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Techmeme
June 27, 2023, 10:00 AM
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Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
A 2019 email by Xbox Game Studios' Matt Booty encouraged buying content to “spend Sony out of business”; Microsoft argues the company didn't pursue the strategy  —  Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money …
James Vincent / The Verge:
AI is killing the web with spam sites, mass article producing “AI editors”, AI-generated junk on Etsy, Reddit, and Wikipedia that exhausts moderators, and more  —  In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed.  Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links.
NewsGuard:
Analysis: in May and June 2023, 141 major brands ran ads, mostly via Google Ads, across 55 low-quality sites with AI-generated articles, some posting ~1,200/day
Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica:
A Pixel Fold reviewer says the device's flexible OLED screen died after four days of light use, starting at the bottom and moving upwards, likely due to debris  —  The closed display halves almost touch, and that can smash debris into the screen.  —  A flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Google Pixel Fold review: landscape-first is great for videos and the outer display feels natural, but it's heavy, pricey, and has limited multitasking features
Wall Street Journal:
How routine drug use by Silicon Valley executives moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, causing issues for boards and tech leaders  —  Entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Sergey Brin are part of a drug movement that proponents hope will expand minds, enhance lives and produce business breakthroughs
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Decentralized social media app Damus says Apple rejected an app update and told the company to remove its tipping feature or use Apple's in-app purchase system  —  Damus, a decentralized social networking app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will be removed from the App Store due to Apple's strict payment rules.
Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Some doctors say that their current best use for generative AI is to ease the heavy burden of documentation, which takes hours a day and contributes to burnout  —  The best use for generative A.I. in health care, doctors say, is to ease the heavy burden of documentation that takes them hours a day and contributes to burnout.
Zheping Huang / Bloomberg:
Baidu claims Ernie 3.5, the latest version of its LLM, has surpassed ChatGPT in general abilities and outperformed GPT-4 on many Chinese-language capabilities  —  Baidu Inc.'s ChatGPT-style service has outperformed OpenAI's seminal product on several measures, China's search leader said on Tuesday.
Robert D. McFadden / New York Times:
John B. Goodenough, who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in developing the lithium-ion battery used in mobile devices and EVs, dies at 100  —  An unassuming professor who remained active into his 90s, he is credited with the breakthrough that gave rise to the batteries powering today's electronic devices.
David Meyer / Fortune:
A last-minute amendment to an Irish bill would let the Data Protection Commission declare some info in privacy complaints as “confidential”, sparking an uproar  —  European privacy advocates are hopping mad at what they see as an attempt by the Irish government to draw a veil …
Brian Fung / CNN:
A look at how the $42.5B US broadband infrastructure plan will be allocated: Texas leads with $3.3B+, California gets $1.8B+, Missouri gets $1.7B+, and more  —  The Biden administration on Monday outlined how states across the country will be receiving billions of dollars in federal funding …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Meta announces Quest+, a VR subscription service that gives Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro users access to two games every month for $7.99/month or $59.99/year  —  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced Quest Plus, the company's new “virtual reality subscription” that gives users access to “the best titles on the platform,” he said.
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Data streaming service Redpanda raised a $100M Series C led by Lightspeed, GV, and HaystackVC, following a $50M Series B in February 2022  —  Redpanda helps companies capture data in real time in a modern context, providing a new way to stream data while maintaining backwards compatibility with Kafka …
Jane Lee / Reuters:
Snowflake partners with Nvidia to allow customers to build AI models using their own data, with Nvidia embedding its NeMo framework into Snowflake Data Cloud  —  Snowflake (SNOW.N) a cloud data analytics company, is partnering with computing company Nvidia (NVDA.O) to allow customers ranging …

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UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:00 AM ET, June 27, 2023.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Sara Fischer / Axios:
PBS and a public TV affiliate in Minnesota sue the Trump administration, saying his executive order to cut federal funding violated PBS' First Amendment rights

Max Tani / Semafor:
The California State Senate opens an inquiry into whether Paramount's reported $15M proposed settlement with Trump violated bribery and unfair competition laws

Chris Willman / Variety:
Taylor Swift acquires the rights to her first six albums from Shamrock Capital; sources say the deal was in the mid-$300M range

More News

Earlier Picks

Aaron Holmes / The Information:
Sources: Sam Altman told developers in May that OpenAI plans to turn ChatGPT into a “supersmart personal assistant for work”, setting up a Microsoft rivalry
New York Times:
A look at review-bombing campaigns on Goodreads that can derail a book's publication long before its release, frustrating both new and established authors
Jesse Hamilton / CoinDesk:
FTX's bankruptcy team says the exchange owed its customers ~$8.7B after commingling and misusing their deposits, and has recovered ~$7B in liquid assets so far
Will Knight / Wired:
DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis details Gemini, an upcoming ChatGPT rival meant to combine the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems and those of LLMs
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
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