Five Things Tech: Data Centers, AI Killing the Old Web, FTC & Amazon, Workers & AI Skills, Ch@ngeme
There's so much going on in Tech. Read this now to stay in the know.
It’s Saturday Morning and it’s time for Five Things Tech - your quick roundup of what happened this week. Five stories you should read to understand what is going on in the fast-paced world of tech.
“Ch@ngeme” shows how little a lot of people still understand about the internet as a concept. Which is fascinating, because we read and talk about the ramifications of the latest wave of GenerativeAI, or how quantum computing will change everything, but at the same time people struggle with understanding the basic concepts that are the foundation of the digital era.
So, please dive into the five articles I picked for you this Saturday!
More Data in the Cloud Means More Centers on the Ground to Move It
Data centers changed and grew drastically in the last 25 years. I still remember when I sat in the data center of my local, friendly ISP, hooked a keyboard and a display to my server, had a coffee and took my time to install updates. Now data centers are huge and our growing global cloud infrastructure needs more and more data centers, which in turn need cooling, electricity, but comparatively few people working there.
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
Automated content farms and bot-based troll farms have been around for quite a while now, but since ChatGPT kickstarted the GenerativeAI era, automagically generated content will be everywhere on the web. I think it won’t take long until genuine content will get some sort of quality ranking, not just because us humans prefer to read stuff written by other humans (at least for now), but the GenerativeAI platforms need to make sure that generated content doesn’t pollute the LLM.
FTC prepares “the big one,” a major lawsuit targeting Amazon’s core business
When I first heard of Lina Khan, I was intrigued by the way she looked at the way platforms create lock-in effects and how they can become new variants of monopolies. So now FTC Chair Lina Khan plans to go after Amazon, which will be an interesting development with potentially huge consequences.
Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
Interesting how all of a sudden people think new skills become necessary, but AI has been around for quite a while now and people had enough time to adapt and learn. I assume all the hype about the prompt engineer earning 300k a year let people think more fondly about the power of AI.
High school changes every student’s password to ‘Ch@ngeme!’
Oh, wow. What a story. And yes, it was meant well, but badly executed.
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