Tag: Tech

  • These are desperate and flailing words.

    Brian Merchant (whose excellent book Blood in the Machine I’m almost finished reading) writes a short, succinct, and jargon-free takedown of the brainworms-infected Andreessen manifesto from today (here’s the link: I read it and I feel dumber for having done so).

  • NPR Quit Twitter and nothing happened

    From Nieman Reports: Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X,…

  • Making cars less dangerous to pedestrians

    There is so much hype around self-driving cars, and passenger safety is always a critical concern for carmakers, but the easy work is to use technology to decrease the danger to people outside the car. This BBC article talks about exactly that. I find it amazing how design and safety standards for vehicles vary so…

  • Ed Zitron interviews Molly White

    Molly started Web3 is Going Just Great and has been an interesting crypto skeptic for a long time. This interview here has a lot in it worth listening to. Zitron always asks smart questions (“Do you think [SBF] is a mastermind or a dipshit?”), and White is excellent. Also, just saw that the theme song…

  • Remembering AltaVista

    In the late 90’s, your choice in search engines was like a social marker. Yahoo! was basic, WebCrawler was kind of standard, but real ones used AltaVista. Vice has a history of the first great search engine.

  • TikTok and facial recognition

    From Metafilter: Joseph Cox in 404 Media, about a TikTok account that doxxes random Taylor Swift fans. I ordered the book referenced in the piece (Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill) and expect it Tuesday. Can’t wait to dig in.

  • The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara

    Even if you’ve read all the similar books like The Innovators: , Hackers, Don’t Be Evil, and The Contrarian, this is great. O’Mara details not just the people and brains, but the politics and culture of Silicon Valley and the broader U.S. tech industry from the 1960s to late 2010s. She isn’t a sycophant or part of the culture,…

  • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

    This is a pretty good substack post padded with 250 pages of filler. What a frustrating disappointment. If the subject interests you, save yourself a lot of time and start on chapter 14. The first 200-plus pages of this book are table-setting, long essays with scares like, “What if the Unabomber, but with AI”? It reads…

  • Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

    The grimmest travelogue I have ever read. This blew me away. The author’s style is blunt, clear and succinct, which makes this very readable and fast. The subject matter is another story though. Kara structures his book carefully, taking the reader on a trip from Kinshasa to the deepest parts of the Congo, to site…

  • Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

    This was readable, and there was building tension that I was drawn in by, but I don’t imagine it’s going to stay with me (for obvious reasons). I’m not the target demographic, but I also felt that this book doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from other current MFA-lit. Style over substance in a big…