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While it may seem like the tech industry is in the midst of a correction, there are actually deeper issues at play. The fact that productivity in the US is also falling is worth noting, and suggests that what’s happening in tech could mean something much deeper is wrong.
The tech economy has yet to live up to its promise. Earlier bursts of technology changed lives: Indoor plumbing is pretty amazing, and so was electricity, the power loom and the telegraph! These not only transformed the human experience, increased living standards and freed us from hard labor, they brought unprecedented gains in productivity and wealth.
Still, I was optimistic — perhaps we just didn’t know how to fully take advantage of these tech innovations. Then the pandemic came and suddenly tech seemed to revolutionise the human experience the same way industrialisation did. Instead of mass-produced cloth and entertainment (from record players, television and radio), we could scale human interaction in ways that seemed equally momentous. It turned out you could have meetings, attend a fitness class and shop for pretty much anything from the comfort of your home. Read more...
In a bold move, energy-guzzling tech titans such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are pressing energy regulators and lawmakers for favorable power grid policies that speed procurement of clean power.
The companies, which dominate a tech industry powered by global data center operations, have entered a debate once controlled by electric utilities and policy wonks well-versed in a century-old system of producing and delivering power. They have staffed up with energy experts and become a regular presence and sponsors of industry panels and meetings.
The major power consumers view the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s grid policies as key to accelerating the rollout of clean energy spurred by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the $369 billion climate-and-tax bill passed by Democrats. Their lobbying has occasionally clashed with regulated electric utilities, which operate the distribution grid and dominate transmission line-building.
The new law “is going to have a large impact on our ability to meet the climate pledge,” Blair Anderson, director of public policy for Amazon, said in an interview. “As a result, we—and I think you see it from some of the other larger corporate procurers—are stepping up and realising that we should have a voice in that process as well. It makes sense for us to become more engaged at FERC.” Read more...
Catanzaro's claim is made by possible by DLSS 3, the latest version of Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). It combines AI-powered image upscaling with a new feature exclusive to DLSS 3: optical multiframe generation. Sequential frames are combined with an optical flow field used to predict changes between frames. DLSS 3 then slots unique, AI-generated frames between traditionally rendered frames.
"When you're playing with DLSS super resolution on performance mode in 4K, seven out of every eight pixels are being run through a neural network," says Catanzaro. "I think that's one of the reasons why you see such a great speedup. In that mode, in games that are GPU-heavy like Portal RTX […], seven out of every eight pixels are being generated by AI, and as a result we're 530 percent faster."
This example, which references testing by the 3D graphics publication and YouTube channel Digital Foundry, is a best-case scenario. But results in other tests remain impressive. Most show DLSS 3 delivering a two- to three-times performance gain over purely traditional rendering at 4K resolution. And while Nvidia leads the pack, it has competitors. Intel offers XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), an AI-powered upscaler. AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics architecture includes a pair of AI accelerators in each compute unit, though it’s yet unclear how the company will use them. Read more...
The promise of Web3 storage is tantalizing: decentralized, cryptographic-secured data that's available on demand and in real time.
But there are several hurdles to overcome before this dream can become a reality.
First, dStorage faces the same challenge as any other tech innovation: people need to adopt it. However, the first issue holding back dStorage is cryptocurrency. Every business operates with fiat currency, and its operations are managed and regulated in those terms. Cryptocurrencies cannot be spent in the real world and need exchanging into fiat currencies – at rates that can fluctuate wildly. Cryptocurrencies have proliferated like wildfire. They are not regulated by any institutions and can be promoted and operated by fraudsters, incompetents, and dupes.
Second, the need for blockchain processing is another thing that will hold Web3 storage back. This distributed ledger idea is computationally intensive and time-consuming. Traditional storage does not bear this computational burden.
Third friction point for Web3 storage is electricity consumption. If I store data on-premises then it flows to, for example, a storage array through its controllers down to the drives. A Web3 storage I/O has to be sharded; then pieces flow to hundreds of nodes over a potentially wide area network with blockchain transactions per node.
Fourth, Web3 storage is slower than Web2 storage. It has no block access protocol and does not typically support SSDs for data storage, although NVMe SSDs are often recommended for blockchain processing use by the individual storage capacity providers.
The fifth point concerns access protocol limitations. You get file and sometimes S3 access though a wide area network. There is no block access and no Fibre Channel or InfiniBand access. NFS or CIFS or other file system protocols may well not be supported on any particular Web3 system. Applications using them would need to be modified to use Web3 storage. Read more...
We've all been there. You're on LinkedIn, and you're trying to grow your personal brand. But there are so many things to do, so many people to connect with and engage with and follow up with, and it's all just… exhausting.
You want to be strategic about what you're doing, but at the same time, you don't have time to waste on things that don't work—and you need a way to know what will work and what won't. You want something that will help you get ahead of the competition, not just keep up with them.
And we understand. That's why we created Taplio: an AI-powered tool that helps you grow your personal brand on LinkedIn by combining great content with efficient relationship building. It lets you:
✔️ Find inspiration for new posts
📝 Define and fill up your content schedule in a few clicks
💬 Engage efficiently with the people you want to build a relationship with
📈 And understand what’s working and what isn’t with simple, actionable analytics
⏳ Save time and energy to focus on other important aspects of your business and much more.. Read more...
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