveling from Google and Yahoo and Uber and every other online company into a massive internet backbone, before moving to a vast array of ISPs that then shuttle it into our homes. That could be a neutral network, but it’s not today’s internet… Ten years ago, internet traffic was “broadly distributed across thousands of companies,” said Craig Labovitz (CEO of DeepField Networks, an outfit whose sole mission is to track how companies build internet infrastructure) “..But by 2009, half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies, and today, half of the internet’s traffic comes from just 30 outfits, including Google, Facebook, and Netflix… Because these companies are moving so much traffic on their own, they’ve been forced to make special arrangements with the country’s internet service providers that can facilitate the delivery of their sites and applications. Basically, they’re bypassing the internet backbone, plugging straight into the ISPs (and) essentially rewired the internet.”
