Five Things Tech: Meta, Bitcoin, Drones, Chips, Right-Wing VC
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Howdy and welcome back to Five Things Tech!
Facebook for grown-ups. Bitcoin for the quantum age. War by drone. A chip that is embarrassingly efficient. And the man who turned Silicon Valley into a political force. I have been reading so you do not have to.
Enjoy Five Things Tech!
Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time.
Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teens wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.
While facebook might not be the current teen magnet, I still think that it makes sense to position itself as the place for the grown-ups. If only the algorithm would push more friends into the feed.
Quantum Computing Is Testing Bitcoin’s Most Important Assumption
Quantum Safe Bitcoin replaces Bitcoin’s elliptic curve signatures with a hash-based signature puzzle that a quantum computer cannot efficiently shortcut, all within Bitcoin’s existing legacy script framework. The trade-off is cost: each transaction requires an estimated $75 to $150 in GPU compute, which is why the researchers themselves frame the scheme as a last-resort mechanism for securing large balances rather than a scalable replacement for everyday transactions.
What QSB delivers is a way for an individual holder to make a quantum-resistant transaction today without waiting for a network-wide upgrade. That is meaningful, particularly for institutions, custodians and large BTC holders seeking contingency options against future quantum threats.
Maybe FIAT, which is the crypto term for real money, is not such a bad idea after all?
Ukraine’s rapid rise as an anti-drone powerhouse
In other words, the biggest European war of the 21st century was looking a lot like the First World War of the 20th century. Instead of the fast maneuvering of forces combined with air superiority that is typical of modern combat, the two forces were well locked into what were essentially fixed frontiers and trenches with neither side gaining dominance in the skies.
But the truly unexpected thing was what came next. Instead of simply being bogged down and hammering on each other’s positions, the reaction of both sides was to embrace military drones of various sizes to spy on or attack the enemy. This not only changed the nature of war in Ukraine, it also turned the conflict into a laboratory yielding results that the rest of the world is still trying to adapt to and learn from. And it isn’t just theoretical. It’s having real world repercussions in the Iran conflict and elsewhere.
The Ukrainians are really pushing it on all fronts.
This New Chip Could Make GPUs Far More Efficient
To overcome these challenges, the researchers developed a hybrid design that combines a piezoelectric resonator with small, commercially available capacitors arranged in a specific configuration. This approach enables the converter to handle larger voltage drops more effectively.
The design was integrated into a prototype chip and tested in the lab. It successfully converted 48 volts down to 4.8 volts — a level commonly required in data centers — reaching a peak efficiency of 96.2 percent. The chip also delivered about four times more output current compared to earlier piezoelectric-based designs.
Chipdesign is so fascinating, don’t you think?
The Venture-Capital Populist
The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials. Leave us alone to do our magic, which you can’t possibly understand, and everyone will benefit.
But about a decade ago, tech’s free ride ran into trouble. In 2013 Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the first popular web browser in the ’90s and now one of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, predicted to me a public backlash against technology companies over privacy rights, intellectual property, and monopoly power. With more foresight he would have included the addictive and corrosive effects of social media. Three years later, in 2016, Facebook enabled Russian meddling in an election that inflamed American divisions and sent Trump to the White House.
These people have to much money, power and influence. We need more and better regulations.
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