Bitcoin: Now a Teenager. We Know What Is Ahead?
November 5, 2021
Bitcoin is 13 years old. Zits, staying out late, pushing boundaries, and trying out controlled substances. Did I miss anything.
Oh, yes, these thoughts were sparked by “Bitcoin White Paper turns 13 Years Old: The Journey So Far.” This nine page document by the mysterious Nakamoto entity has set off a fuse in the financial industry.
The write up provides a walk down memory lane. The essay states:
While it isn’t clear whether more countries will adopt BTC as legal tender in the future, or whether interest for Bitcoin ETFs will wane, it appears clear that Bitcoin is here to stay and serve as both a store of value and medium of exchange, and that’s only 13 years after the idea was first introduced. Imagine what will happen in the next 13 years.
Stock up on NFTs and crypto. Keep your eye on tax regulations too.
Stephen E Arnold, November 5, 2021
Google Realizes Making Big News Is Big Pain
November 5, 2021
Yahoo hired Marissa Meyer as CEO in 2012 to de-semelize, yangize, bartzize, morse-ize, thompsonize, levinshohnize the once coherent portal. One idea she had to reinvigorate Yahoo was to make it a top news authority. She hired the best journalists in the business and subsequently failed. Google is learning that being a news provider is harder than it appears. Search Engine Journal explains Google’s newest media endeavor in the article, “Google Is Developing ‘Big Moments’ Feature For Breaking News.”
Google has a poor reputation for curating news. The search engine giant wants to rectify that problem with a new search feature called “Big Moments.” Google has been working on “Big Moments” for over a year. Big Moments launched after Google’s employees complained about the lack of access to real-time news.
People visit Google to search for news after it happens. For updated news, people turn on the television or visit social media Web sites like Facebook or Twitter. Google wants that traffic, so they are hoping this new endeavor will hook people seeking news:
“Big Moments will provide historical context about events when possible, and go beyond what Google typically shows in search results for news stories. If the story is a natural disaster like a hurricane, for example, Big Moments may list authoritative facts about deaths and injury counts, as well as data about the frequency of hurricanes in the area. Google may pull in information for Big Moments from open source data repositories such as Data Commons, which gathers data from US government agencies and is hosted by Google.”
Big Moments uses machine learning technology that Google developed in 2018. Elizabeth Reid is leading the project.
Google’s Big Moments is moving more towards news editorial content curation. Google relies on algorithms to automate its processes, while news services rely on humans for editorial content. Google cannot add human curators, because it would delay the desired instantaneous response.
Algorithms are getting what appears to be “smarter” and some can even write legible content. However, they still lack human reasoning and ability to respond to changing news with human logic. Humans are still needed in journalism and news curation.
Whitney Grace, October 19, 2021
Microsoft: Two Different Meta-Messages or Just an Example of Microsoft Marketing?
November 4, 2021
I have heard quite a bit about the metaverse in the last week. Meh. I was more interested in two Microsoft meta-related stories.
The first was “Microsoft President Says Tech Must Compromise, Downplays Metaverse Hype.” The write up reports:
Hot on the heels of Facebook’s rebranding as Meta last week and a day after Microsoft touted its metaverse-related projects in a blog post, Smith tempered the “hype” around the metaverse, a concept overlaying digital and physical worlds. “We’re all talking about the metaverse as if we’re entering some new dimension. This is not like dying and going to heaven. We’re all going to be living in the real world with people,” Smith observed, before calling for collaboration and interoperability in the metaverse’s development.
Then I spotted “Microsoft Plans To Create A Corporate Version Of The Metaverse And It Will Have PowerPoint.” That write up stated
“This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction,” Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant, and even the international space station, he said.
Interesting. Zoom meetings are great. Microsoft Teams meetings are quite special. Making Teams meta is the greatest thing since Microsoft security vulnerabilities. Hype? Never.
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2021
Facebook: Who Sees Disturbing Content?
November 4, 2021
Time, now an online service owned by Salesforce founders, published “Why Some People See More Disturbing Content on Facebook Than Others, According to Leaked Documents.”
The user categories exposed to more troubling Facebook content are, according to Facebook’s researchers:
vulnerable communities, including Black, elderly and low-income users, are among the groups most harmed by the prevalence of disturbing content on the site. At the time of the 2019 integrity report, Facebook’s researchers were still defining what constituted disturbing.
Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2021
Who Remembers Palantir or Anduril? Maybe Peter Thiel?
November 4, 2021
Despite sci-fi stoked fears about artificial general intelligences (AGI) taking over the world, CNBC reports, “Palantir’s Peter Thiel Thinks People Should Be Concerned About Surveillance AI.” Theil, co-founder of Palantir and investor in drone-maker Anduril, is certainly in the position to know what he is talking about. The influential venture capitalist made the remarks at a recent event in Miami. Writer Sam Shead reports:
“Tech billionaire Peter Thiel believes that people should be more worried about ‘surveillance AI’ rather than artificial general intelligences, which are hypothetical AI systems with superhuman abilities. … Those that are worried about AGI aren’t actually ‘paying attention to the thing that really matters,’ Thiel said, adding that governments will use AI-powered facial recognition technology to control people. His comments come three years after Bloomberg reported that ‘Palantir knows everything about you.’ Thiel has also invested in facial recognition company Clearview AI and surveillance start-up Anduril. Palantir, which has a market value of $48 billion, has developed data trawling technology that intelligence agencies and governments use for surveillance and to spot suspicious patterns in public and private databases. Customers reportedly include the CIA, FBI, and the U.S. Army. AGI, depicted in a negative light in sci-fi movies such as ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Ex Machina,’ is being pursued by companies like DeepMind, which Thiel invested in before it was acquired by Google. Depending on who you ask, the timescale for reaching AGI ranges from a few years, to a few decades, to a few hundred years, to never.”
Yes, enthusiasm for AGI has waned as folks accept that success, if attainable at all, is a long way off. Meanwhile, Thiel is now very interested in crypto currencies. For the famously libertarian mogul, that technology helps pave the way for his vision of the future: a decentralized world. That is an interesting position for a friend of law enforcement.
Cynthia Murrell, November 4, 2021
AI And Social Media Measure the Esthetic Beauty of Nature
November 4, 2021
Artificial intelligence armed with machine learning algorithms can practically do anything these days from detecting deforestation in the Amazon to accessing the contents of a photo. TechXplore shares how AI can now determine a landscape’s beauty: “Social Media And AI Can Measure The Aesthetic Quality Of Landscapes.” EPFL and Wageningen University scientists developed an ecosystem modeling tool from Flickr photos and deep learning.
The model was fed nine million photos of British landscapes and it is the first project to take into consideration how people appreciate their surroundings. The landscape aesthetic model was built with:
“To develop their model, the scientists trained a deep-learning algorithm on over 200,000 photos of landscapes in Great Britain obtained from the Scenic-Or-Not database. These photos, comprising a geographically representative dataset of Great Britain, were rated according to their aesthetic quality, or “scenicness,” through a crowdsourced survey. This approach enabled the scientists to include factors addressing how individuals enjoy landscapes personally—factors that are missing from conventional large-scale ES assessments. The research team then ran their deep-learning model, which is based on neural networks, on over nine million Flickr pictures, also integrating other AI-based models in their predictions of scenic beauty. Finally, they compared the output from their model with the results of a more conventional, environmental indicator-based model.”
Results were overlaid on a map of Great Britain, where color coding was used to determine the most scenic areas. Natural landscapes were deemed the most beautiful, while urban areas were not. Weather and seasonal patterns were also factored into the results. The scientists hope to apply their landscape modeling to other countries and learn if there are any differences how people appreciate scenery.
Social media influencers cold use the algorithm to determine the best place to take photos with their outfits, food, or sponsored products. The AI would also rank the top of Mt. Everest very low, because of the amount of trash and dead bodies.
Whitney Grace, November 4, 2021
Elastic Adds Optimyze for Best Cloud Optimization
November 4, 2021
Elastic specializes in enterprise and cloud search solutions, but the company has also branched out by assisting systems in gaining big data insights. Help Net Security details Elastic’s newest move in this area: “Elastic Acquires Optimyze To Deliver Visibility Into Cloud Native Environments.” Optimyze providers a simpler way for users to gain insights from their entire IT ecosystem, eliminate blind spots with Prodfiler, generates continuous system profiling, and low performance overhead code.
Elastic also recently acquired Cmd and build.security. Combined with these other acquisitions, Optimyze with enable Elastic users to monitor and protect data from the unified Elastic Search Platform:
“Optimyze provides frictionless continuous profiling, while the Elastic Search Platform delivers analytics and machine learning capabilities with the ability to correlate and contextualize profiling data with metrics, logs, and traces. The ability to unify the three pillars of observability—metrics, logs and traces—with emerging continuous profiling capabilities delivers actionable insights to customers, leading to improvements in service quality and performance while reducing MTTD (mean-time-to-detect) and MTTR (mean-time-to-resolution).”
Elastic takes the idea of search to a different level. Instead of only concentrating on finding user generated data, Elastic observes, secures, tracks, and locates all kinds of data related to a system’s performance. Does this change the definition of enterprise and cloud search altogether?
Whitney Grace, November 4, 2021
China Realities: No Fortnite after more Than 20 Days
November 3, 2021
Google, as I recall, wanted China to change its approach to high technology. Facebook – oops, Meta – had a senior manager who learned Chinese and gave a talk in actual Chinese I believe. Yahoo bailed. And now Fortnite has decided to leave the Middle Kingdom to its own devices.
What’s interesting about the Fortnite decision to abandon the world’s largest market is that it was never serious about China. China was a “test.” The “test” began in 2018 and involved an interesting partner, Tencent, which owned a chunk of the popular online game.
China is rethinking its approach to online activities. The CNN report states that:
companies were “urged to break from the solitary focus of pursuing profit or attracting players and fans”…
Yep, just a test. But of what? Fortnite’s will? The company can take on Apple, but it swizzled its push into China as a test.
Who or what failed? My answer: The marketing/PR wizard thinking up this Fancy Dance move. It’s an F.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2021
Smart Enough Tesla Artificial Intelligence: Just Not Safe It Seems
November 3, 2021
Who would have thought developing smart software is harder than marketing it? We learn from Mashable, “Tesla Pulls Full Self-Driving Update Due to ‘Issues’.” It turns out the “issues” only come up if one needs to turn left at traffic lights. Otherwise, there is no problem. This version 10.3 that is being rolled back was released as a beta to a select few drivers. Reporter Stan Schroeder writes:
“The Full Self-Driving (FSD) is optional software that enables a number of autonomous driving features in Tesla cars (though it does not really enabled autonomous driving without driver supervision). The company released it as limited beta software to eligible U.S. drivers in October 2020, causing controversy as some experts feared that this puts other traffic participants at risk. On Saturday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that there was an issue with ‘left turns at traffic lights’ in the 10.3 version of FSD. On Sunday, he followed up by saying that the company is temporarily rolling back FSD to version 10.2. ‘This is to be expected with beta software. It is impossible to test all hardware configs in all conditions with internal QA, hence public beta,’ he tweeted.”
Sure, testing such a lucrative product is totally worth risking a few accidents, right? The company is mum on what, specifically, goes wrong when the AI tries to turn left at a light. However, we learn:
“The Verge points out that some drivers who tested the FSD 10.3 update have seen phantom forward collision warning (FCW) alerts and a disappearing Autosteer option, among other issues.”
Will Tesla think twice before deploying another experiment on actual roads? We are not sure, but you may want to give any Teslas you see a wide berth, just in case.
Cynthia Murrell November 3 , 2021
A Google Tax?
November 3, 2021
I read “Google Takes Up to 42% from Ads, States Say in Antitrust Case.” The article contains one interesting statement:
“More daily transactions are made on AdX than on the NYSE and NASDAQ combined,” a group of 16 states and Puerto Rico said in their complaint, saying they were quoting “Google’s own words.”
How are these transactions and their fees perceived? The article offers a clue:
“Google now uses its immense market power to extract a very high tax of 22 to 42% of the ad dollars otherwise flowing to the countless online publishers and content producers such as online newspapers, cooking websites, and blogs who survive by selling advertisements on their websites and apps,” the states said in the unredacted filing.
I assume that one could make a Latinate sentence like this:
Facebook ripped the social fabric; Google killed traditional advertising.
If I were not tired, I would translate the sentence and see if it would pass the scrutiny of ablative loving Mr. Bushman, my high school Latin teacher.
Nope.
Don’t care about Latin translations, and I don’t care too much about decades late understanding of the Google business model.
Free has a price: No cost and the ability to realize what’s shaking in near real time.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2021
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