Five Things Tech: Cables, Misanthropy, Winners Take None, Hackers, Quake II
Five Things Tech: Cables, Misanthropy, Winners Take None, Hackers, Quake II
If I were you, I'd read this email. I wrote it just for you.
This past week everybody in the tech world and their dog have been discussing the LK-99 superconductor and the impact on science and technology. Pundits discussed these findings as worthy of a Nobel prize while others remained skeptical. Turns out the hype about LK-99 was just that, hype, and no substance. In Germany we have an expression for that, as we have for most things, since we’re totally smart and have a very tweakable language where you can just add word to words to create a new one with a new meaning. So in Germany we have a thing called “Sommerloch” - summer hole. Usually some conservative backbencher takes the slow news days during the summer as his moment to “shine” and demands something totally stupid like annexing the Spanish island of Mallorca and integrate it as the 17th state into Germany as so many Germans are spending the summer there. Or there is a sighting of a bear in the Bavarian alps and this obviously creates problems as we normally don’t have bears there, because they would scare tourists. So this bear became a “Problembär” - a problem bear. Isn’t German awesome?
LK-99 was a typical Sommerloch story, we looked for more and there was nothing.
Here are five articles that are way more than a filler for the Sommerloch. Read on, my dear!
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The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet
This interconnectivity continues to amaze me, yet we take it for granted that we do videoconferences between the continents with almost no latency. We should remember every once in a while that the internet is based on a protocol that allows for sending little packets of data across the globe only to be reassembled in almost real-time at the destination. This is pretty amazing stuff.
The New Misanthropy
“Given all this, is it any surprise that we have sat back and let the billionaires fight over our planet, our species, the future of both? “No Regrets” is not an indictment of “the Doctor,” the thinly veiled Musk sendup. It is an indictment of us. Our lazy misanthropy and half-ironic apocalypticism. Our weak optimism that Big Tech will figure something out. Our myopic focus on a politics of the self at a moment when our species is imperiled.” - there’s much to unpack in this essay.
“Winners Take None:” Coworking, Self Storage, Scooters Have Burned Billions of Investor Dollars and Maybe Were Never ‘Tech
Finally somebody takes a closer look at a few new category leaders that got a lot of money to create a category and then went bust.
With AI, Hackers Can Simply Talk Computers Into Misbehaving
Oh good, more new problems to solve that we didn’t have before. Well, we always had social engineering to break into computer systems by getting people to reveal their password. This takes it to a new, much more powerful level.
Quake II gets a remaster for PC and consoles—and it’s exactly what it needs to be
To me, this is the most exciting tech development of the week. I just explained to my son the other day that I loved playing Quake II in the late 90s when I was at university, that I was a member of a clan, that we practiced a few times a week and that I hosted one of the first LAN-Parties in Germany, called Fragadelica in 1999. And now this. Let’s see if I an still do this. So many memories. I also hosted the official server for the newsgroup de.alt.games.quake, because my student dorm had a 100 mbit/s connection back then and we had a server reserved for fun things in the basement.
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