I’ve scoured the internet to find today’s funniest/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Big Tech Wants To Kill The Leap Second
The extra time has led to internet outages and outages, they claim. (CNET)
2 QAnon Ideology Is Thriving In The Primaries
But smart Republicans explicitly avoid themselves as believers. (NYT $)
+ Donald Trump refused to read lines condemning the Capitol rioters during a speech. (Reuters)
+ The Pennsylvania Democratic nominee’s social media game is exceptional. (the guard)
3 Venture capitalists are going to invest a record amount in crypto
Totally unaffected by the past six months then. (Reuters)
+ Hacked crypto platforms beg thieves to return some of their loot. (WSJ $)
4American pedestrians are in grave danger
Roads built purely for vehicles threaten the lives of people trying to cross them. (Vox)
+ London is experimenting with traffic lights where the pedestrian comes first. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Facebook is even worse without news
Pulling the plug on articles makes the platform look like a content graveyard. (The Atlantic Ocean)
+ The inability to curb hate speech continues to fuel violence in Ethiopia. (Insider)
+ Meta’s insistence on copying TikTok is starting to get a little embarrassing. (axios)
+ Instagram’s makeover hasn’t gone down well with users either. (TechCrunch)
6 Algorithms warp our sense of style
Nurturing a flat, generic flavor designed to appeal to everyone, but no one. (New Yorker $)
+ We struggle with pricing algorithms designed to squeeze us for every cent too. (NPR)
7 Roblox leaned back to appease Chinese censors
And even that didn’t stop it from closing there after just a few months. (Motherboard)
+ Chinese gamers are using a Steam wallpaper app to get porn past the censorship. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Within the ongoing war over digital book lending
Physical libraries are dragged into debates about copyright. (WP $)
9 Tech Entrepreneurs Sell Stocks In Their Lives
Because, why not? (New Yorker $)
10 Brace yourself for the return of the glass hole
Companies are desperate to sell us smart glasses, but do we really want them? (The edge)
+ Why Facebook uses Ray-Ban to put a claim on our faces. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Where will it go next? Good luck there, little bag.’
—Finbarr Taylor, whose suitcase broke on a flight from California to Glasgow, is sadly tracking his bag’s journey around the world thanks to an Apple AirTag tracker, reports Bloomberg.
The big story
In the machine that saved Moore’s law
October 2021
In Wilton, Connecticut, Dutch company ASML makes the world’s most advanced lithography machine – a critical process used to make the transistors, wires and other essential components of microchips. The team’s speed and accuracy are key to keeping up with Moore’s Law — the observation that the number of transistors crammed into a microchip doubles about every two years as components get smaller, making the chips cheaper and more powerful.
It took ASML $9 billion in R&D and 17 years of research to refine its industry-leading extreme ultraviolet (EUV) microchip machine. But the effort and time it took to get it done raises inevitable questions. How long will EUV be able to sustain Moore’s law? And what will happen next? Read the full story.