Sources: e-commerce startup OpenStore, co-founded by Keith Rabois, is raising a $15M Series C at a valuation of just $50M, down from $970M in September 2022
E-commerce startup OpenStore is slashing its valuation from nearly $1 billion to just $50 million in a new round of funding … Bluesky: @kevinmarks.com . X: @pitdesi and @sri_batchu Bluesky: Kevin Mark...
How Spotify used its Perfect Fit Content program to rig its system against musicians, filling popular playlists with “ghost artists” to cut its royalty payouts
here's what's going on Nick Heer / Pixel Envy : ‘Ghosts’ of Spotify — Liz Pelly, Harpers: … Reading this article made me feel quite sad. Bluesky: @nanobii.com : the spotify “fake artist” issue appar...
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is testing making posts from Threads accounts “available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol”
I've been as big a Facebook critic as anybody, but this is a good thing. And reflects that we're entering a new era of the open web, with a chance for things to be more interesting again. Brian Penny...
A profile of Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington who co-wrote a paper in 2020 to illustrate what LLMs can and cannot do
Nobody likes an I-told-you-so. But before Microsoft's Bing started cranking out creepy love letters; before Meta's Galactica spewed racist rants … Mastodon: @ben@werd.social , @emilymbender@dair … , ...
Microsoft appears to have updated the new Bing to end chats following prompts mentioning “feelings” or “Sydney”, after adding chat restrictions on February 17
but the human response is way scarier Russell Kidson / gHacks Technology News : The Problem of Other Minds: Assessing the Sentience of Chatbots like Bing Eric Hal Schwartz / Voicebot.ai : Microsoft Re...
Experts say open sourcing Twitter's algorithm will not increase transparency because recommendation engines are complex and use an immense fire hose of data
Conservatives have long claimed discrimination by the social network, but there's no one algorithm that could prove it, researchers say Tweets: @chrismessina , @kevinmarks , @peterwsinger , @nbashaw ,...
Hotel and flight search service Hipmunk says it's shutting down on January 23, over three years after SAP Concur acquired it
no mean feat — but nobody beat Hipmunk for presenting flight information in a really useful graphical way that emphasized flight times and durations. Online travel booking remains slow, unpleasant, an...
Twitter is funding bluesky, an independent effort to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media, with the goal of Twitter being a client of it
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey outlines … Shoshana Wodinsky / Adweek : Twitter Will Fund the Development of a Decentralized Social Media Standard Rob Price / Business Insider : Twitter is trying to build a n...
Inside the almost-adult, insular lives of ambitious teenagers flooding into Silicon Valley to join tech startups
The Real Teens of Silicon Valley … “Do you know Zach Latta?” asked Fouad Matin, 19, on the roof of San Francisco's unofficial tech teenager headquarters one recent night. Tweets: @calebgarling , @prof...