Technology

Discover the best articles, videos, and resources on the tech industry, tech innovation and implications of technological advancements from around the web. Follow along on Refind to get the most relevant new links picked for you.
9 Best Articles in 2021
MIT Technology Review
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2020MIT Technology Review
~14 min read · 2020-02-26 ·  MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2020 outlines scientific discoveries, available now or in the very near future, that could most profoundly change people’s lives. Included this year: unhackable internet service; individual designer drugs; the proliferation of digital currency; anti-aging treatments; AI molecule searches for better medicines; satellite constellations boosting remote internet access; new uses for quantum computers, tiny, powerful AI apps for phones; bolstering Census privacy; and more accurate climate change forecasts. 
technology
future
medium.com
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist — Mediummedium.com
~16 min read · From 2016 · When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.
technology
digital life
startups
OpenAI
DALL·E: Creating Images from TextOpenAI
20+ min read · Jan 5th · We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
artificial intelligence
technology
language
Fast Company
All the things COVID-19 will change forever, according to 30 top expertsFast Company
~11 min read · 2020-04-20 ·  The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly changed how the world does business. Work shifted, where possible, into people’s homes and online in accordance with social distancing guidelines. As a result, businesses’ longstanding resistance to remote employees dissolved, and the lines between work and family life, long blurred, blended overnight. Even when life returns to some form of normal, some of these changes will stick, according to tech journalist Mark Sullivan's interviews with CEOs and business leaders from a cross-section of industries. 
technology
business
venture capital
Cloudflare
Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the InternetCloudflare
Oct 4th · Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1.  But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.
technology
social media
networking
Most highlighted
So now, because Facebook and their sites are so big, we have DNS resolvers worldwide handling 30x more queries than usual and potentially causing latency and timeout issues to other platforms.
The Verge
NFTs, explainedThe Verge
8 min read · Mar 3rd
art
digital life
technology
Most highlighted
A lot of the conversation is about NFTs as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art.
A fool and their money are soon parted, I guess?
Nike has patented a method to verify sneakers’ authenticity using an NFT system, which it calls CryptoKicks.
MIT Technology Review
He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addictionMIT Technology Review
20+ min read · Mar 11th · Three years ago, the company began building "responsible AI." This is the story of how it failed.
facebook
technology
social media
Most highlighted
the fraction of people who logged in to Facebook six of the previous seven days. L6/7 is just one of myriad ways in which Facebook has measured “engagement”
It found that there was indeed a correlation, and that reducing polarization would mean taking a hit on engagement.
The researcher’s team also found that users with a tendency to post or engage with melancholy content—a possible sign of depression—could easily spiral into consuming increasingly negative material that risked further worsening their mental health. The team proposed tweaking the content-ranking models for these users to stop maximizing engagement alone, so they would be shown less of the depressing stuff.
numinous.productions
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?numinous.productions
From 2019
media
technology
better thinking
Most highlighted
Unfortunately, those steps are poorly supported by existing media.For more on this argument, see Andy Matuschak, Why books don’t work (2019).
Make sure the early questions in a mnemonic essay are trivial: it helps many users realize they aren't paying enough attention as they read:
A small minority of the population does not possess a mind's eye, and so cannot mentally visualize. This condition is known as aphantasia
The New York Times
Designed to Deceive: Do These People Look Real to You?The New York Times
4 min read · 2020-11-21 · The people in this story may look familiar, like ones you’ve seen on Facebook or Twitter or Tinder. But they don’t exist. They were born from the mind of a computer, and the technology behind them is…
deepfakes
technology
social media
New this week
I Was Hacked. The Spyware Used Against Me Makes Us All Vulnerable.
The New York Times
Why we place too much trust in machines
BBC Future
The Coming Age for Tech x Bio: The ‘Industrial Bio Complex’
a16z
Emerging technology: 10 years of top tech trends and how they've changed the world
World Economic Forum
The Metaverse Is About to Change Everything
VANITY FAIR
Clarifai moves beyond computer vision to manage companies’ unstructured data
TechCrunch
The Metaverse Is Bad
The Atlantic
Maybe losing the AI race to China isn’t such a bad idea
Vox
How To Recognize When Tech Is Leading Us Down a ‘Slippery Slope’
OneZero
Introducing raspberrypi.com
Raspberry Pi
Technology-driven growth in China: An interview with Jiang Xing
McKinsey & Company
Top 10 Digital Transformation Trends For 2022
Forbes
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World Economic Forum
These are the top 10 tech trends that will shape the coming decade, according to McKinseyWorld Economic Forum
6 min read · Oct 13th · Technological progress is advancing more rapidly than ever. To survive – and thrive – businesses must swiftly find their feet in this new landscape.
technology
trends
Most highlighted
Understanding the impact they will have on organizations and on the people whose jobs will be affected, could be key to avoiding any of the worst downsides of the disruption that may follow.
1. Process automation and virtualization
The Atlantic
Is Slack Good for Anyone?The Atlantic
~20 min read · Oct 12th · The software made it easier to crack jokes and easier to stir up trouble. Employees love it. Bosses don’t.
slack
future of work
remote work
Most highlighted
Slack gave every company a message board. Now those that want to hold on to their authority are hiring moderators.
On Slack, everyone has the same size megaphone, regardless of hierarchy or chain of command.
Slack is work software that insinuated itself into our lives precisely by feeling unlike work software.
a16z
An Agenda for the Future of the Interneta16z
2 min read · Oct 13th · Today, we’re excited to announce the release of How to Win the Future, a policy agenda for the third generation of the internet. It will be a living document housed in our new web3 policy hub…
technology
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it’s time to begin. It’s time to build a better internet.
The Atlantic
The Metaverse Is BadThe Atlantic
5 min read · Oct 21st · It is not a world in a headset but a fantasy of power.
technology
society
Most highlighted
In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair.
In the simplest explanation, the metaverse is just a sexy, aspirational name for some kind of virtual or augmented-reality play.
What better way to go meta on going meta than to rename the company Meta?
Stratechery
The Death and Birth of Technological RevolutionsStratechery
~15 min read · Oct 12th · Carlota Perez documents technological revolutions, and thinks we’re in the middle of the current one; what, though, if we are nearing its maturation? Is crypto next?
technology
TIME
Facebook Will Not Fix ItselfTIME
6 min read · Oct 7th · Tech giants behave as unelected governments. Do we have the courage to stop them?
social media
facebook
technology
WIRED
Facebook's Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford'sWIRED
3 min read · Oct 14th · Before there was Big Tech, there were auto companies that prioritized profits over safety—until a leaked memo made it clear regulation was the only cure.
business
history
facebook
Most highlighted
At a certain point in this historical cycle, the harms being inflicted rise to the level of a social or political crisis.
Executives downplayed the scale of the public safety crisis and often claimed to be unaware of the extent of their products’ harms to consumers.
WIRED UK
We need to talk about Apple’s surveillance empireWIRED UK
3 min read · Oct 11th · Apple has taken a public stand on privacy, curtailing data abuses by apps and declaring it doesn’t exploit its users’ information. But it has also created comprehensive new ways to track us
apple
privacy
technology
Most highlighted
f we want to keep our democracies in the digital age, we need to set limits on what gets tracked. 
Many of Apple’s latest features are about enhancing surveillance – even if Apple would never call them that.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Deep learning helps predict traffic crashes before they happenMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4 min read · Oct 13th · A deep learning model predicts high-resolution automobile crash risk maps that describe the expected number of crashes and identify high-risk areas. The work was led by scientists from MIT’s Computer…
technology
Most highlighted
For many of our road-related advancements — GPS lets us fire fewer neurons thanks to map apps, cameras alert us to potentially costly scrapes and scratches, and electric autonomous cars have lower fuel costs — our safety measures haven’t quite caught up
We still rely on a steady diet of traffic signals, trust, and the steel surrounding us to safely get from point A to point B. 
If people can use the risk map to identify potentially high-risk road segments, they can take action in advance to reduce the risk of trips they take
WIRED
Americans Need a Bill of Rights for an AI-Powered WorldWIRED
3 min read · Oct 8th · The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is developing principles to guard against powerful technologies—with input from the public.
technology
artificial intelligence
Technology

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