Weekly Link Roundup (Part 2)

OK...Phew. Think I'm all caught up...for now

IBM AI chief advises people who want a tech job in 2024 to learn the language and creative thinking skills you get with the liberal arts: I just love this first para: “If you’re updating your resume this holiday season, you’ll no doubt consider the impact of AI on your employability. While strong coding skills are valuable, don’t underestimate the significance of your background in fields like philosophy, literature, or anthropology.”

Jeff Bezos Bets on a Google Challenger Using AI to Try to Upend Internet Search: Another space in which I hope for increased competition but worry because while the tech is innovative, we still need new business models. Look at search - would you pay for it? Google has been so dominant for so long that most of the population has been trained that we (our data) is the price we pay for free search. Something will need to disrupt that model or we’ll just get more free search that is paid for by advertising.

Microsoft’s new Copilot key is the first big change to Windows keyboards in 30 years: Why do I like this story? Because the keyboard is like the browser - for the vast majority of people, its how we interact with, well, everything that’s not physically in front of us. It’s also one of the great, largely unexamined pieces of tech. There have been some articles that point to the “lies” about its origins, but its one of our great defaults. Now comes a new key to the fray!

Book Trends 2024: Top Genres, Trends, and Changes to Watch Out For: Books interest me for a couple of reasons. First, I love books and the first time I come over to your house, I will be checking to see how many books you have. Second, they are artifacts that represent a lot of time, passion, and cost by lots of people and as such have a certain gravity. I also love the current interplay between tech like TikTok and books which shows the digital amping up the physical and the super short term amping up the longer term engagement. There’s some cool dynamics at work there.

Dear tech companies: Please fix this stuff in 2024: Seconded. Get on it.

The AI Images That Shook the Photography World in 2023: First, if you haven’t seen some of these images, take a look, there are some amazing ones in here. Second, we really need to be thinking about what happens when you need to insert a few seconds of verification before you can trust any image that you see or voice that you hear.

Pika Labs’ text-to-video AI platform opens to all: Here’s how to use it: Tell me again about how creating content for compliance training is a business model that won’t be dead soon?

Big Tech is spending more than VC firms on AI startups: Follow the money - not for validation necessarily but an indicator of how the business models will work.

Huge 2TB microSD card is on the way, sounds perfect for your Steam Deck: I just can’t even. As someone who remembers getting their first 1 Gb hard drive and then feeling like future really hit when I had a 1Gb drive on my Compaq iPaq, this kind of stuff just stuns me. TWO TERABYTES. TWO! On a microSD card.

Top robotics names discuss humanoids, generative AI and more: Who doesn’t love a good Q&A session with lots of smart people?

Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?: I love Cory’s thinking and his writing. If you haven’t read Unauthorized Bread, what are you waiting for? Don’t you want to know what a future of networked appliances and subscriptions for everything looks like? I also agree with his assertion that “Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way.” I think the combo of AI coming on the heels of a pandemic and WFH put us in a place where lots can left behind.

The Philosophy of Time: Study the Nature of Past, Present, and Future: Including this because it fits right into my fascination with things we think “have always been this way.” Spoiler alert: They haven’t.

2023 was the year the economics of tech caught up with reality: In short, yep.

In Memoriam: The tech that died in 2023: Not really sad about any of these.