Dispatch 048: Irish Eyes
Yes, yes, the Spyglass Dispatch is still on hiatus. But I found myself taking notes on so many different news items I was reading earlier, that I figured I'd just send them out to offload them from my head as I work on a few longer posts this week.
Happy St. Patrick's Day! ☘️
I Think...
🤳 Oracle Is Leading Contender to Help Run TikTok in New Deal – If we are indeed closing in on an agreement here, it sounds like Oracle is in the driver's seat. Which is weird because well, it's Oracle. The 48-year-old database management company would be in charge of the most popular consumer app in the US? Okay. I mean, at least 50-year-old Microsoft has a consumer business – sorta! Still, this does make some sense in the sort of backroom dealing kind of way given how crucial ByteDance is to Oracle's newfangled AI datacenter business. And reworking the "Project Texas" initiative from the last time we all went through this song and dance should carve an easier path to some kind of agreement here. I also have to imagine there will be some other players involved – including, perhaps that certain aforementioned tech giant always looking for an inroads with those elusive consumers. Oh yes, and then there's the whole matter of the US getting a taste of the upside... [Information 🔒]
👨🏻 ‘Ted Lasso’ Is Coming Back – Not a huge surprise, as this was rumored months ago, but a welcome one – especially since it sounds like most everyone on the creative side will be back. That includes, of course, Jason Sudeikis, who the world was waiting upon for the greenlight here. When the series last wrapped up, I had guessed that it would be back relatively soon – and the fact that it remains Apple TV+'s most popular show (though Severance has been giving it a run for its money) all but assured they'd figure out a way. Mainly though, I hope they're able to capture the initial magic of the first season, as the second was up and down and the third was pretty rough. But that first season was also right place/right time as the world was stuck in the COVID era, so it's a magic that is hard to recapture – to say the least! Still, it sounds like they'll focus on the AFC Richmond women's team (as hinted at in the finale) for a change of pace. [NYT]
🔭 Nvidia’s Next Chips Are Named After Vera Rubin – While most of the details about the next chips won't be known until Jensen Huang's keynote tomorrow, NVIDIA's naming convention for them has taken on a life of their own. While the company, as with most in the industry, has technical names that are a mash up of letters and numbers (e.g. 'H100', 'GB200', etc), this secondary naming convention has really taken off – not unlike when Apple started to officially use the "Big Cat" codenames for actual OS X marketing. (Much more compelling than what Dell has done!) Of course, this marketing move is far more meaningful as these are real scientists being honored – and yes, most of them female. Vera Rubin discovered a lot of what is now believed about "dark matter". "Her" chips should ship next year. [CNBC]
💨 Apple’s iPhone 17 ‘Air’ Is a Step Toward a Slimmer, Port-Free Era – Mark Gurman notes that one of the ideas explored for the "iPhone Air" was to create a device without ports, but Apple backtracked perhaps in part because the EU would have bitched and moaned (and undoubtedly fined them). Innovation! He also notes that Apple thought about making the screen larger – akin to the current iPhone Pro Max devices – but they were worried it might bend/break more often given how thin it would be. Still, it sure feels like a key step/test for the eventual foldable iPhone. Gurman also thinks they'll hit the same $900 price point of the 'Plus' model it is effectively replacing. We'll see, I could see them using the move to push the price up a bit... [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Wrote...
A few recent posts...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
- The Flow Trip, which sounds like the lifestyle magazine to end all lifestyle magazines, and is the media arm of Adam Neumann's startup post-WeWork, Flow, is apparently profitable. I don't really know what the point of noting that is since it can't possibly support the $1B+ valuation of the larger company, but good for them, I guess? [Axios]
- Taara, the laser-based internet company that at a high level (quite literally) competes with Starlink (and was born out of the "Project Loon" high-altitude balloon moonshot) is spinning out of Alphabet's X. [FT 🔒]
- Carl Lundstrom, the Swedish bread heir best known for having financed The Pirate Bay back in the day died piloting his own plane in Slovenia. That led me back down a rabbit hole about the old infamous piracy site... [NYT]
- Village Roadshow, the film production house behind many massive movies you'll know, is filing for bankruptcy. Why? In no small part because they say that Warner Bros. destroyed the value of the most recent Matrix film by releasing it on streaming. No word on what it means for the next Matrix movie in the works... [THR]
- A profile of Chetan Nayak, the man leading up Microsoft's quantum computer efforts. There remains quite a bit of skepticism about their Majorana particle breakthrough here. [WSJ 🔒]
- Speaking of quantum, D-Wave, another company in the space, claims to be the latest to achieve "quantum supremacy" – noting that it carried out magnetic materials simulations that would take a traditional supercomputer "nearly a million years" – in under 20 minutes. (Yes, it's also being disputed.) [WSJ 🔒]
- Tim Berners-Lee makes the case – as he does every couple of years – for the end of social media's "walled gardens". Oddly, he doesn't mention the Fediverse, but naturally he has his own solution in the form of Solid, a new W3C-controlled standard he hopes to create around social-linked-data (hence the name). He also talks up Charlie, an AI agent his startup, Inrupt, is building to work on top of Solid. [FT 🔒]
- Speaking of the Fediverse, the first beta of the ActivityPub integration within Ghost is live! [Ghost]
- WhatsApp is working on threading within messages – finally. [Verge]
- There is some real spy shit going down within enterprise HR software companies, it seems. Rippling set a "honeypot" trap inside of their corporate Slack which it says led them to discover their rival Deel had placed a mole inside the company. And now they're suing! Both, I'll point out, are also YC companies... [NYT]
- Speaking of YC – "about 80%" of the companies in the latest batch are apparently AI-focused. [CNBC]
- A profile of Joel Kaplan, Mark Zuckerberg's divisive new political fixer for the (second) Trump era. [FT 🔒]
- A new movie, Novocaine, won the U.S. box office this past weekend with just $8.7M in ticket sales – yikes. [THR 🔒]
- In better news for Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences quickly invited Conan O'Brien back to host the Oscars once again next year. Usually, such hosting decisions drag on for months and sometimes are not really decided at all, when the show goes on with no host. [NYT]
- Meanwhile, business has seemingly never been more booming than it is right now on Broadway, pushed by the Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal-led "Othello" – which is still in previews. Tickets are going for almost $1,000 for a huge part of the theater, smashing records. [NYT]
- Brave to News Corp: you can't sue us, we sue you! (I do appreciate Robert Thompson using the phase "shiftily shameful" in his statement.) [Reuters]
- Regulators effectively killed the Roomba after they contested the deal for Amazon to acquire iRobot. That turned a $1.4B company into a $100M company (and falling – seemingly on the verge of bankruptcy in just over a year). Innovation! [Axios]
I Quote...
"The main mistake people usually make is thinking Newton or Einstein were just scaled-up good students, that a genius comes to life when you linearly extrapolate a top-10% student."
— Thomas Wolf, the co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, with quite a few good/thought-provoking points in a long tweet – which remains just an awful way to read longer thoughts. So it's probably worth its own post!
I Spy...
Perplexity's ad is pretty good/fun. Though I'm surprised Apple was okay with them using their apps/icons in the shots? Also, with "Poogle" I might have shown a few ads on top of those 10 blue links...