From Starlink Spies to Taco Bell Cartography: Your Tech Roundup
Navigating the choppy waters of tech evolution, one email rewrite at a time
Happy Friday, Friend!
It has been quite the update week for anyone in tech—Apple released their latest batch of OS updates and, of course, OpenAI pushed the envelope of LLMs with their o1 model release.
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The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
I Can Hear You Now — In 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen coined the now ubiquitous phrase “software is eating the world.” And surely you have seen one of the many infographics showing all the formerly physical gadgets, such as your Walkman, GPS device, and heart rate strap, which were displaced by an app on your mobile device. Now you can add one more device to the list—and this one is pretty huge: your hearing aid. The latest version of iOS, combined with Apple’s noise-canceling earbuds, just received FDA approval as a medical-grade hearing aid. The kicker? You can do a hearing test in five minutes from the comfort of your home. Which means that many more people will have access to hearing tests (and hearing aids should they need them). The future has just become a little less muted. (link ↗)
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t — The US military Green Berets demonstrated an infiltration in which they used advanced cyber capabilities to not only deactivate a building’s security systems but also wiped themselves off the security cam footage. The stuff we saw Tom Cruise do in Mission: Impossible is not quite as impossible anymore. (link ↗)
Now You See Me — Talking about the military, a group of Chinese scientists has demonstrated how they can use Starlink’s dense constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to unmask US stealth aircraft. One man’s Netflix stream is another’s national security. (link ↗)
The AI Enshitification is Well Under Way — We talked about this here before with the news that the AI search tool Perplexity might soon serve ads to its users. Now Amazon announced that their AI search bot Rufus (which, to be honest, is a weird name to start with) will answer your product questions with ads. (link ↗)
The Many Sides of AI — On one hand, you have AI Maximalists, touting the imminent release of AGI. A little less extreme, yet still very optimistic, are the folks who (rightfully) point out how incredibly far we have come in the development of GenAI—and make predictions on how this trend will continue (link ↗). On the other hand, you have folks like Ed Zitron, who calls for a moment of “Subprime AI Crisis.” (link ↗) As usual, it is good to read and contemplate both ends of the spectrum (and all that falls in the middle), as the truth will likely be somewhere in between.
And There Goes WFH — Remember the collective “we will never go back to the things we were” mood after the COVID lockdowns loosened. People (and their employers) got used to working from home, and the new normal was, well, new and exciting. Get your work done wherever you are; who needs offices? Back then, we argued that during COVID, for office workers, productivity was generally up, whereas creativity (which needs more direct human interaction) was down—and thus the companies that can figure out how to keep the benefits of WFH while ramping up their creativity would win. It looks like corporation after corporation is throwing in the towel, though—maybe it’s just too hard?! We had Dell forcing its workforce back into the office (and experiencing a mass exodus as a result); now Amazon follows suit. It will be interesting to see what this does to their workforce and, ultimately, competitiveness. (link ↗)
EV Fires Require Lots of Water — One of those interesting (and pesky) “implications of the implication”: When an electric vehicle catches fire, it requires significantly more water to put out than a combustion engine-powered vehicle. Point in case—Tesla’s Semi Truck, which required 50,000 gallons of water to be put out after its battery pack ignited. A world of EVs, will also be a world of headaches for firefighters. (link ↗)
AI Also Requires Lots of Water — By now, it is a well-known fact that AI (specifically Generative AI) requires large amounts of energy. What is discussed less is the amount of water needed to cool all those data centers. The Washington Post has a well-put-together article with a couple of infographics. To put things into perspective: having AI rewrite a single email equals about a bottle of water. (link ↗)
Jobs in the Age of AI — Copyeditors were probably the first to see their jobs being affected by AI. GenAI is simply good enough for many writing and editing tasks. Now we rehire those same copyeditors to edit the slob AI produces. Brave new world. (link ↗)
Want to Be Safe? Drive in an Autonomous Vehicle — Waymo, the Google (sorry, Alphabet) spinoff clocking in millions of miles with their self-driving taxi fleet in cities like San Francisco released their accident statistics—and the data looks not just good but great. Autonomous vehicles are significantly safer drivers than their human compatriots. One juicy detail: Most of the crashes which did happen were not Waymo’s fault but a human driver rear ending the Waymo car. (link ↗) and (link ↗).
Social Media Virality Decoded — Wonder how YouTube superstar Mr. Beast runs his shop? Which metrics does he track, or where does he spend his money? Wonder no more—someone leaked his “How to Succeed at Mr. Beast Productions” manual. (link ↗)
What We Are Reading
🐾 When Dogs Recall Toys, And Horses Plan Ahead, Are Animals So Different From Us? Paws for Thought: We need to rethink animal intelligence. @Jane
✈️ SpaceX Starlink Has 2,500 Airplanes Under Contract After United Megadeal, Director Says Being completely offline on airplanes is a thing of the past; at least on United! They’re bringing free Wi-Fi to their 1,000-plane fleet via Starlink, something the internet company hopes other airlines will get on board with ASAP. @Mafe
⚡ Techno-energy Is Reshaping The World Could an energy tech revolution deliver some of the global changes (fewer autocrats, fewer cartels, general abundance) that the information tech revolution promised but didn’t quite deliver? Maybe. @Jeffrey
🤑 To Speak To A Representative, Press $$ May I talk to a human, please? Authentic human interaction is now a premium feature when it comes to customer service. @Pedro
🔧 The Uruguayan Company Teaching People How To Turn Regular Cars Into EVs Tesla, BYD, and a whole slew of (new) car companies help the world transition to EVs. Meanwhile, an Uruguayan bucks the trend, goes DIY, and teaches its customers how to convert their gas-powered cars into electric vehicles. @Pascal
(Random) Bits & Pixels
👟 Incredible footage from the legendary designer of the NIKE Swoosh (easily one of the most recognizable logos in the world—which she charged $35 for!) shows Carolyn Davidson’s visit to NIKE Headquarters in 1983 with NIKE founder Phil Knight.
✈️ The future of air transportation is… in a stolen plane? The absolutely bonkers story of the Australian airline Rex. (link ↗)
🌮 Did you know the American fast-food chain Taco Bell has different prices across its locations? Let’s map all of them and see where you can get the cheapest and most expensive Taco Bell in the USA. Taco Tuesday will never be the same… (link ↗)
🏀 You gotta love the Internet: Here is a photo of every single outdoor basketball court in the U.S. (link ↗)
🧱 Just in case you are running out of ideas on what to do with your Legos, you could rebuild the Lego Great Ball Contraption. (link ↗)
🚗 First we had polo (the sport, not the fashion brand), and it was played on horseback. Then came the automobile—and we got auto polo! (link ↗)
