Hello folks!
I think I may start sending a part of the Thursday issue to the free subscribers. Thursday is a usually a good day for tech news and in the future I might even use it to recap the big stories of the week.
For those of you paying for the newsletter today’s a big one! I thought yesterday’s was hard to pin down but I had no idea. I have waded through hundreds of stories and these are the ones I think are important today, and why.
Enjoy!
Tom
"Meta’s Threads app has almost 100 million users, says Mark Zuckerberg - The Verge"
"Meta’s Reality Labs loses $3.7 billion in third quarter"
"Meta - Meta Reports Third Quarter 2023 Results"
So Threads is not going unused. Its demise was just as exaggerated as its domination was at the beginning. Not a shocker. And Meta's reality labs bleeding cash is something Meta is fine with. It wants to spend on that category until the category takes off. So it's gambling the VR/AR category will take off, but that's starting to look like a better gamble, with Apple joining next year. And remember the Quest 3 is just now selling, so this earnings report doesn't reflect its success yet.
The thing I always pay attention to in Meta's earnings is number of users. Sadly they now Lump WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook all together, so the success of one can fuzz out the demise of one of the others. Generally users rose 5-7% depending on how you count them which is good for Meta. But I'm really curious how that's divvied up. I would guess slight decline for Facebook, and rises for Instagram and WhatsApp.
"New Training Method Helps AI Generalize like People Do - Scientific American"
If I understand this right, instead of training it to mimic text, it trained it to mimic reasoning. Which is a smaller dataset but had better results. I may be oversimplifying but essentially this is a big leap forward toward generalized intelligence. It’s *not* self-awareness, just better mimicking. But at some point mimicking will get so good the question of whether it’s mimicry will no longer be meaningful. This is university research published in Nature, so very interesting to see who applies it where. I feel like this one will be under-reported.
"Pro-Russia hackers target inboxes with 0-day in webmail app used by millions | Ars Technica"
Here is the important things to know with this story.
- If you use Roundcube to check your email on the web, or administer a server, make sure you have the patch.
Here's the interesting thing.
A specially crafted email could take advantage of a bug so all you did was load the email and you got infected. It's a cross-set scripting bug previously unknown in Roundcube's software. Attackers started exploiting it October 11th and Roundcube issued a patch October 14th. Attackers got access to folders and emails in the account.
Patchy patch patch!
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