Tech Meme

Jared Newman / Fast Company: A look at Obsidian, an indie, Electron-based note-taking app that has developed a cult following on Discord and Reddit; Obsidian estimates its app has ~1M users  —  The indie darling rejects everything you know about modern software.  And its strategy is working. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Brendan Bordelon / Politico: How Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy pushes policymakers to focus on AI’s long-term risks by funding the salaries of congressional and federal agency staff  —  An organization backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and tied to leading artificial intelligence firms is funding the salaries … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg: How influencers helped boost the popularity of Riot Game’s Valorant on YouTube and Twitch among Generation Z gamers; Riot says 70% of Valorant players are Gen Z  —  Valorant was never a sure thing, until it was. … Rachell Hofstetter, known to fans as Valkyrae, yells like a banshee as she dodges gunfire in the video game. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: A look at Apple’s recent executive promotions; sources: a cheaper Vision Pro may not have EyeSight and M3-based MacBook Pros could come in early or spring 2024  —  Still, it’s losing a top hardware executive.  Also: There are fresh details on efforts to lower the price of the Vision Pro … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Thomas Claburn / The Register: Researchers find that a modest amount of fine-tuning can undo safety efforts that aim to prevent LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo from spewing toxic content  —  OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo chatbot defenses dissolve with ‘20 cents’ of API tickling  —  The “guardrails” created to prevent large language models … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post: How social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes between Israel and Hamas, shaping the views of panicked citizens and a global public  —  The barrage of false images, memes, videos and posts — mostly generated from within the region itself — is making it difficult to assess what is real. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Financial Times: How Brad Smith, who became Microsoft’s top legal officer in 2002, used a legal, policy, and influence machine costing $1B+ a year to close the Activision deal  —  Company’s top legal officer has honed diplomatic skills to recast the US tech giant’s reputation Lees verder op Tech Meme

Simon Hill / Wired: Hands-on with Wi-Charge’s wireless charging system that delivers power of up to 2 or 3 watts but requires a line of sight between transmitter and receiver  —  Nikola Tesla once dreamed of transferring electrical energy through the air.  Now, a company called Wi-Charge is beta-testing a prototype technology … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Kate Irwin / Decrypt: DappRadar: blockchain gaming projects raised $600M in Q3 2023, down 38% YoY, and $2.3B so far in 2023, which is only 30% of what was raised for all of 2022  —  While the gaming industry continues to be plagued by mass layoffs, crypto gaming is still seeing many millions invested each quarter. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Disney+ Hotstar reclaims the global streaming record for most live concurrent views with 35M watching the October 14 India-Pakistan ICC Cricket World Cup match  —  In India, few events garner as much attention as a cricket game.  A high-profile match between neighbors India and Pakistan delivered … Lees verder op Tech Meme