About: blatcho

Clive Thompson / UX Collective: A look at Mastodon’s “antiviral” design and culture, where users push back at features and behaviors that promote virality, and embrace things that add friction  —  Back in 2017 I wrote a short column for Wired about “antiviral” design.  —  I’d recently been using some fun …

Financial Times: FTX balance sheet: $900M in liquid assets the day before bankruptcy, including $470M in Robinhood shares owned by an SBF entity not listed in bankruptcy filings  —  Vast gap highlights the dire state of Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange before it collapsed into bankruptcy

We’re hot on the heels of Black Friday, and the discounts are rolling in.

Even with all the modern advances in winter footwear, I love these 110-year-old L.L. Bean Duck Boots.

The big sale isn’t here quite yet, but you can already get killer deals on laptops, streaming sticks, tablets, and even Instant Pots.

Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk: FTX US General Counsel says the exchange has moved remaining funds to cold wallets to “mitigate damage” following a series of “unauthorized transactions”  —  Millions of dollars started to mysteriously move from FTX late Friday U.S. hours.

Bloomberg: FTX’s crash highlights flaws like Sequoia’s lack of access to Alameda’s balance sheet despite its due diligence and the investors failing to demand a board seat  —  Among the last people to realize that the cryptocurrency exchange FTX was a financial time bomb were the company’s own investors.

Brian Windhorst / ESPN: Miami-Dade County and the Miami Heat are ending their arena naming rights deal with FTX; the county had signed a 19-year, $135M deal for the rights in 2021  —  Miami-Dade County and the Miami Heat are ending their arena naming rights deal with bankrupt cryptocurrency firm FTX.

As Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire crumbles, its customers, and other crypto traders, are paying the price.

Grief slows the pace of Ryan Coogler’s sequel but makes it more meaningful in the process.

Are you tearing your hair out trying to feed a family of picky eaters? Try a subscription service like Blue Apron.

Sage D. Young / CoinDesk: Crypto.com shares its wallet addresses with Nansen to create a dashboard of ~$3B in assets, showing ~20% are in Shiba Inu, more than ETH’s ~17%; ~30% are in BTC  —  As large crypto exchanges push to prepare “proof-of-reserves” audits, an initial effort reveals just how much of Crypto.com’s reserves …

New York Times: An internal Twitter log shows that more than 140,000 accounts had signed up for the new Twitter Blue as of Thursday, November 10  —  The social media service, which is undergoing changes from its new owner Elon Musk, has descended into a messy swirl of spoof messages and parody accounts.

Reuters: Meta tells employees it plans to exit its Portal smart display business and wind down smartwatch projects, and that 46% of the 11K jobs cut were in technology  —  Meta Platforms (META.O) told employees on Friday that 54% of the 11,000 jobs it cut earlier this week were business roles and the rest were […]

The base of computer chips and batteries tends to be made from unrecyclable plastic, but using skin from a certain species of mushroom instead would reduce electronic waste

A German company’s efforts have prevented the use of more than 4.7 million disposable packaging containers.

A proposed SEC rule would require companies to disclose their cybersecurity governance capabilities.

Six actions for marketing leaders.

Tens of thousands of job cuts have rocked the industry, but unemployment among tech workers remains low—and plenty of companies are desperate for talent.

Satellite monitors discovered two vessels with their trackers turned off in the area of the pipeline prior to the suspected sabotage in September.

Harvests of the fungi are plummeting as Europe gets drier, pushing the prices of some varieties to eye-watering heights.

Jason Del Rey / Vox: How Amazon’s shopping experience, saturated with sponsored products, impacts sellers and consumers, as its ad revenue surpassed revenue from Prime in 2022  —  Inside the under-the-radar business that makes more money than Amazon Prime.  —  Type any random product into Amazon’s search bar and look closely at the results.

Financial Times: A look at Sam Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall in DC: becoming the face of crypto regulation, proposing bills, and testifying to Congress before FTX collapsed  —  Sam Bankman-Fried sought digital asset legislation and donated heavily to Democrats  —  In less than four years …

New York Times: Interviews with 36 current and former Twitter employees detail the excruciating chaos during Elon Musk’s first two weeks in charge  —  Mr. Musk ordered immediate layoffs, fired executives by email, laid down product deadlines and has transformed the company.  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk had a demand.

The UK’s Home Office will use a key fob-like device to track people who are subject to deportation orders 24 hours a day, meaning at any point they could be required to scan their fingerprints and confirm their location

Sparrow could shift the balance between humans and machines in the company’s warehouses, using machine learning algorithms and a custom gripper.

Questions about the Kremlin’s relationships with these groups remain. But researchers are finally getting some answers.

A decade ago, she was the target of a harassment campaign for her feminist critiques of video games. With That Time When, she can put it behind her.

Lydia Beyoud / Bloomberg: The Bahamas Securities Commission freezes the assets of FTX Digital Markets and “related parties” and appoints an attorney as a provisional liquidator  —  The Bahamas Securities Commission has frozen the assets of FTX Digital Markets “and related parties.”

Bloomberg: Source: Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth and head of ad sales Robin Wheeler resigned on November 10  —  Elon Musk, in his first address to Twitter Inc. employees since purchasing the company for $44 billion, said that bankruptcy was a possibility if it doesn’t start generating more cash …

Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8: Sources: Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth and head of sales Robin Wheeler resigned today  —  NEW: Hearing that the top execs remaining at Twitter — head of Trust & Safety @yoyoel and head of sales @robinw — both resigned today When you add in that Musk told employees […]

Artificial intelligence has helped design an invisibility cloak. The cloak could hide communication devices from detectors that use microwaves or infrared light

Many AIs can only become good at one task, forgetting everything they know if they learn another. A form of artificial sleep could help stop this from happening

Getting good answers from an artificial intelligence can be a tricky task, and now researchers have found that an AI is better at asking questions of another AI than people are

One glance at the news lately will reveal countless headlines on the dire state of global water and food security. Pollution, supply chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine are all threatening water and food systems, compounding climate change impacts from heat waves, drought, floods, and wildfires. Every year, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and […]

It’s a dilemma as old as time. Friday night has rolled around, and you’re trying to pick a restaurant for dinner. Should you visit your most beloved watering hole or try a new establishment, in the hopes of discovering something superior? Potentially, but that curiosity comes with a risk: If you explore the new option, […]

The political narrative doesn’t stand up to the research.

Sponsor content from ENEL.

Conserve cash and pay close attention to your customers, investors, employees, and culture.

The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.

One of the world’s biggest crypto groups just voted to back its enigmatic founder. The only problem is, no one understands his plan.

Comic book saviors get resurrected all the time. Chadwick Boseman’s 2020 death made that impossible for Black Panther’s sequel.

Politico: Experts and Western officials say the Egyptian government’s Android app for the COP27 climate summit could help spy on emails, messages, and voice conversations  —  Western security advisers are warning delegates at the COP27 climate summit not to download the host Egyptian government’s …

Cameron Thompson / CoinDesk: OpenSea plans to continue to enforce NFT royalties on its platform, after X2Y2, Magic Eden, and LooksRare altered their NFT royalty structures  —  “The world is otherwise burning, but we decided this couldn’t wait,” a representative from OpenSea told CoinDesk.

Bloomberg: Foxconn reports Q3 revenue up 24% YoY to ~$54.8B, net income up 5% YoY to ~$1.2B but below estimates, and warns consumer electronics revenue will fall in Q4  —  Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., maker of most of the world’s iPhones, warned consumer electronics revenue will fall this quarter …

The collapse of crypto exchange FTX opens opportunities for rival exchange Binance—and raises questions about the sector’s sustainability.

After 30 years of talk about forcing wealthy polluters to compensate those bearing the brunt of climate damage, the COP27 conference seems poised to act.

You don’t need a degree in horticulture to help your indoor garden grow, just a few key pieces of gear.

Gillian Tan / Bloomberg: Source: Sam Bankman-Fried told investors that FTX needs a cash injection or the company would need to file for bankruptcy due to a shortfall of up to $8B  —  Sam Bankman-Fried told FTX.com investors on Wednesday that without a cash injection the company would need to file for bankruptcy …

Bloomberg: Amazon becomes the world’s first public company to lose $1T in market value, shrinking to ~$879B from $1.88T in July 2021; Microsoft lost $889B since Nov. 2021  —  Amazon.com Inc. is the world’s first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value as a combination of rising inflation …