Tech News
Tech News and Analysis from around the web
Joanna Ossinger / Bloomberg:
The Graph Foundation, which operates a protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data, raises $50M led by Tiger Global via a sale of its The Graph tokens — The Graph Foundation, which operates a protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data, raised $50 million in a sale of digital tokens …
New York Times:
Twitter terminated its head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko this week, and CISO Rinki Sethi will depart in the coming weeks; both execs joined Twitter in 2020 — Parag Agrawal, Twitter's new chief executive, terminated the company's head of security this week.
Alana Semuels / TIME:
Intel commits $20B to build at least two semiconductor fabrication plants on a 1,000-acre site by 2025, employing at least 3,000 people in New Albany, Ohio — The announcement comes amidst a push to increase domestic manufacturing of semiconductors. Partly because of enormous incentives offered …
Nesrine Malik / The Guardian:
How Facebook became indispensable in Africa with its ease of access, importance to small businesses, its facilitating of community organizing, and more — Western users may be logging off, but across the continent of Africa, the social media company is indispensable for everything from running a business to sourcing vaccines.
Sue Halpern / New Yorker:
Inside DARPA's Air Combat Evolution program, which aims to design AI that can fly a plane and engage in aerial combat without a human pilot — Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted? … On a cloudless morning last May …
Tiernan Ray / ZDNet:
Meta details Data2vec, a self-supervised algorithm that unifies the process of training a neural network to learn the same across speech, images, and text — By eschewing data-specific outputs for internal representations, Meta aims for a more-general sort of AI.
Washington Post:
Analysis: many right-wing personalities saw their followers surge on sites like Telegram, Gab, and Gettr after the January 6 riot, but growth has since stalled — After a short surge following the Jan. 6 riot last year, the number of people following noted right-wing personalities on services …
Filipe Espósito / 9to5Mac:
Apple releases iOS 15.3 RC and macOS Monterey 12.2 RC with a fix for Safari 15's IndexedDB API that leaked users' browser history and Google ID to other sites — We recently reported that Apple was working on a fix for a Safari bug that led to the leaking of users' browsing history and Google ID.
New York Times:
DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman is leaving Google to join Greylock Partners; Suleyman was stripped of some duties in 2019 for allegedly bullying staff — Mustafa Suleyman, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, is leaving Google to join the venture capital firm Greylock Partners.
Coral Murphy Marcos / New York Times:
DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman is leaving Google to join Greylock Partners; Suleyman was stripped of some duties in 2019 for allegedly bullying staff — Data delayed at least 15 minutesSource: FactSetBy: Ella Koeze — Stocks fell on Thursday, a third-consecutive decline for Wall Street …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix reports Q4 revenue of $7.71B, up 16% YoY, net income of $607M, 222M paid subscribers, and $30B in 2021 revenue, up 19%; stock down ~20% on weak guidance — Netflix ended 2021 with a slightly lower-than-expected subscriber gain in the fourth quarter, and its stock took a dive with a weak Q1 outlook.
Jeff Cox / CNBC:
The US Federal Reserve releases its long-awaited report on a digital dollar but doesn't take a position on issuing one, and seeks public feedback for 120 days — - The Federal Reserve on Thursday released its long-awaited exploration of a digital dollar but took no position on the issuance of a central bank digital currency.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Prophecy, which lets data engineers build workflows by switching between a visual interface and a code editor, raises a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners — Prophecy, a low-code platform for data engineering, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Insight Partners.
John Paczkowski / BuzzFeed News:
Apple names longtime company spokesperson Kristin Huguet as VP of worldwide communications, replacing Stella Low, who is leaving after joining Apple in May 2021 — Apple has tapped a new head of PR: longtime company spokesperson Kristin Huguet. She'll replace Stella Low …
Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
The Senate Judiciary votes 16-6 to advance the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would stop platforms from favoring their products over rivals' — The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-6 Thursday to advance a major tech competition bill, which some experts consider lawmakers' best shot …
Way back in 1986, my then-company Living Videotext shipped a product called MORE.
We called it that because there was so much more in it than the earlier outliner, ThinkTank 512, we didn't have any idea which new feature, if any, would be the one that turned people on.
We didn't have the luxury of picking among them because our company was on the verge of going out of business. We needed help from Apple to make it to shipping. They gave us a loan of $400K, and we put our source code in escrow in case the company failed, which looked like a real possibility.
Well the product was an instant hit. And now, so many years later, I can tell you for sure which features made the difference -- tree charts and bullet charts.
Here's what a MORE tree chart looked like:
You'd edit an outline, click a button and boom a colorful tree chart would appear. Go back to the outline and make a change, view it again, and boom, the tree chart changed. Up till then color graphics, which were still very new to computers, was something for a priesthood. This was color graphics for thinkers.
We sold a huge number of MOREs that year and in 1987 sold the company for a lot of money and I was able to go back to making software and stop being a CEO which was a good thing for me to do! :-)
It's 2022 Dave
OK so here we are, it's 2022, an unthinkable number of years later (36) and here we are again. We have a nice powerful outliner. Like MORE it can print (these days that means render as a blog), but where are the beautiful graphics?
Here they are. A new Tree Chart viewer that hooks into Drummer very neatly.
If you're a Drummer user, go have fun. I'm sure you'll love it. And if you use another kind of outliner, either give Drummer a try, or ask the people who make your outliner to have a look at Tree Chart (it's open source) and either adapt their outliner to work with Tree Chart (the better idea) or adapt Tree Chart to work with their outliner.
As I said before, these days my product is interop. I made my fortune in the 80s, and I've invested well enough so that I don't need a hit product now. What I want to do is re-kindle the interest in computers used as thinking tools around common formats and protocols so it can grow like the open web, not so much like a silo. We've been down both roads and open is better for the users. And also for the vendors imho.
The press is stuck in a rut. Everything is about Biden and the various horse races. But that isn't what matters. What matters is that we don't become a fascist country with slavery for Blacks, ovens for Jews and women turned into baby-producing handmaidens. Also a human-habitable planet would be nice. Focus on these things. This is what matters, not that random journalists earn a salary for flushing America down the toilet.
I was watching Ari Melber last night. The only reason I didn't turn it off is because he had James Carville on. Melber is entertaining and sometimes interesting, but usually just repeats the same bullshit night after night all the while claiming to be a journalist. He's an entertainer. But Carville, while also very entertaining, actually has ideas that you don't hear all the time on cable and in the NYT etc. More Carville please.
Here's what Carville says.
- The Dems are actually doing okay.
- They would do better if there were a few more Dems in the Senate, and also in the House.
- So the campaign, he says, should be about what they can do for us, workers, families. And they have quite a few things they want to do for us, so sell those things! Man, sometimes it's so simple when you get a clear thinker who doesn't have anything in particular to sell and doesn't give a shit if you like him (and we do like him, he's a coonass after all).
- Four more Senators and hold the House, and you can have it all. So we can do some very specific things for you.
It's so logical. Get actors, great ones, who look like Democratic voters, and run ads that say what Carville says they should say, and let's have the slogan be something like this. You have the power, for real. Just vote, and we all win. Yeah it could be shorter. Use the last three words. We All Win. Come on, that's what it's about. I would give the max to fund such a campaign and so would a lot of people. The ads sell more ads. And the call to action is: Make a difference and vote.
Run the same ad with different faces. Surprise us, have one with Stacey Abrams or Val Demings. Run it over and over. We all win. We all win. Over and over. Buttons, bumper stickers, flags, lawn signs. We all win everywhere all the time. Basketball games. Hockey games. Football, baseball. County fairs.
Because we all want to feel we can do good. Maybe not all of us, but I suspect a lot of Trump voters while they may be racist (face it, we're a racist country, so you have to work really hard to not be racist) what they really want is this: To make a difference. Trump filled a vacuum, the Democrats while they care about us in the aggregate, never get that we are individuals and we want to make a difference. We all want to know there's something we can do to help us all win. If you want to win, Mr or Ms Democrat, you have to bring the people into your marketing. And then, if you want to keep governing and not be completely obstructed, you have to bring us into governing too. The mistake that Obama made was not bringing the people into his administration. McConnell and his fascist Federalists wouldn't have been able to stand up to him if he had us behind him. No Democrat should ever try to do that again (though Biden is doing it too).
We all win. Tatoo that on your forehead.
I don't care how it became 6-3 in favor of the fascists, that's where it is now, that's not the United States, and that's not the Constitution.
It's bullshit. I don't care if the Dems don't have the votes to fix it. It's still bullshit.
Bullshit is bullshit. Pretty simple folks.
If journalism wanted to help, they would always stay in the present, talk about what Repubs are doing now to undermine democracy, and explain carefully and often what the impact of those actions will have in the future.
The election for governor in Virginia was an excellent example. Journalism could have said that despite what the candidate is saying this is what Repubs do when they gain control of a state government, esp one in the South. So when you vote for the Republican, no matter how you feel about Critical Race Theory, he's doing to do X, Y and Z which are things that most Americans find hideous. And btw, the Democrats could do that too. They are awfully nice to their Republican friends. And the result is we're doomed.
When Trump was first running in 2016, only one reporter wrote a story explaining what a Trump presidency would be like. They should have all been doing it. All the time. Saving ourselves begins with telling ourselves the truth, and realizing that journalism and the Democrats are not doing that.
Summary of the above. Journalism should always clearly answer the question: What This Means To You. Don't run the piece until you can answer it. And maybe consider getting some new reporters who can.