Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Day: February 1, 2023

A Letter from Om. January 2023

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

Hi! In case you are new around here, I am Om & this is my letter where I share what’s on my mind, my latest writings, articles worth reading from around the web, my recommendations & some of my photography.

What I have been up to: 

It is amazing how quickly the first month of the year has passed. January went way too quickly for me. I had an excellent start to the year — I went on a year-end photography trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. With steady snow, low temperatures, and incredible minimal landscapes, it was a perfect way to ring in the new year. It put me in a great state of mind for the year ahead. However, my return to everyday life didn’t go as well — I picked up a bug. I didn’t test positive for COVID, but it felt like it. For about ten days, I could barely leave my bed. Whatever! I am just glad to be out and about. I have been researching and preparing to write much more in the coming year.  

What I am thinking about:

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that “tech layoffs” have been on my mind, and I wrote a column for The Spectator to explain “the why of these layoffs.” An unprecedented boom in Silicon Valley that started with the once-in-a-generation convergence of three mega trends: mobile, social, and cloud computing, has peaked. It started in 2010, and it has been bananas around here for (Read more...)

How Spotify is changing dance music

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

Spotify is changing electronic music and dance music in particular. Spotify doesn’t just eliminate the DJ as the conduit between artist and audience. Streaming music has cultivated a new breed of creators who seem to be totally in the dark about what a DJ does in the first place. As a result we have what’s almost a new format of music that broadly fits into the parameters of club music, but will almost certainly never be played in a club — or by any DJ at all.

I am not surprised that Spotify or TikTok are changing how music is made, why it is made, and how it is consumed. Streaming has shaped how we experience music, and as a result, it has lost some of that loving feeling. Medium is the message!

Good Read: How Spotify turned dance music into dance Muzak.

Infographic: Generative AI Explained by AI

by Nick Routley
This post is by Nick Routley from Visual Capitalist

infographic explaining generative ai created using generative ai tools

Generative AI Explained by AI

After years of research, it appears that artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching a sort of tipping point, capturing the imaginations of everyone from students saving time on their essay writing to leaders at the world’s largest tech companies. Excitement is building around the possibilities that AI tools unlock, but what exactly these tools are capable of and how they work is still not widely understood.

We could write about this in detail, but given how advanced tools like ChatGPT have become, it only seems to see what generative AI has to say about itself.

Everything in the infographic above – from illustrations and icons to the text descriptions⁠—was created using generative AI tools such as Midjourney. Everything that follows in this article was generated using ChatGPT based on specific prompts.

Without further ado, generative AI as explained by generative AI.

Generative AI: An Introduction

Generative AI refers to a category of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that generate new outputs based on the data they have been trained on. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI creates new content in the form of images, text, audio, and more.

Generative AI uses a type of deep learning called generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create new content. A GAN consists of two neural networks: a generator that creates new data and a discriminator that evaluates the data. The generator and discriminator work together, with the generator improving its outputs (Read more...)

Speaking of oracles

by Joseph

This is Joseph

Marginal Revolution pointed me to this quote by Peter Thiel:
[Thiel] has described British people’s affection for the state-backed health service as “Stockholm syndrome.”

The venture capitalist’s comments came during a Q&A session after a speech at the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society, on Monday. He also said that the crisis-stricken health service, currently grappling with strikes and long wait times for emergency care, was making people sick and needs “market mechanisms” to fix it. Such mechanisms include privatizing parts of it, avoiding rationing and loosening regulations…

“In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” Thiel said after an address in which he argued that a perceived fear of disruption was holding back technological and scientific developments. “In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards-compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” 

Let me be blunt. I can improve any pension plan by starting over and no longer needing to pay out previous obligations. It's trivial.

The political challenge is that older adults have paid into the NHS their entire working life. The National Health Service (NHS) started in 1948, only a few people over 90 will have worked at any point in their career without contributing to the national health care plan. Tear it down might be ok, if and only if the new package of services are equivalent. Privatizing and avoiding rationing, together, make it hard to see how services can be maintained. Further, if a (Read more...)

Kubeark raises $2.8m pre-seed to scale software products and speed up cloud adoption

by Anamaria Iuga
This post is by Anamaria Iuga from Seedcamp

The pandemic has been one of the most powerful accelerants for digital transformation in recent years. At record speed, CIOs, CFOs, and CTOs were forced to adopt flexible cloud strategies and tools that enabled them and their teams to take control of their mission-critical workloads and data management. However, fast adoption is only the first step in the process of delivering software products at scale.

This is why we are excited to back Kubeark, an early-stage startup founded in April 2022. Based in New York and Bucharest, the company’s mission is to support enterprises fix their scalability, delivery, and lifecycle management challenges.

Bogdan Nedelcov, Kubeark’s CEO and co-founder, emphasizes:

“Software vendors currently struggle with their hybrid cloud infrastructure and the transformation of products from on-premises to cloud on a large scale. Kubeark helps them achieve operational excellence regardless of where their infrastructure resides: on-prem, public cloud, or private cloud. Our platform ushers in a new era in which software products are delivered as true Saas products, helping vendors speed time-to-value, hyper-scale their distribution, and SaaSify any piece of software instantly.”

On why we invested, our Managing Partner Reshma Sohoni comments:

“We are excited to back Kubeark, a company founded by an incredibly experienced team with roots at Seedcamp-backed UIPath. Their holistic yet versatile solution has the potential to supercharge scalability in an efficient and secure way.”

The six-strong founders’ team includes CEO Bogdan Nedelcov, CTO Teofil Harapcea, VP of Engineering Adrian Tudoran, VP of Customer Success George Dumitrascu, (Read more...)