Five Things Tech: Fiber, Open Source, Reinventing Memory Chips, Post-Human Internet, Matter
So much tech, somewhat orderly grouped around Five Things
Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
Again I have a Smörgåsbord of tech topics picked out for you. And while I found all articles fascinating, I can say that the first one is the one that really impressed me. People are taking matters into their own hands, figure out how it works and get it done. Fiber to the home, even if the home is somewhere very remote. If you have electricity, you can have fiber. That is so cool.
Read on, there is more!
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A Remote Indigenous Community Built One of Canada’s Fastest Fiber Networks
Nakogee says ownership remains the key advantage. Unlike earlier telecom providers that leased infrastructure or delivered service wirelessly, WJBTN owns the backbone fiber, the right-of-way, and the poles carrying the network. That makes it far harder for outside telecom companies to displace the service. “That’s our secret weapon,” he says.
Fundamentally, it’s about sovereignty. By controlling the infrastructure that carries internet traffic, the communities can govern and maintain the network according to their own priorities rather than the financial goals of distant providers.
We have largely forgotten that the core idea of the internet was to have a decentralized network. It’s refreshing to see a community building their own fiber access to get the necessary bandwidth they need.
Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet
When you talk about open source in certain circles, usually governmental policy circles, they would say things like, “Oh, it’s just some kid in the basement, right?” This ecosystem is not that. These businesses are building huge economies, infrastructure, products, and technology.
It’s like Linux, which started with just a kernel, not being taken very seriously. But Google was able to take Linux and make Android, and now, for all practical purposes, every computer on the planet runs on Linux. Every single new vending machine probably is running on Linux.
We are seeing the same thing in the open-source, open-weight AI world. It is because of the marketing blitz of the big frontier labs that we all view AI just as something that Anthropic, OpenAI, and a few other companies are doing. There’s actually a burgeoning ecosystem on the open-source, open-weight side that a lot of people actually do know about.
It’s potentially one of the best well-kept secrets right now when it comes to technology.
I am very sure that the majority of AI usage will be on open weights models soon that are being hosted somewhere in your region, under your region’s jurisdiction.
While the world builds more memory chips, Israel could reinvent them
AI has now turned what was once an industry constraint into a strategic bottleneck. The industry is responding by increasing production and finding more sophisticated ways to connect memory to processors. These solutions can improve performance, but they do not solve the underlying problem: even HBM ultimately relies on the same DRAM technology.
This matters strategically because the memory industry is dominated by a small group of companies based mainly in South Korea, the United States and Japan. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron account for most of the DRAM market, while Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron and SanDisk are major players in NAND. HBM is more concentrated still: according to Counterpoint Research, South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix together account for roughly 80% of the global market by revenue.
That concentration is already creating vulnerabilities. As supply tightens and prices rise, technology companies are looking beyond the traditional suppliers. Apple is testing memory chips from China’s CXMT, while some PC makers have already begun using its products. This could deepen reliance on Chinese suppliers at a time when US policy is seeking to reduce such dependencies in critical technologies.
This is really smart thinking. We cannot rely on just building more factories, we need to rethink the core technologies that are in high demand right now and figure out new, innovative ways to come up with solutions for the next decade to come. And yes, I am betting on the Israelis to deliver.
Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet
The dead internet theory, a concept popular in tech circles, holds that most digital traffic will eventually be software, leaving humans as a minority voice. We may now have a corollary of that prediction — let’s call it a bot loop — when the humans on both sides of an interaction hand over their role to artificial intelligence. These recursive exchanges can be eerie and error-prone, a single mistake bouncing back and forth uncorrected over and over. Stranger still, they flip our conversational dynamic inside out, turning chatbots into the interlocutors and humans into their enablers.
Depending on whom you ask, bot loops might be banal, dystopian or genuinely useful. No matter how people feel about them, researchers say we’re going to see bot loops much more often as we deputize A.I. systems to do our bidding.
This will happen sooner than we think, but it will take us a lot longer to really understand the impact this paradigm shift is going to have.
Physicists are closing in on the origin of matter
Physicists have now found a new clue about the source of this mismatch by studying quarks and gluons—the building blocks of baryonic matter. Nature, it seems, is set askew not through either quarks or gluons alone but via their intermingling. The research, which appears today in Science, used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. (RHIC was permanently shuttered earlier this year to make way for a new, better particle collider at Brookhaven.)
“This is one of the most significant results achieved by the RHIC program,” says Dmitri Kharzeev, a physicist at Stony Brook University, who was not involved with the new paper but is mentioned in its acknowledgments. “It reshapes our understanding of baryon structure and how baryonic matter emerged.”
This is so cool. Just imagine for a second you work on these kind of projects, then everything else feels kind of pointless…
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico