About: blatcho

A conversation with George Mason University’s Todd Kashdan on pushing back against the consensus.

A group of activist shareholders at the world’s largest bitcoin investment trust claim they lost billions as the market tanked. Now they want to take control.

The latest trend to hit the video-sharing site is a backlash against hauls and self-serving recommendations.

If you’re desperately scrolling, it’s not your fault. The recommendation system for love needs a major reboot.

Bloomberg: US financial regulators are rapidly closing crypto’s key routes to the banking system, accelerating since FTX collapsed, pushing the industry to the fringes  —  Crypto’s free pass is getting yanked as the most powerful US financial regulators rapidly close key doors to the country’s banking system.

Will Knight / Wired: A look at Eric Schmidt-backed startup Ishtari, which uses machine learning to virtually assemble and test war machines from computer models of each component  —  The former Google CEO is on a mission to rewire the US military with cutting-edge artificial intelligence to take on China.

Reuters: Beijing’s IT bureau plans to support AI startups building ChatGPT-like models and says 1,048 core AI companies, or 29% of China’s total, are located in Beijing  —  China’s capital Beijing will support leading enterprises in building large artificial intelligence (AI) models that can challenge ChatGPT …

Overwatch 2’s new limited-time dating sim lets you romance Mercy or Genji, but I want so much more.

By shutting off its free API, the social network will stop researchers from getting access to crucial data to track hate speech and disinformation.

Whether you’re headed to the office with a tickle in your throat or getting on a crowded bus, face coverings are probably here to stay.

Wesley Hilliard / AppleInsider: A bug introduced in iOS 16.3.1 is causing the Google Photos app to crash at launch  —  iOS 16.3.1 causing Google Photos to crash  —  A bug introduced in iOS 16.3.1 is causing Google Photos to crash at launch, so users that rely on the service should hold off on updating […]

Sarah Nassauer / Wall Street Journal: Memo: Walmart plans to close its tech hubs in Austin, Portland, and Carlsbad, CA, and require staff to relocate and be in office twice a week to keep their jobs  —  Retail giant is closing offices in Austin, Portland and Carlsbad and telling hundreds of staff they must relocate […]

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Cloudflare says it mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks hitting customers last weekend; one exceeded 71M rps, 35%+ higher than the previous record  —  This weekend, Cloudflare blocked what it describes as the largest volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to date.

A spate of shootdowns involving balloons and other flying objects over North America comes as the US military is becoming more sensitive to unidentified aerial phenomena

Four mysterious objects, including a suspected spy balloon and three that are unidentified beyond being described as cylindrical or octagonal, have been shot down by fighter jets over North America in just over a week. Here’s what we know about them all

We haven’t seen airships in our skies since the days of the Hindenburg disaster but has airship technology matured? New Scientist reporter, Alex Wilkins gets hands-on experience in flying an airship

Priscilla King Gray, an integral part of the fabric at MIT for more than 50 years, died on Feb. 8. She was 89. Gray, who had been the wife of former MIT president Paul Gray ’54, SM ’55, ScD ’60 until his death in 2017, co-founded the MIT Public Service Center — since renamed in […]

Engineers at MIT and Caltech have demonstrated an ingestible sensor whose location can be monitored as it moves through the digestive tract, an advance that could help doctors more easily diagnose gastrointestinal motility disorders such as constipation, gastroesophageal reflux disease, and gastroparesis. The tiny sensor works by detecting a magnetic field produced by an electromagnetic […]

Six ways to invest in the person who’s investing in your career.

Set clear expectations and be a willing coach — but don’t micromanage.

Strategies to navigate this complicated (and awkward) question.

Investment schemes are ensnaring victims with increasingly compelling narratives and believable tech.

Astrophysicists are using gravitational waves and light to trace the genealogies of dead stars and reveal the history of the universe.

The Modi administration keeps giving itself new powers, and Big Tech keeps giving in.

Financial Times: A look at Andy Jassy’s challenges running Amazon, down by $1T in market cap since he took over: cutting costs, layoffs, boosting Prime subscribers, and more  —  Investors joining Amazon’s earning call earlier this month were greeted with a surprise guest: the group’s chief executive, Andy Jassy.

Max Tani / Semafor: A look back at Spotify betting hundreds of millions of dollars on podcasts, which CFO Paul Vogel says were a “big drag on our business in 2022”  —  By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors.

Wired: Publishers worry that Microsoft’s and Google’s search chatbots, which summarize key info from articles, may undermine their businesses and spread misinformation  —  Microsoft’s new search interface can serve up key information from articles, removing the need to click—and potentially undermining publisher business models.

Powerful machine-learning models are being used to help people tackle tough problems such as identifying disease in medical images or detecting road obstacles for autonomous vehicles. But machine-learning models can make mistakes, so in high-stakes settings it’s critical that humans know when to trust a model’s predictions. Uncertainty quantification is one tool that improves a […]

The roads and parks are calling. Our favorite cold-weather picks will have you jogging in no time.

This smart bird feeder takes pictures, notifies you when new visitors arrive, and even teaches you facts about your fluffy friends.

Stretches of DNA that lock inherited traits together often accumulate harmful mutations. But they also hold genetic benefits for species.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: the SEC has told crypto firm Paxos it plans to sue the company, alleging the Binance USD token, which it issues and lists, is an unregistered security  —  The agency has been intensifying its enforcement of major crypto players  —  The Securities and Exchange Commission …

Wall Street Journal: IDC: Pico, owned by ByteDance, gained ~15% of the global VR market share by Q3 2022, a 3x gain YoY; Meta’s market share fell from 90% to ~75% in the same period  —  Pico, owned by ByteDance, has increased shipments of VR headsets as it attempts to compete with Meta’s Quest 2

Tiffany Hsu / New York Times: How a slowing digital ad market, Apple’s ATT changes, tech companies’ internal turmoil, weak content moderation, and more are contributing to a junk ad epidemic  —  Scrolling past ads has rarely been enjoyable.  But in recent months, people say the experience seems so much worse.

Remember what happened with the Tower of Babel? Same type of deal.

Keep your movements private.

Steve Nadis / Quanta Magazine: A look at “liquid” neural nets, which change their underlying algorithms based on observed inputs, making them more flexible than standard ML neural networks  —  “Liquid” neural nets, based on a worm’s nervous system, can transform their underlying algorithms on the fly, giving them unprecedented speed and adaptability.

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: Creating trustworthy generative AI requires resources probably on the scale of what companies like Microsoft and Google possess, making them even more powerful  —  Relying on tech giants for both answers and assistance, rather than just information, could entrench them into our lives more deeply than ever

Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Google staff criticize company leadership over the Bard announcement, calling the unveil “botched”, “myopic”, and “un-Googley” on the internal forum Memegen  —  – Google employees took to Memegen this week, filling the message repository with criticisms …

Before James Hermus started elementary school, he was a happy, curious kid who loved to learn. By the end of first grade, however, all that started to change, he says. As his schoolbooks became more advanced, Hermus could no longer memorize the words on each page, and pretend to be reading. He clearly knew the […]

These are our favorite portable speakers of all shapes and sizes, from clip-ons to a massive boom box.

Who cares if the “big game” is on? Here are our picks for the best stuff to stream on Sunday besides that pesky football championship.

Plus: Netflix expands its efforts to end password sharing, Apple’s “buy now, pay later” entry creeps closer, and we scrutinize your Bitcoin spending.

Louise Matsakis / Semafor: Sources: TikTok’s Internal Audit team that spied on journalists had wide investigative powers with little oversight; ByteDance says it’s restructuring the team  —  TikTok’s hyper-aggressive internal security team drew a wave of complaints from employees before its conduct exploded …

Antonio Olivo / Washington Post: Some local legislators and residents in Northern Virginia, home to ~275 data centers with dozens more planned, complain of land use, cooling fan noise, and more  —  A drone soared over a cluster of data center buildings in Northern Virginia, recording video of rooftop exhaust fans whose constant whir …

Clare Duffy / CNN: Pathmatics estimates the monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers fell 60%+ from around $127M in October 2022 to just over $48M by January 25, 2023  —  New York CNN —  —  More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform …

Military interest in balloon surveillance had been increasing even before a Chinese-launched balloon wandered across the continental US

Andy Greenberg / Wired: A look at the newly launched Bitcoin mixer Sinbad.io, which appears to have become the preferred outlet for North Korean hackers to launder stolen crypto  —  The world’s most prolific crypto thieves have used Sinbad.io to launder tens of millions.  Its creator, “Mehdi,” answers WIRED’s questions.

Benedict Evans: An overview of macro tech trends, with a focus on the e-commerce slowdown, Amazon, layoffs, advertising, and generative AI opportunities beyond text and images  —  Presentations Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.  This year, ‘The New Gatekeepers’.

Jonathan Greig / The Record: The City of Oakland confirms reports of a ransomware attack on its networks but says 911, financial data, and fire and emergency resources were not impacted  —  The City of Oakland confirmed reports that its networks had been hit with ransomware after rumors emerged online that several agencies …