Category: Current Events
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AI’s Dark Secret
Behind every freakishly algorithm is a group of often underpaid and overworked “digital serfs” busy labeling and reviewing the data streams that make the technology work. Expensify SmartScan for receipts? In 2017, someone discovered some of these receipts turned up on Mechanical Turk. Amazon announced last week that it’s shutting down its “Just Walk Out”…
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Earthquake!!
I felt a slight rumble while standing at my desk today. No big deal, a very small earthquake, it felt like a subway was passing under our apartment. Only, we don’t have a subway under us. Tyler came in to say his girlfriend texted from the Lower East Side to say she felt it too.…
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SXSW Hacks
The SXSW conference in Austin, Texas is overwhelming. The sheer number of keynotes, sessions, branding pop-ups (aka “activations”), movie premiers, concerts and satellite activities make it impossible to catch it all. With over 1,500 events just on the schedule, it took me a couple of hours just to browse through what was available before I…
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Turning Point?
A crowd spontaneously turned on a Waymo robot car when it tried to push its way through a Chinese New Year’s crowd in San Francisco’s Chinatown. So there were fireworks happening – pretty fun night and folks watching the fireworks. Every now and then traffic would build up and the crowd would make way for…
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Attention to Detail
I’m as guilty as anyone of the careless typo but sometimes the stakes are higher and it really pays to double-check your work. There was this post from Friday last week in the Financial Times’ Alphaville, Last year, Norway’s $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund revealed that it had lost NKr980mn, roughly $92mn, on an error relating…
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OpenAI has an App Store
OpenAI’s DevDay keynote had the look and feel of all Silicon Valley product announcements – a well-scripted parade of announcements, a couple live demos, and even a “one more thing” that is revealed with low-key fanfare but, by it’s placement at the end of the talk, signals to the world that this is the game-changer.…
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NYC – Water Logged
“This changing weather pattern is the result of climate change, and the sad reality is our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond.” Rohit Aggarwala, Department of Environmental Protection Water streaming out between the tiles in the subway. Not too sure about the structural integrity of that column. Brooklyn got over 6 inches…
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The Joy of Happenstance
John Battelle has a wonderful reminisce about what’s lost as information moves from analog to digital. He specifically writes about the college course catalog and what’s lost as these guides have moved online in Digital is Killing Serendipity. In the comments, I shared an experience I had with a printed catalog at the Edinburgh Festival…
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Video: Simon Willison on AI
Simon Willison has been hacking on technology for years and blogging about it in his excellent blog where he posts on how to recreate his innovations and follow along on his adventures. He was a speaker at this year’s WordPress WordCamp US 2023 conference and gave a talk that I would highly recommend to anyone…