Techmeme
July 19, 2020, 6:25 AM

Top News

Delian Asparouhov / Operators & Delian's Ramblings:
Despite its limitations, GPT-3, OpenAI's text-generating AI, excels at producing follow-on thoughts to input text, and could thus succeed as a “writing buddy”  —  OpenAI, an AI research foundation started by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and a few other leaders in ML …
Shaun Nichols / The Register:
Researchers say seven Hong Kong-based “no log” VPNs have left 1TB+ of user logs and personally identifiable info exposed on the internet  —  Maybe it was the old Lionel Hutz play: 'No-logging VPN?  I meant, no!  Logging VPN!'  —  BIO EMAIL TWITTER
Nikhil Basu Trivedi / next big thing:
A look at the bifurcation of the VC industry between agglomerators, who invest at every stage and across every sector, and specialists, who focus on one  —  Welcome to issue #10 of next big thing.  —  On one side of the venture capital industry are the agglomerator firms.
More: Protocol
Kari Soo Lindberg / Bloomberg:
Trump campaign urges supporters to sign a petition to ban TikTok, saying TikTok has been caught “red handed by monitoring what is on your phone's Clipboard”  —  - Ads are targeting supporters in battleground election states  — Teens on TikTok signed up to Trump rally with no plans to go
Niall Firth / MIT Technology Review:
Critics contend that predictive policing algorithms need to be dismantled due to biased training data, even as advocates say that algorithms can be made fair  —  Lack of transparency and biased training data mean these tools are not fit for purpose.  If we can't fix them, we should ditch them.
Twitter:
Twitter provides an overview of what it knows about Wednesday's hack so far: how it happened, what the attackers accessed, how it reacted, and the next steps  —  As we've been informing via the @TwitterSupport account, on Wednesday, July 15, 2020, we detected a security incident at Twitter and took immediate action.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
New York Times:
South China Morning Post:
CloudMinds CEO, a Chinese engineer who started the cloud-based robotics company in SV, says he will not consider US listing after sanctions hurt the business  —  CloudMinds lost almost 75 per cent of orders in the US and cut 80 per cent of its US workforce after Washington imposed sanctions …
Jennifer Miller / New York Times:
A look at startups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to online forums for grieving virtually, amid a surge in interest during the pandemic  —  The coronavirus pandemic has drawn new business to start-ups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to a final tweet.
Erin Griffith / New York Times:
Current and former employees provide an inside look at Airbnb amid layoffs, as its warm and fuzzy office culture met with the business realities of a pandemic  —  What happens when a kumbaya office culture meets the business realities of a pandemic?  —  SAN FRANCISCO — On May 5 …

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