Techmeme
March 31, 2021, 2:30 PM

Top News

Nick Clegg:
Nick Clegg defends Facebook, saying it is not in the company's interest, financially or reputationally, to push users towards ever more extreme content  —  In a recent article for The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance compared Facebook to a Doomsday Machine: “a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life.”
Sami Fathi / MacRumors:
Josh Taylor / The Guardian:
Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:
Apple says it is introducing two new Siri voices for English speakers and eliminating the default female voice selection, as part of iOS 14.5 beta 6  —  Apple is adding two new voices to Siri's English offerings, and eliminating the default ‘female voice’ selection in the latest beta version of iOS.
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Biden announces $2T American Jobs Plan focused on improving US infrastructure, with $100B allocated for high-speed broadband access over eight years  —  It sets aside $100 billion for the effort  —  President Biden plans to announce a sweeping infrastructure plan Wednesday that includes $100 billion …
Financial Times:
Deliveroo closed down 26% in its LSE debut, after pricing shares at £3.90, valuing it at £5.2B; the poor debut is likely due to labor practice issues  —  Fall comes after food delivery company priced its shares at bottom end of range  —  Deliveroo's shares plunged 26 per cent …
Ken Klippenstein / The Intercept:
Leaked doc sheds light on “Veritas”, an Amazon FC Ambassador program conceived in 2018 that sought to train employees to defend Amazon and Bezos on social media  —  Amazon's small Twitter army of “ambassadors” was quietly conceived in 2018 under the codename “Veritas,” …
Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch:
Apple leads $50M Series B in music distributor UnitedMasters, with a16z and Alphabet participating; UnitedMasters enters a strategic partnership with Apple  —  Independent music distribution platform and tool factory UnitedMasters has raised a $50M series B round led by Apple.
Cade Metz / New York Times:
Turing Award goes to Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho for their work on compilers, which underpin computer programming languages  —  Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho developed many of the fundamental concepts that researchers use when they build new software.  —  When Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman met …
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Sponsor of Arizona's HB2005 bill, which allows alternative payment systems in app stores, says it won't get a hearing this year after being pulled last week  —  Arizona House Bill 2005, a hotly contested piece of legislation that would have imposed developer-friendly changes to Apple …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn confirms it's working on a Clubhouse rival and will begin beta testing soon, but doesn't have an exact timeframe for its launch  —  Clubhouse's list of competitors is growing.  LinkedIn has now confirmed it's also testing a social audio experience in its app which would allow creators …
Arjun Kharpal / CNBC:
Huawei reports 2020 revenue of $136.7B, up 3.8% YoY but slower than the 19%+ growth it saw in 2019, and net profit of $9.9B, up 3.2% YoY  —  - Huawei's revenue for 2020 totaled 891.4 billion yuan ($136.7 billion), a 3.8% year-on-year rise in yuan terms.  That was slower than the more than 19% revenue growth Huawei saw in 2019.
Emily Feng / NPR:
How Wuhan's HSMC created an unusable chip factory, becoming one of six multibillion-dollar Chinese chip project failures in the last two years  —  WUHAN, China — In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned two major Chinese telecom firms, temporarily cutting them off from a vital supply of semiconductor chips …
Lawrence Weru / Slate:
The rise of Clubhouse and other audio-only social networks marginalizes people with speech impediments like stuttering  —  It's before sunrise and I'm doing some accounting while listening to conversations on Clubhouse.  On the app, people can schedule and host audio chat rooms …
Ted Chiang / New Yorker:
For the foreseeable future, technological innovation will be driven by humans, not self-improving AI systems, so there won't be a “singularity”  —  We fear and yearn for “the singularity.”  But it will probably never come.  —  In the eleventh century, St. Anselm of Canterbury proposed …
Peter Rubin / Wired:
A reflection on Facebook's VR efforts as the Oculus Rift turns five: an astonishing number of problems have been solved but many big challenges remain  —  A lot's happened since Facebook's first headset brought virtual reality to the masses.  Facebook might have been a first mover, but it also wants to be the last one.
Eric Geller / Politico:
Interviews with 15 people show CISA is underfunded, short on talent, outmatched by adversaries, and overwhelmed by the fallout from two massive cyberattacks  —  The agency that protects the U.S. from hackers is hobbled by funding woes, a talent shortage and growing pains that are jeopardizing …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Source: Apple is planning to announce a mixed reality headset “sometime” in the next several months, possibly at an in-person event  —  Hi everyone—it's Mark.  On Tuesday, Apple Inc. announced what will be at least its fifth virtual product launch in a row and one of its most important events …
Politico:
Sources: suspected Russian hackers stole thousands of State Department officials' emails last year; the classified network doesn't appear to have been accessed  —  Suspected Russian hackers stole thousands of State Department officials' emails last year, according to two Congressional sources familiar …
Molly Fischer / The Cut:
A look at the downsides of virtual therapy apps like Talkspace and BetterHelp, which are booming amid high demand but seem to promise more than they can deliver  —  The summer of 2020, recalls Hillary Schieve, was hard.  The pandemic was bearing down across the country …
Caitlin McCabe / Wall Street Journal:

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Zoho Books is now ICAEW accredited  —  Zoho Books, an end-to-end accounting solution trusted by thousands of businesses and finance professionals worldwide, is now officially accredited by the Institute …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
A Sober Conversation About AI Existential Risk — With Nate Soares
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:30 PM ET, March 31, 2021.

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.

More News

Earlier Picks

Catalin Cimpanu / The Record:
Reed Albergotti / Washington Post: