FT: ““The internet is getting worse, fast,” says Cory Doctorow at the start of this book, a broadside against the world’s biggest technology companies. His argument is simple: Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and others have become so big and so unaccountable that they can degrade their services, with few consequences. Doctorow sees the process as having three stages. First, the companies are good to their users. Second, they abuse their users to benefit their business customers, often advertisers. Third, they abuse those business customers. By this point, they have “enshittified”. A lack of meaningful competition and regulation means they can still increase profits.”
NYTimes: “Working 9 to 5 is a way to make a living. But in Silicon Valley, amid the competitive artificial intelligence craze, grinding “996” is the way to get ahead. Or at least to signal to those around you that you’re taking work seriously…The number combination refers to a work schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — that has its origins in China’s hard-charging tech scene.”
Bloomberg: “Just as oil futures and spectrum auctions unlocked waves of investment, turning compute into a tradable commodity will be needed to fuel AI’s next stage…Compute markets — both spot and futures — involve so many variables that they’ve become a possibility only with the advent of AI agents that can accept natural-language inputs. Those agents then turn high-level English-language goals and instructions into detailed structured “expressive bidding” that can be executed on-exchange. The trick is to use what’s known as combinatorial auctions. Bidders might care very much about having an uninterrupted stretch of time to do their computations, for instance, or they might be willing to break it up if someone else wanted the data center urgently and briefly. Similarly, a bidder might ideally want to use B200 chips, but would be fine with paying slightly less money to use more H100 chips for more hours. Right now the market in compute is almost entirely bespoke: A client explains what they’re looking for, and a vendor gives them a price. But with combinatorial auctions, a large number of buyers and sellers can collectively arrive at prices for the optimal allocation of every chip during every hour of every day.”
Rodney Brooks: “In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training. At the end of the post, after I have completed my argument on this point, I have included two more short pieces. The first is on the problems still to be solved for two legged humanoid robots to be safe for humans to be near them when they walk. The second is how we will have plenty of humanoid robots fifteen years from now, but they will look like neither today’s humanoid robots nor humans.”
