Nicholas Thompson’s Post

The most interesting thing in tech: Did Olena Zelenska really buy a $4.8m Bugatti with money meant to aid Ukraine? Of course not. But the reason the story trended last week on social media and popped on Google is because of how easy it is now to create fake stories, on fake websites, and pollute the information ecosystem. It's a sign of trouble to come. But there's an interesting counterpoint too. Despite the ease and despite the nonsense, democracies and elections are still holding up pretty well. Disinformation hasn't been able to break the Mexican, Indian, French, or British elections. Maybe the information ecosystem is more resilient than people think.

The most interesting thing in tech: when can algorithms protect against bias and misuse better than humans can? There's a wonderful study about Uber drivers and NYC taxi drivers that show that the latter are more likely to take you on longer, less-direct routes, particularly if you're from out of town. Why? It's not that taxi drivers are less ethical. It's that Uber/Lyft and other services have more transparency and feedback. You can see on the map if the driver is taking a direct route and you can rate them. This doesn't always mean that algorithms are better, obviously. An Uber with a full monopoly and bad intentions could be vastly worse. But it's an interesting insight into how different systems—transparency, feedback loops, competition—can help us.

Meetings are becoming everpresent. Knowledge workers now spend fewer hours every day, on average, creating new things than they do talking about those new things.

The most interesting thing in tech: a new post from a partner at Sequoia Capital estimates that companies would need to be earning back about $600b to pay for the amount of money they are spending on chips and data centers to power AI. And how much are they earning? It's closer to $100b. The author, David Cahn, writers that there is now "a $500b hole." It's a fascinating, wonderfully concise argument and post. But I think that many people are overreacting in saying that it's a presage of a giant bursting bubble. The companies spending the money have loads of cash on hand, and they have ways to hedge their bets too.

This made me laugh. https://buff.ly/2lX1kc8

"Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee." I love this essay by E.B. White and reread it every 4th of July.

The most interesting thing in tech: How will we regulate AI agents? It's not going to be easy, and we'll have to do lots of things. One important step will be data labeling: making sure that packets of information created by agents are labeled as such. Maybe we even need to add special labels for bots making lots of requests or passing across lots of routers, just as cars and trucks are required to have license plates but bicycles do not.

The most interesting thing in tech: a new paper from the NBER suggests that bringing Starbucks coffee shops to communities that don’t have them increases entrepreneurship. If people have spaces where they can sit and talk to each other, they come up with good ideas and start new companies. The finding doesn’t hold for bars, or coffee shops that don’t have places to sit. It’s a good reminder for city planners and business leaders: build communities where people can share ideas together and good things will happen.

This sentence, in David Brooks's story about professional late bloomers, surprised me. "A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to start a successful company as one who is 30."

My favorite video of the day. The proper way to repurpose an old bus for summer.