Technology News

Steve Ballmer's tenure as Microsoft's CEO is often overshadowed by the company's resurgence under Satya Nadella. However, a closer look reveals that Ballmer laid crucial groundwork, making significant long-term investments and strategically positioning Microsoft for future success despite facing considerable criticism at the time. Was the narrative of a failing Microsoft under Ballmer simply inaccurate?

About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a word guessing game based on word clues, a teammate suggested that, based on the physical layout of the words that had been selected, most of the possibilities we were considering would result in patterns that were "too

There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in the LLM and generative AI case when compared to "classical" bugs in cases where there's a clear bug. In particular, if you look at forums or other discussions with lay people, people frequently deny that a model which produces output that's sort of the opposite of what the user asked for is even a bu

A decade after the FTC decided against pursuing antitrust action against Google, newly released internal memos paint a concerning picture. The documents suggest a significant disconnect between FTC economists' understanding of the tech industry and the realities on the ground, potentially influencing a pivotal regulatory decision.

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't usable for people with slow internet, but the exponential increase in bandwidth (Nielsen suggests this is 50% per year for high-end connections) has outpaced web bloat for typical sites, m

The conventional wisdom is that tech giants are best equipped to combat spam, fraud, and harmful content due to their vast resources. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that these platforms often struggle more than smaller entities, highlighting the diseconomies of scale when it comes to content moderation and user support.

On large platforms, it's impossible to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on. David Turner made a simple game to illustrate how difficult this is even in a trivial case, No Vehicles in the Park. If you haven't played it yet, I recommend playing it now before continuing to read this document. The idea behind the site is that it's very difficult to get people to agree on what moderation rules should apply to a platform. Even if you take a muc

This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. After seeing some comments about this report, I read five stories on this report and then skimmed the report and my feeling is that the authors of four of the stories probably didn't read the report, and that people wh

Despite the rise of blogs, newsletters, and in-depth articles, platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram continue to thrive. This isn't just about shorter attention spans; it's a complex interplay of engagement, community, ease of creation, and monetization that keeps creators and consumers flocking to microblogging and video platforms.

Are search results getting worse? One tech expert puts Google, Bing, and alternative search engines to the test, alongside ChatGPT, to uncover the truth about search quality in the age of SEO farms and AI-generated content. The findings reveal a landscape rife with scams, misleading information, and the prioritization of revenue over relevance.