CategoryTechnology

From Fortune’s article: The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley A few quotes tell the story. For starters: “What if Theranos is the canary in the coal mine?” says Roger McNamee, a 40-year VC veteran and managing director at Elevation Partners. “Everyone is looking at Theranos as an outlier. We may discover it’s not an outlier at all.” Because: So inexperienced people are...

I’ve been reading a bit around AI lately. It started with this piece in the New York Times which focusses initially on Google (in particular Google Translate) and then the extraordinary speed with which they’ve reorganised the entire company around AI. And then the ‘arms race’ to AI control in the industry: Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the...

I used Apple Pay this morning in a shop and the girl behind the counter was amazed by it. She wanted to know all about it and how it worked. She was young and tech savvy and yet this was an entirely new (and massively cool) concept for her. If you have an AMEX and have had Apple Pay for a while you’ll likely find this strange – to you paying with Apple Pay is probably so routine...

Netflix released their own stripped down version of SpeedTest called Fast – here try it now. I don’t know if it’s indicative of how bad our internet connection is or what, but it seems that every time I try it I get a vastly different speed result. In the last few minutes my speeds have ranged from 1.2 Mbps through to 25 Mbps with no discernible pattern. I tried it on my phone...

This piece by David Niu on Entrepreneur made me think. In it he outlines his view that remote working inhibits company culture. He notes his own views: I firmly believe that a strong company culture determines your success, and you can’t have a strong culture without people working together in an office setting. and A strong workplace culture is an organization’s No. 1 competitive advantage...

Techmeme is the first thing I check every morning. It’s my window to the tech world. One of things I really appreciate is their human editing of headlines. Not only do they de-clickbaitify, but they also add details that help to communicate the real story. Here’s a story from The Verge: Apple updates iTunes with a ‘simpler’ design that doesn’t really help And...

I liked Marco Arment’s thoughts about Apple’s dominant position in the podcast world. It was a response to this NYT article. Speaking about Apple’s role in podcasting Marco writes: Apple has only ever used its dominant position benevolently and benignly so far, and as the medium has diversified, Apple’s role has shrunk. The last thing podcasters need is for Apple to increase...

In this Gizmodo piece on Facebook’s trending news curation project we find out that:

Facebook hired a bunch of contractors (likely out-of-work journalists)
to do basic curation of trending news items
worked them really hard
replaced most of them with an algorithm

TL;DR Technology progress happened. As usual. No one is surprised.
See also John Gruber’s take.

Here’s an all too common example of political incompetence and bungling when it comes to technology and infrastructure planning. And I thought it was just the NBN that had issues – at least we’ve got something rolling (albeit limping) out… Of course The Backburner nails it in a piece that you’d be forgiven for thinking was all too real: The Turnbull Government has...