Five Things Tech: Geoengineering, Venture Capital, OpenFisker, Grumpy Devs, Color LiDAR
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Howdy and welcome back to Five Things Tech!
Five tech things (see what I did there?) that made me think this week. One involves particles in the stratosphere. One involves developers losing their edge. And one is the best community response to a corporate collapse I have seen in years.
The throughline, if there is one: technology keeps moving faster than our ability to govern it, understand it, or even agree on whether it is good for us. Geoengineering gets trialed before regulation exists. AI gets mandated before anyone asks developers what it does to their craft. Cars ship as software black boxes and owners only find out what that means when the company goes under. The Fisker community figured it out anyway, and that gives me more hope than most funded startups I see right now.
Enjoy Five Things Tech!
Can Some Very Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes.
The materials produced by Stardust are made from amorphous silica, which is used as a food additive and in some consumer products, and calcium carbonate, a compound found in eggshells and limestone. The company said its particles were biodegradable, were not harmful to people or animals, and would not accumulate in the oceans or soil. Released in the upper atmosphere, the particles could reflect a small amount of sunlight away from Earth, the company said.
Geoengineering - is it good or bad? This idea certainly sounds like something a mad scientist in a dystopian science-fiction movie would try to develop, only to be stopped by the good guys. Or can we really safely use this globally to keep the temperatures down and make hotter regions livable again?
Venture Capital Is Concentrating Faster Than Ever. What Happens To Everyone Else?
![Illustration of founder looking at HUGE pile of money. [Dom Guzman]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AaqA!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f2a89da-76ce-482d-b238-df48f78f69d3_900x506.jpeg "Illustration of founder looking at HUGE pile of money. [Dom Guzman]")
The fundamental question for the venture world now is: Does the rapid growth and capital concentration for the largest companies come at the expense of smaller startups, or does the success of OpenAI, Anthropic and the like expand the total addressable market for tech startups so drastically that it promises to grow and reshape opportunities across the entire ecosystem?
Everybody wants to be in on the mega-rounds, the safe bets of the probable industry leaders. It makes it very hard for startups that target specialist niches to gain any traction in their fundraising efforts.
Fisker went bankrupt and owners built open source car company from the ashes
Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) — a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker.
The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker’s proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts — negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250.
This is a genuinely cool response to what could have been a total desaster. Cars are software black boxes and we need to better regulate this. Also, I’d love to be able to configure my own Android Auto or whatever it is called, because the latest release, which was 2 months ago, ruined my bluetooth…
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains
Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.
Oh well, get used to it. I really am not that sympathetic. Change is coming fast and we have to embrace it. The job of a developer will change tremendously, but developers will stay valuable, or becoming even more valuable when we do agentic coding and need to orchestrate agents to build software.
World’s first native color LiDAR gives machines human-like vision
Ouster's technology is built around its new L4 chip, which embeds Fujifilm 's color science – the same expertise behind the company's imaging technology – to deliver hardware-level color processing. It integrates 42.9 GMACs of processing capacity, detects up to 20 trillion photons per second, and operates at 40 kHz with picosecond-level precision. Those numbers are dense, but they mean a single sensor can now read a traffic sign, detect whether the car ahead is braking by the color of its brake lights or produce topographic maps with real-world color data – all without additional hardware or calibration.
That is just really amazing and will improve the safety of autonomous vehicles even more.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
🤖
— Nico