Welcome to the fifth issue of Tech Tuesdays!
Here’s what I found interesting this week:
It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine
We need to think carefully about all this, and perhaps evolve Operation Warp Speed into a sustainable vaccine-pandemic strategy. We know another pandemic is coming. We knew this one was coming.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
With the Election Over, Facebook Gets Back to Spreading Misinformation
There was always skepticism of how long these enhanced moderation efforts would would last, but when it was reported earlier this month that Facebook had also altered is algorithms to better root out hate speech—a major issue on social media platforms—there was at least a sense that the company was perhaps beginning, ever so slightly, to inch ahead in the right direction.
Battery Costs Down So Much, EVs Could Soon Cost Same as Gas Cars
BloombergNEF cites increased production due to sales growth, falling manufacturing costs, the price of cathode materials, and new pack designs as the main contributors to the drop in price. Essentially, it's basic economics. If you make more of something, the prices fall as the entire ecosystem adjusts and becomes more efficient.
Hackers targeted US nuclear weapons agency in massive cybersecurity breach, reports say
Suspicious activity was identified in the networks of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation, and the Richland Field Office of the Department of Energy.
Post Mortem of Google Outage on 14 December 2020
On Monday 14 December, 2020, for a duration of 47 minutes, customer-facing Google services that required Google OAuth access were unavailable. Cloud Service accounts used by GCP workloads were not impacted and continued to function.
Being kind to others is good for your health
“Humans are extremely social, we have better health when we are interconnected, and part of being interconnected is giving”
Zoom executive charged with disrupting meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square
PRC authorities took advantage of information provided by Jin to retaliate against and intimidate participants residing in the PRC, or PRC-based family members of meeting participants.
Workers are happier, less stressed, and healthier, too. Shorter working time is a way of future-proofing economy and ensuring that the impact of automation benefits workers.
German scientists say the prices we pay for meat and dairy products are too low
They fail to account for costs to society and the climate in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest polluter is conventionally-produced meat, they say, which should be nearly 2.5 times its current price.
Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.
“Code in simple, straightforward terms. Don't get too clever, "manufacturing artificial ingredients". Use the primitives that are there, when possible. Write what is simple, and natural, and human.“
Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature
Facebook doubled down on its marketing campaign against Apple. The social media giant rolled out full-page ads across popular publishing houses such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and more.
Nikon Is ending 70 years of camera production in Japan
The Japanese website Asahi reports that Nikon is ending the production of cameras in Japan and moving all production to Thailand.
Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year
The numbers are staggering. Arrests of journalists skyrocketed by more than 1200% in comparison to 2019. In just one week, from May 29 - June 4, more reporters were arrested in the U.S. than in the previous three years combined.
Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills
After years of being stymied by well-funded interests, Congress has agreed to ban one of the most costly and exasperating practices in medicine: surprise medical bills.
iPhone factory workers say they haven’t been paid, cause millions in damages
The Times of India has several on-the-ground reports and dramatic video of the protests. The news outlet reports, "A majority of the nearly 2,000 employees, who were exiting the facility after completing their night-shift, went on a rampage destroying the company's furniture, assembly units and even attempted to set fire to vehicles."
Lonely people's brains are different due to excess of imaginary social contact
“We speculate that the associations between the default network and loneliness revealed here,” the researcher writes, “reflect increased demands on episodic mental simulation of inner social events in the absence of desired social experience in the external world.”
EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech
Big tech firms face yearly checks on how they are tackling illegal and harmful content under new rules unveiled by the European Commission. Fresh restrictions are also planned to govern their use of customers' data. It is proposed that if companies refuse to obey, they could be forced to hand over up to 10% of their European turnover.
Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday
Anew study has found that elderly patients who underwent emergency surgery on their surgeon’s birthday had significantly higher 30-day mortality rates than patients whose surgery took place on any other day of the year.
To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
“There have been claims from both camps — it has to be together with math, it has to be together with language,” Ivanova says. “But it looks like computer science educators will have to develop their own approaches for teaching code most effectively.”
Cyberpunk 2077: How 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles
Thanks to online updates, in 2020, a video game’s launch is not its destiny. Despite these first weeks of controversy, in another three or six months, Cyberpunk 2077 will probably be fixed, and it may even end up in the black.
The universe is expanding faster than expected
With the new data in hand, Riess, Freedman and Madore and their teams have been able to recalculate the universe’s expansion rate. In broad strokes, the way to gauge cosmic expansion is to figure out how far away distant galaxies are and how fast they’re receding from us.
Thanks for reading!
If you got any comments or just want to brainstorm, email me at jacob@unhype.com.