“While Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have technically “invested” in these companies, they’ve really created guaranteed revenue streams, investing money to create customers that are effectively obliged to spend their investment dollars on their own services. As the use of artificial intelligence grows, so do these revenue streams, forcing almost every single dollar spent on AI…
“Steve Ells Is Still Trying to Solve Lunch” – Elizabeth G. Dunne (Grub Street)
“Ells is not the only restaurateur looking for ways to trim labor through automation. Sweetgreen is testing a bowl-composing robotic assembly line in two stores. White Castle is rolling out a robotic arm called Flippy 2 to work its fry stations. Chipotle has been testing a chip-frying bot, an automated guacamole-maker, and a roboticized make-line…
“Who killed Google Reader?” – David Pierce (Verge)
“At its peak, Reader had just north of 30 million users, many of them using it every day. That’s a big number — by almost any scale other than Google’s. Google scale projects are about hundreds of millions and billions of users, and executives always seemed to regard Reader as a rounding error. Internally, lots…
“’Electoral bonds’ no more: India’s Supreme Court vs BJP’s political funding tool” – India Inside Out
“The Union Government – which had previously argued in the Supreme Court that Indian citizens have no fundamental right to privacy – defended its reform by arguing that citizens have no right to information regarding the funding of political parties” https://rohanvenkat.substack.com/p/electoral-bonds-no-more-indias-supreme
“On notes, outlines, and somehow cobbling a script together…” – Development Hell
“If you can make notes and create outlines and then stick to those things and create a good script out of them, then that’s great. Good for you. I can’t do it. And the reason I know I can’t do it is that it has taken me writing this piece up to this point for…
“Public intellectuals have short shelf lives – but why?” – Scholar’s Stage (2020)
“Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s: these are the years in which they have…
“A Trilli – AI, Green Energy, Uber, and Reading” – A Scammer Darkly
“It allows Uber to control drivers by forcing them to take lower-paying rides to hit ‘utilization’ metrics or face consequences. Like the advertising auctions we talk about around here sometimes, creating opaque markets where the company in charge sets prices on both the buy and sell side means Uber can pay itself more with no…
“It’s Apple’s Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here” – BIG
“Scientific and engineering development isn’t a function of corporate size and power, but the collective knowledge of our society and how we organize it. The internet is a massive scale network, the biggest in human history, and no one owns it. By contrast, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have control over immense swaths of…
“February 15, 2024” – Letters from an American
“True the Vote, the right-wing organization that insisted it had evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, has told a Georgia judge that, in fact, it has no such evidence. Their claims provided the basis for the arguments about voter fraud highlighted in right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2024
“Issue 51 – It’s quiet… too quiet” – Citation Needed
“Fairshake superPAC (funded by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and others [I47]) has just spent around $2 million of the $80 million in its war chest on attack ads against California Senate candidate, Democrat Katie Porter. The ad attacks Porter for receiving three contributions of $500, $2,000, and $2,900 from individuals who are executives at a pharmaceutical…