Tech Time by Tim #30

Man, Cookie Monster’s gotten pretty hardcore since his Sesame Street days. Just kidding, it’s the name of a big international police operation. Also featured this week, Rare Earth minerals and computing recovery, AI rivalries and potential future AI cannibalism, Fintech frictions and friendships, and some interesting details about the Twitter vs. Substack grudge match. Last but not least, Decentraland’s struggles and the metaverse’s potential therapy triumph.

At A Glance:

A quick overview of this week’s content:

·??????The Week that Was: Cookie Monster Fights Cybercrime, Rare Earth Risks And Computing Recovery

·??????The Business End: R(a)ivalries And Cann(a)ibalism, Fintech Frictions And Friendships

·??????Rules of Engagement: Twitter’s Substack vs. Substack’s Twitter, Macro vs. Micro Metaverses

The Week that Was:

A look back at the tech world of the past week.

Cookie Monster Fights Cybercrime:

Genesis Market, a dark web marketplace for stolen personal information was recently closed down through a large-scale international law enforcement collaboration. The name? Operation Cookie Monster. This particular operation isn’t just notable for its scale and complexity. It is also worth pausing to consider the mental image of a bunch of Sesame Street Cookie Monsters in SWAT uniforms breaching and clearing a building.

Much less funny is the ongoing shift towards decentralized crime. As authorities gain ground against centralized criminal infrastructure, messaging services such as Telegram continue to grow in their prominence, not just as communication platforms, but also as replacement marketplaces.

This is a bit of a detour, but I feel like I use the word ‘ironic’ a lot. The Pentagon having another massive data leak in the same week that Operation Cookie Monster makes headlines though…that’s not exactly making it much easier for me to use ‘ironic’ less. This brings us back on target because of the way these leaks spread…? Via the very same routes and apps as decentralized cybercrime. LINK

Rare Earth Risks And Computing Recovery:

There were some important strategic developments this past week with regard to industrial manufacturing and computing. I’ve divided them into subheadings for ease of scanning.

Industrial Manufacture Faces A Rare Earth Mineral Bottleneck:

The Hungarian industrial sector is struggling. So far the volume of production has been 2.4% lower than in 2023 when compared to the first two months of 2022. The only real bright spots are the electrical and transport sectors. These sectors are heavily reliant on rare earth metals, a sector dominated by China. New reports appear to indicate that China is looking at leveraging this dependence by foreign countries via new export restrictions. If true, it will be interesting to see how supply chain overhauls such as Apple’s might be affected.

Chips And Computing Markets Are Slowly Stabilizing:

Taken at face value, the steep drops in earnings by companies such as Foxconn (-21%, March) and Samsung (-96%, first quarter) might look alarming. However, it bears reminding that computing in particular is still working through the aftermath of the massive demand frontloading of the pandemic. Indeed, it appears that the PC gaming marking is set to grow again as the market gradually stabilizes.

Challenging Market Conditions Continue To Drive Partnerships:

Back to Samsung we go. Though its financial results are explainable, they aren’t easily justifiable to jumpy investors. The recent leaking of confidential information by sloppy employees certainly isn’t helping matters. For those that can’t read Korean, 3 incidents have been reported since March 20th when ChatGPT usage was permitted in Samsung’s Device Solutions (DS) division. Classified code was entered into ChatGPT, making it, as they say, ‘free real estate’ for training purposes, and potential answers to rival’s questions. For AMD’s sake, I do hope their recently extended Exynos partnership won’t have such issues to discuss at the next meeting. LINK

The Business End:

Coverage of big business moves and events in the tech world.

R(a)ivalries And Cann(a)ibalism:

AI companies Anthropic and Stability AI are both putting their best generative foot forward as they look for financiers. They are running out of money and time to stay in the race against Microsoft funded OpenAI. For its part, OpenAI is continuing its attempts to ease fears and allay criticisms amidst ongoing controversy. Though under less immediate financial pressure, Microsoft is fighting a regulatory war on multiple fronts. Among other issues, its Activision Blizzard deal is still being fought over, whilst more EU regulators are looking into potential ChatGPT restrictions.

Though calls for a global oversight of AI are also growing louder, disagreements at both the national and international level place this firmly in the ‘easier said than done’ category. Since mental and emotional wellbeing are also high on the AI ethics agenda, there are some who are looking to the World Health Organisation (WHO) to take a leading role.

As for the practical side of rising AI adoption, hope remains high that it can lead to scalable and persistent boosts to productivity. However, as previously covered in this very newsletter, there is also the risk of overreliance on AI content generation. Such overreliance would greatly accelerate data starvation (running out of human content to train the algorithms on). This is another aspect of the ethical concerns of AI, that they will cannibalise themselves and one another, leading to a flattened intellectual and cultural landscape. LINK

Fintech Frictions And Friendships:

The financial technology (fintech) sector is under more scrutiny now than it has ever been. Though the more cynical observers might chime in to say that this is a pretty low bar to clear, it is worth taking a closer look.

Recent research about American consumer confidence in cryptocurrencies coincides with reports about the mounting difficulties for Binance to find a banking partner. PayPal and Facebook are using this opportunity to extend their reach into the fintech sector via new payment partnerships. Facebook had previously been blocked from implementing crypto payments, yet at least in Brazil, ‘normal’ payments via WhatsApp seem to have been given the greenlight. PayPal, for its part has partnered with, among others, Visa and Venmo.

PayPal and Visa are long time heavyweights of the financial world. Whilst they certainly have plenty of skeletons in their closets, they are reasonably reliable for daily financial use. As they throw their weight around in the fintech space, it’ll be interesting to see if and how established players such as Revolut will adapt. A low hanging fruit would be to focus on customer service. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

Twitter’s Substack vs. Substack’s Twitter:

You’ll likely have read already about the row between Twitter and Substack. In case you haven’t here’s a brief summary:

Similarly to how it marked reputable news organisation NPR as a state affiliated news outlet, Twitter also branded Substack as an unsafe domain. What this meant, in practical terms, was that interaction with these sources was heavily restricted. For example, any Tweet with a Substack link could not be liked, commented on, or retweeted. Much coverage has focussed on the potential threat substack’s new ‘short-form notes feed’ might pose to Twitter.

Elon Musk’s detractors have pointed out that Twitter’s ‘visibility’ situation is a bit awkward when set against the backdrop of recent revelations. It appears that Twitter private circles are about as private as Tesla camera data. Substack has its detractors too. They compare the platform to Twitter in a different way…via its negative revenue.

In a PR hit to Twitter, Matt Taibbi, who made headlines for his collaboration with Elon Musk on the so-called ‘Twitter files,’ seems to be jumping ship. Also of note is that in his announcement that he’d be moving to substack notes, Taibbi seemed to indicate that Twitter is working on a feature that would allow writers to directly publish articles there. Curious. LINK

Macro vs Micro Metaverses – Success At Small Scale:

Decentraland, a User Generated Content (UGC) platform focused on virtual real estate had a rough ‘metaverse fashion week.’ Attendance was down 76% compared to last year. Functionally a video game, Decentraland’s lack of engaging gameplay, its shacky interface, and the poor reliability of its infrastructure have all been the subject of criticism since its inception in 2020.

Critics of Decentraland argue that much like how there is no one size fits all internet, there is no one size fits all metaverse. This is one of the core contradictions inherent to efforts to realise such an all-encompassing vision. The original concept of the metaverse as coined in 1992’s novel Snowcrash continues to be a world spanning, all-encompassing digital replacement for the material world. It’s a grand ambition that can leave even believers sometimes wishing for simpler times.

Ironically, at a far smaller scale, the ‘replacement for the material world’ aspect is continuing to prove successful. A new Virtual Reality (VR) therapy for Ukrainian refugees is allowing them to come to terms with what’s happened to them in a safe and secure digital Kyiv. It has led some to wonder whether no one being able to agree on a singular metaverse might end up a good thing in the long run. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web

Moore’s Legacy LINK

The House Loses LINK

Programming Popularity LINK

Catan’s Legacy LINK Klaus Teuber changed boardgames with Catan

OnlyFans site violation LINK

Gameboy MBC LINK

Mammoth Meatballs LINK

Double Slit LINK

Deep Sea Potatoes LINK

US Renewables LINK

Shit Training LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of longform content recommendations.

Pokémon Fan Neuroscience Study:

Examining the Pokédex of the mind. LINK

Metaverse History Lesson:

A two-part history of various interpretations of the Metaverse over the years. LINK + LINK

Super Sims:

What if they put ChatGPT into the sims games? Well… LINK

The Tragedy of Goat Girl:

The sad tale of a girl and her goat vs. the American meat industry. LINK

Lemon8:

A look at another of Bytedance’s popular apps, an Instagram alternative. LINK

Binance Blues:

The weird turf war between US regulators about who gets to punish crypto. LINK

One More Thing…

I hope everyone had a wonderful easter weekend! I’m quite happy with how mine went. I had a lovely easter lunch at work on Friday and a relaxing Easter Weekend with family afterwards. The abundance of easter eggs made me think a lot of the chicken and egg problem. The problem revolves around this question: ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’.

As I digested the Twitter vs. Substack drama I kept seeing Twitter as the chicken, arguing with Substack as the egg about who should come first when it comes to engagement and traffic. Like many other newsletter writers, I publish my newsletter on Substack (alongside LinkedIn) and promote it on Twitter.

I didn’t manage to cover this in the newsletter, but I also noticed Phil Harrison quietly leaving Google after Stadia’s dramatic downfall. Joseph Staten also appears to be leaving Microsoft after the mass firings at 343 Studios. I can’t help but wonder to what extent the chicken and egg debate misses the crucial factor of what state the nest is in. Neither Substack nor Twitter are making money, and despite the massive amounts of money sunk into Stadia and Halo Infinite, both are widely to be considered commercial flops because, I believe, they made a mess of their ‘nest’.