Tech News

Tech News and Analysis from around the web


Annie Palmer / CNBC:
Andy Jassy says Amazon plans to lay off an additional 9,000 employees, mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch, after cutting 18,000 jobs in January  —  KEY POINTS  — Amazon will lay off 9,000 more employees, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff on Monday.  —  Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT





Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Netflix plans to launch 40 games in 2023 and has a further 70 in development, after releasing 55 titles since adding games in November 2021  —  Netflix has announced that it has 40 games slated for launch this year and has 70 in development with its partners.






Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Microsoft plans to launch a mobile app store for games as soon as 2024 if the Activision bid is cleared and the EU's DMA rules for app stores come into effect  —  Xbox boss Phil Spencer says store could launch as soon as next year if regulators clear Activision Blizzard deal







Reading my notes on being at Harvard, it sounds like Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I was very excited, and it shows. In hindsight, I was about to have some great adventures. One of the best experiences of my life. Now twenty years later, I'm still very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the people I met at Harvard, and the power afforded to me with the H-bomb business card. The friends I made there still benefit me to this day, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference.

Archive of my blog from March 2003, marking the start of the war in Iraq, and my arriving in Cambridge to begin my fellowship at Berkman





Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
Runway, which helped create Stable Diffusion, announces its Gen 2 system to generate three second snippets of video from prompt words, available via a waitlist  —  Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress with still images.  For months, services like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion …











Yoshihiro Sato / Bloomberg:
Taiwan's Ministry of Finance data: chip exports to China and Hong Kong fell 31.3% YoY in February, the worst decline since 2009 and above January's 27.1% fall  —  Taiwan's exports of integrated circuit chips to China and Hong Kong fell for a fourth month in February as Washington-Beijing tensions simmer …



Bryce Elder / Financial Times:
OpenAI's GPT-4 failed a CFA Institute exam, the finance world's self-styled toughest test, scoring eight out of 24, despite the answers being available online  —  Artificial intelligence versus arbitrary irrelevance  —  It's an algorithmic mystery box that inspires fear, awe and derision in equal measure.



ABC News:
An interview with Sam Altman on OpenAI's GPT-4, how “people should be happy” that OpenAI is a “little bit scared of” its tools, misinformation, rivals, and more  —  “This will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed,” he said.  —  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks with ABC News, Mar. 15, 2023.





Matt Burgess / Wired:
How open source intelligence, or OSINT, researchers are using public data to untangle the mystery of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, helping debunk claims  —  Open source intelligence researchers are verifying and debunking opaque claims about who ruptured the gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.





Bloomberg:
China's anti-graft watchdog begins to investigate ex-Tsinghua Unigroup Chairman Zhao Weiguo, the latest executive to be ensnared in its chip corruption dragnet  —  China's top anti-graft watchdog has begun an investigation of former Tsinghua Unigroup Chairman Zhao Weiguo …








Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:
Research: ByteDance's video editing app CapCut, launched in 2020, has 200M+ MAUs and 400M+ downloads in 2022, up 43% YoY, surpassing TikTok in recent weeks  —  CapCut, the video-editing tool from ByteDance, helps users go viral on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube  —  How TikTok Could Become a U.S. Company



Washington Post:
India cuts mobile internet for a second day in Punjab, a state with ~27M people, as officials try to catch a Sikh separatist and curb “fake news” and unrest  —  The ban in Punjab state, as officials looked for Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh, is one of the country's broadest shutdowns in recent years















Carol E. Lee / NBC News:
Source: in his upcoming testimony to Congress on March 23, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to reveal TikTok has 150M MAUs in the US, up from 100M in August 2020  —  When TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress on Thursday, he plans to unveil new internal data that suggests …





Pete Schroeder / Reuters:
The FDIC plans to sell Signature Bank's deposits to Flagstar Bank, excluding those in its digital banking business, some loans, and Signature's 40 branches  —  A subsidiary of New York Community Bancorp (NYCB.N) has entered into an agreement with U.S. regulators to purchase deposits and loans …








Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Netflix's ad-supported tier reached ~1M MAUs in the US after its second month, and the company fulfilled its forecasted deliveries to advertisers  —  Good afternoon from Los Angeles.  It's good to be home and I hope your March Madness bracket is doing better than mine.













Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
As concerns over Tesla's Full Self-Driving rise, former employees blame Elon Musk's erratic leadership, cost-cutting measures like removing radar, and more  —  Tesla's campaign to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle has suffered amid mounting safety concerns — and the boss's Twitter distraction










I get that people don't like that ChatGPT will return incorrect results. But as a software developer, I can experiment with the product with that caveat, and imagine its uses once the quality of the results are better, however they achieve that. I don't have to wait to think, in other words. With that disclaimer, I searched for docs about how to do a hard-reload in popular browsers. Those docs are hard to find, and when you find one it's heavily monetized. So instead, I asked ChatGPT to write a docs page to answer this question. Looks pretty good to me! No bullshit in the page either.



In FeedLand, if you're being asked to log in every time you go to the site, you're probably opening it via a bookmark that goes to the old URL. The easiest fix is to edit bookmark so it goes to https://feedland.org/ -- note the https. Another fix is to do a hard-reload of the page. This will force a new version to reload. It redirects if it gets a non https request.





















It's important for users to have their own feed in the same way it was good to be able to develop software for the Mac on a Mac. Most users will never make a software product, and maybe most FeedLand users won't write publicly, but you want to make it was easy as possible for people to contribute to the ecosystem they use. It's a philosophy of the active not-just-eyeballs users. It's a basic democratic idea.


I first wrote about the use of checkboxes in this way (see above) in 2007. I called it Checkbox News.

Another important feature, every user has their own feed, which you can edit in FeedLand, of course. To write a post, click in the edit box at the top of the page, type some text, click the Post button. It should show up in the list of user-feed posts, below. If you want to edit one of your posts, click on the text, make the changes, click the Update button. Of course there's an RSS feed for each user, which you can subscribe to in FeedLand or any other RSS-compatible application (there are many, as I'm sure you know).


Almost everything you do on FeedLand is public. You can read anyone else's feed list. Example, Ken Smith's list. If you're signed in, to subscribe to a feed just click the feed's checkbox. You can also see who's been on recently, when they signed up, how many feeds they subscribe to, and how many pages they've viewed. You can also see the feeds that have recently been subscribed to. The idea is to make feed discovery as easy as it possibly can be. We steal (and improve on) ideas from social media apps that didn't exist last time I took a fresh look at feed systems. I don't think of FeedLand as a feed reader -- it's more of a feed management system, imho.

A steady flow of new signups on the first FeedLand server.