Techmeme
February 26, 2023, 6:15 PM

Top News

Emma Roth / The Verge:
Reports: 50+ Twitter staff were laid off over the weekend, including Twitter's product lead Esther Crawford, and Revue founder Martijn de Kuijper  —  Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company's Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter's forthcoming payments platform.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Inside Apple Exploratory Design Group, which works on a glucose monitor, other advanced tech, and was behind some of the chip and battery tech in iPhones, Macs  —  Apple has a secret team working to bring noninvasive glucose monitoring to its smartwatch, but that's not all it's pursuing.
Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Some AI companies are hiring “prompt engineers”, who create and refine text prompts for AI systems to understand their faults and coax optimal results  —  When Riley Goodside starts talking with the artificial-intelligence system GPT-3, he likes to first establish his dominance.
Mia Sato / The Verge:
Molly White:
The recovery of ~120K stolen ether by Jump and Oasis demonstrates the centralization of DeFi enabled by multisig-controlled upgradable smart contracts  —  Wormhole, Jump Crypto, and Oasis demonstrate the centralization threat introduced by multisig-controlled upgradable smart contracts.
Jon Rice / Blockworks:
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Q&A with sci-fi author Neal Stephenson about inventing the metaverse concept, his blockchain startup Lamina1, not using ChatGPT to help write novels, and more  —  Neal Stephenson's science-fiction writing has predicted (and inspired) innovations from cryptocurrency to Alexa.
Ranjan Roy / Margins:
How the potential of voice as a platform was wasted: closed ecosystems, overly ambitious claims, distorted monopolistic incentives, and too much capital  —  Sometimes innovation just ain't enough … I have four Echo devices in my household.  For years, we used them to control the lights in our apartment …
Kate Lindsay / The Verge:
As AI tools and CGI creations get better at pretending to be human, some creators say they are often being asked to prove that they're human  —  Last April, 27-year-old Nicole posted a TikTok video about feeling burned out in her career.  When she checked the comments the next day, however, a different conversation was going down.
Jon Porter / The Verge:
HMD Global announces the £150 Nokia G22 and claims users will be able to replace its battery in around five minutes and screen in ~20 minutes with an iFixit kit  —  HMD has worked to make what it says are the most common smartphone repairs — replacing a broken screen, charging port …
Tabby Kinder / Financial Times:
Sources: Sequoia resigned from Citizen's board after the startup offered a “pay to play” deal obliging existing investors to participate in a new funding round  —  Investor abandons start-up over fundraising that has massively diluted its shareholding, as Silicon Valley VCs re-evaluate deals
Anton Shilov / Tom's Hardware:
Report: 69,190 semiconductor patents were filed globally in 2022, up 9% YoY; Chinese companies accounted for 55%, US companies 26%, and UK companies 0.26%  —  The U.K. only accounted for 0.26% of the global total.  —  China is neither the world's largest developer of chips nor the world's largest maker of semiconductors.

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More News

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post:
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:

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