Ericsson CTO: The road to 6G success runs through AI on 5G. At the Ericsson Industry Analyst Event in Boston, CTO Erik Ekudden laid out a road map for operators to build AI businesses on 5G before 6G arrives. My latest on Fierce Network.
"Stop treating trans people's rights as a legitimate issue to debate"
“Trans people are a tiny minority, trans people can easily be demonized, and so the Republican Party has made the decision to spend hundreds of millions of dollars raising the salience of ‘trans issues’ in political campaigns, because they wager that it is good fuel for stoking fear and bigotry, which will benefit them, as the Party of Scared Bigots. The fact that national political reporters and columnists and debate moderators will now treat questions about trans people and their rights as legitimate is proof that this rude, repellent, morally abhorrent campaign has been successful. Congrats, bigots: The political establishment has been completely unable to tell you to fuck off, which would have been the proper response from day one.”
100% yes to this.
Part of the reason I feel strongly on this issue is that bigots eventually come for the Jews, and it doesn’t take long. There are other reasons I support trans rights – because I have had trans friends, coworkers, acquaintances and creators I admire, and because it’s the right thing to do. But self-interest is part of it.
Sovereignty drives Orange Business to open-weight AI. Orange Business is moving its most sensitive AI workloads onto open-weight models running on infrastructure it controls, driven primarily by sovereignty concerns. I talked with Miguel Alvarez Bernardo, Orange chief data and AI officer, about how the company is adapting to the changing AI landscape. “On AI, if your expectations are not being reset at least twice a month, you are maybe not paying attention to everything that’s going on,” he said. My latest on Fierce Network.
Marco Arment, developer of the Overcast podcast app, says he no longer feels he owns it
“After building up a large, passionate userbase over a very long time, it’s not really entirely mine anymore. I can’t just do whatever I want with it,” Marco writes.
He also sees the growth era of indie podcast apps as over. “The business is now about serving and retaining my existing customers for as long as possible…. This has been difficult for me to accept.”
I’ve enjoyed Overcast since it launched 12 years ago. Though I’ve tried other podcast apps, I keep coming back to Overcast.
But if I had started listening to podcasts recently, I’d probably just use the built-in iPhone podcast app. It seems like it’s good enough.
Marco has been an outstanding indie developer. He helped build Tumblr, launched Instapaper, Overcast, and his new Unforgetful reminders app is excellent. I wish him much prosperity, happiness and continued great work in the future.
(I can never remember the name of the “Unforgetful” app — I have to look at it on my phone homescreen to remind myself — which is ironic, considering the purpose of Unforgetful is not forgetting things.)
'The Great Refusal' author Casey Gerald says ruining his reputation saved his life
On Fresh Air: “A decade ago, [Casey] Gerald was a rising star, a Yale and Harvard graduate running a celebrated nonprofit. Then he shut it all down. His new book is an argument for forging a different path.”
Gerald “has walked away from his own success twice. The first time was in 2016, at the height of everything. He was a kid from Oak Cliff, a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Dallas, who had made it out the way America tells us to make it out - a football scholarship to Yale, a job at Lehman Brothers, an MBA from Harvard. He created a nonprofit that put him on magazine covers and TED stages, with a talk viewed millions of times. He opened for President Barack Obama at South By Southwest in 2016. And there was even a New York Magazine headline that asked, ‘Does Casey Gerald Know How To Fix America?'”
“And then just like that, he shut down his nonprofit, stopped answering the phone and disappeared. His memoir, ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here,’ was his first report back. Then he went quiet again. And now, after that second long silence, Casey Gerald has returned with a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a challenge. It’s called ‘The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance.’ It’s his attempt to make sense of the choice at the center of his own life - to stop trying to convince America that he deserves a place in it and take back the authority to decide what his life is for.”
Why the current tech backlash feels different. Issues of surveillance and police militarization date back at least to the Patriot Act and 9/11. Why didn’t most Americans care then, and why are they protesting now? On the Verge’s Decoder podcast with Nila Patel.
I’ve been listening to podcasts for more than 20 years. In the 80s and 90s, I recorded audio off the radio programs to listen to in the car. I’m a die-hard podcast listener. A big part of my podcast-listening is done while exercising, so I guess you can say podcasts have been lifechanging for me.
What even is a “podcast” anymore?
Until recently, “podcasts” were audio distributed over the Internet — listened to, not watched. But nearly all of today’s most popular podcasts have video too. Some are video-only.
Spoiler alert: Hosts Willa Paskin and producer Evan Chung basically conclude that the word “podcast” now has two meanings: One is the traditional meaning, audio distributed over the Internet using RSS. But a newer meaning of the word is a video program of “two or three people chatting behind big bulky microphones.”
And they note that the microphones are just props — lapel mikes and other hidden mikes have been around for decades. Those big mikes strictly for show.
I am definitely an audio-only podcast man. I listen to a couple of hours of podcasts daily (though I’m lately listening to more audiobooks as an alternative to podcasts). We watch a few talk videos too, but I am turned off by the visual podcast format, with tight closeups on faces, amateurish set design and those big mikes.
Industry Standard Tools: A list of tools of various trades that are “so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses,” compiled “by the people who use them.”
“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem,” is so very often the appropriate response when communicating with a business.
They Ran For President. What Did They Learn?
In 2004, Charlie Jane Anders interviewed people who ran for President and lost, including Larry Flynt, who said:
“[My biggest surprise was learning] what a void existed in American society, and the desire to have a candidate other than one from the two-party system. I just announced [my candidacy] sort of as a joke, and I got $60,000 in my office that first week in change, dollars, five and ten-dollar bills from people saying, ‘Go get ‘em.'“
“I never dreamed that would be the case. There were so many disenfranchised people out there that I thought, if somebody came along who was really a major contender, he could really upset the system. I was not surprised when Ross Perot had the effect on the election that he had. Bill Clinton would have never gotten elected had it not been for Ross Perot. And of course, in 2000, Al Gore would have been elected had it not been for Ralph Nader.”
“Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment,” writes Brian Goldstone at The New York Times
Millions of Americans have full-time jobs but can’t afford housing. They live in their cars, or motels, or double up with more fortunate people. These homeless are intentionally excluded from US homelessness statistics, perpetuating the myth that homeless people are mostly drug-addicted or mentally ill.
…
“For millions of Americans, the greatest threat isn’t that they’ll lose their jobs. It’s that the job will never pay enough, never provide enough hours, never offer enough stability to keep them housed.… when work no longer provides stability, when wages are too low and rents are too high, when millions of people are one medical bill, one missed paycheck, one rent hike away from losing their homes – who, exactly, is safe?”