Chris Scollo

I thought the productivity dip would be temporary while we get used to the new icons, but I still lose too much time trying to figure out which tab is @googlecalendar, which is @googledrive, @gmail, etc. They're just too similar. We navigate by colour. teapaw.org/spycho/status/13166969…

The bear case on AI is NOT that "AI doesn’t work". It clearly does. The bear case is this: Silicon Valley in recent years has an extremely poor record of understanding how humans actually use tech. In the past five years: Bitcoin as payments, NFTs as art, the metaverse, VR headsets. Every time the tech "worked". But mass adoption did not happen. In retrospect, it seems obvious that people wouldn't want to use bitcoin to buy stuff in the metaverse. But as recently as 2021 many people earnestly believed it. Here's the bigger problem. Bitcoin, metaverse etc were consumer products. Relatively simple. By contrast, a big part of AI is targeted at businesses. These are WAY more difficult to understand. Businesses are the aggregation of thousands of different people, all doing things that even people within the business don't understand. This makes prediction way more difficult. Then you get the question of whether AI adoption is actually profitable. Again, no one actually has a clue. So far companies are spending loads on AI inference. Costs are rising. But there are VERY few instances of companies seeing higher profits as a result of AI use. The notion that "once AI is good enough, profitable adoption at scale will follow" is a MASSIVE bet with trillions of dollars riding on it.

New: The Pentagon bans foreign citizens from accessing highly sensitive data, but Microsoft bypasses this by using engineers in China and elsewhere to remotely instruct American “escorts” who may lack expertise to identify malicious code. propub.li/44My9K9

People have stopped buying new Teslas. Elon is trying to give them away for $0 down and 0% APR financing for 60 months. Why would you buy a car that protesters are going to smash and flip over once the Trump economic riots begin?

YELLEN SEES NO RED LIGHTS FLASHING ON FINANCIAL RISKS NOW

Some Chinese dudes imitating AI videos lol this is next level

Peace mission 5.0 It was an honour to visit President @realDonaldTrump at Mar-a-Lago today. We discussed ways to make #peace. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!

🚨 Let the games begin — China launches exercise Joint Sword 2024A, surrounding Taiwan from all directions Thread with everything you need to know + tracking live updates:

A new ocean is forming in Africa along a 35-mile crack that opened up in Ethiopia in 2005. The crack, which has been expanding ever since, is a result of three tectonic plates pulling away from each other. It’s thought that Africa’s new ocean will take at least 5 million to 10 million years to form, but the Afar region’s fortuitous location at the boundaries of the Nubian, Somali and Arabian plates makes it a unique laboratory to study elaborate tectonic processes. There are still some big unknowns, including what is causing the continent to rift apart. Some think that a massive plume of superheated rocks rising from the mantle beneath East Africa could be driving the region’s continental rift. Each plate boundary in the Afar region is spreading at different speeds, but the combined forces of these separating plates is creating what’s known as a mid-ocean ridge system, where eventually a new ocean will form. The three plates are separating at different speeds. The Arabian plate is moving away from Africa at a rate of about 1 inch per year, while the two African plates are separating even slower, between half an inch to 0.2 inches per year. [📷 Anthony Philpotts]