I, Cringely

Last week somebody rebuilt a working website using a swarm of cheap AI agents bossed around by a smarter one, and the whole thing cost about eight dollars - sandwich and a coffee. But the part that lit up my corner of the internet wasn't the website. It was that the agents caught their own lies. One of them went out and collected a couple hundred quotes for the site and reported back that every last one was verified, checked, gold. Another agent - a suspicious little thing that had been told to ignore the first one's homework and redo it from scratch - went and compared each quote against the actual source. More than a dozen were wrong. Invented. Stitched together from real fragments [...]The post The Auditor's Opinion first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

There's a lot of excited arithmetic going around about artificial intelligence. A trillion-dollar valuation here, a hundred-billion-dollar funding round there, the price of a model quoted like the budget of a moon mission. I've been writing this column long enough - since the Reagan administration, if you want to make me feel old about it - to have learned one durable thing about computing: the number everybody is staring at is almost never where the money ends up. Let me tell you about two companies that figured that out early. The first is ARM. If you're reading this on a phone, there's an ARM design inside it. There's one in the tablet on your nightstand, the car in your driveway, probably the watch on your [...]The post ARM Never Made a Chip. Dolby Never Built a Speaker. first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

How GenAI is not yet ready for law In 2023, a New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a brief in a routine personal-injury case against an airline. The brief cited a half-dozen helpful precedents. The precedents did not exist. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT to find supporting cases, and ChatGPT - being a machine that produces plausible language rather than true statements - invented them, names and citations and quotations and all, then cheerfully assured him they were real when he asked. The legal world treated Mata v. Avianca as a freak show: a cautionary tale about one careless lawyer. An embarrassing one-off. It was not a one-off. It was the first crack in a dam. By the end of 2025, a researcher in Paris [...]The post The Cases That Don't Exist first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

WWDC answered whether your assistant is private. It never answered whether it's telling the truth - and Apple just gave it hands. The smartest thing I've read about Apple's WWDC didn't come from Apple. It came from an analyst named Nate B. Jones, who watched the same keynote everyone else did and noticed that the real story wasn't whether Siri had finally gotten smart. The real story, he argued, is a land grab over what he calls the trusted action surface - the place where AI actually meets your work, touches your apps, and is handed permission to do something. There are two great bottlenecks in AI, he points out: raw compute, which is Jensen Huang's kingdom, and the trusted surface where intelligence becomes useful, [...]The post Apple Gave Siri Hands first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Yesterday I told you what 2Brains is, and how it separates the saying from the knowing. Today, the part that ought to worry some very large companies: what all of it is worth if we're right. Wall Street is pricing the AI data-center buildout at something like $1.7 trillion by 2030. Almost all of that spend assumes one particular shape: vast halls of graphics chips answering questions by guessing, one likely word at a time. So ask the heretical question - how many of those questions" are questions at all? How many are lookups? What's our refund policy? What was Q3 revenue in the Ohio region? Is this patient allergic to penicillin? Those aren't creative prompts. They're retrievals, and an ordinary processor has answered retrievals [...]The post The Market Behind the Wall first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

For two months this column has been describing an architecture. Here's the part I kept in the footnotes: I've been building it. I owe you a confession, and then I owe you a demonstration. The confession first. For weeks I've written about why the machines can't tell truth from plausibility - why detection isn't a strategy, why fluency isn't fidelity, why the only honest path is to separate the saying from the knowing and import truth from somewhere you can actually check. I've signed each of those columns with a one-line note that I co-founded a company built on this conviction." That little disclosure has been doing a lot of quiet work. These columns were not the musings of a neutral observer. They were the [...]The post Two Brains first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Why the machines hallucinate, why they have no worldview, and why truth has to come from somewhere else. I'm going to say something that sounds like an insult and is meant as a description: large language models (all of them) hav never known a true thing. Not once. It doesn't know things at all. It is extraordinarily good at sounding like it does, which is a different skill, and most of our present confusion comes from mistaking the second for the first. Here is what a language model actually does. It has read an enormous amount of text, and from that text it has learned, with real brilliance, what tends to come next. Give it some words and it predicts the words likely to follow. [...]The post GenAI is Fluent in Everything, but Faithful in Nothing first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Every few weeks, someone announces a tool that detects AI hallucinations. A startup, a research lab, a hyperscaler bolting a trust layer" onto its chatbot. The release uses the word guardrails." Everyone nods. Another brick in the road to safe, reliable AI. I want to argue that we are cheering for the wrong thing - that hallucination detection, however clever, cannot be the strategy. It can be a backstop. It can be a monitor. It cannot be the plan. And the reason is older than computing. Start with the trap at the center of the whole idea. To catch a hallucination, your detector has to know the right answer. Sit with what that means. The original model produced a confident falsehood because it did not [...]The post Detection Is Not a Strategy first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Why the next real breakthrough in AI isn't a bigger brain - it's a machine that can admit ignorance. A reader caught me out. Last column I argued that the great AI buildout - the hundreds of billions pouring into data centers and the GPUs that fill them - is aimed at the wrong layer. We are spending as if the bottleneck were the size of the model's brain, when the real bottleneck is getting the right information in front of it. Cheap retrieval, I said, not expensive cognition. A reader replied, pointing out the name Jevons. In 1865, a young English economist named William Stanley Jevons noticed something strange about coal. As steam engines got more efficient - as they wrung more work out [...]The post Knowing What You Don't Know first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I promised to show you why the whole industry's answer to its own problem - buy a bigger brain - is the most expensive mistake in the history of computing. To do that I have to take you back to 1999, because I was there, and if you're old enough to be reading me, maybe you were too. And I wasn't only watching. In 1999 I put $10,000 into a young company called E-Loan, run by a founder named Chris Larsen. After the IPO I cashed out for $400,000 and bought a house. Chris kept playing - E-Loan to Prosper to Ripple - and did rather better than a house; he's a crypto billionaire now. (Chris, if you're reading this: we should talk.) Those are [...]The post The Most Expensive Mistake in the History of Computing first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Last time I told you the AI industry is paying a tax it doesn't have to pay - that a great deal of what we grandly call AI" is really just looking things up, and we've chosen to do that looking-up on the most expensive silicon ever manufactured. A number of you wrote to say I was overstating it. Surely, you said, the people setting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire know something I don't. So this week I won't argue with you. I'll let one of the largest companies in enterprise software argue with you instead - because it already has, in a research paper it published itself and seems to have hoped you wouldn't read too closely. The company is Salesforce. [...]The post The Thirty Percent Confession first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

There is a lawsuit grinding through a federal court in Minnesota that every insurance executive in America should be reading instead of their quarterly AI roadmap. The case is Estate of Lokken v. UnitedHealth Group. It was filed in late 2023 by the families of two deceased Medicare Advantage members, and it alleges that UnitedHealthcare used an artificial-intelligence tool called nH Predict to decide how much post-acute care its members were entitled to - and that the tool was wrong roughly nine times out of ten, a figure the plaintiffs draw from how often its denials were reversed on appeal. UnitedHealth denies that the tool makes coverage decisions at all; it calls nH Predict a guide" and says the real decisions are made by clinicians [...]The post The Lying Machine first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

The Tax You're Paying on a Chip You Never Bought I live in Virginia, which means I have a front-row seat to the strangest tax increase in modern American life. Nobody voted for it. It isn't on any ballot. But it's showing up on the electric bills of people who have never typed a prompt into a chatbot and wouldn't know a GPU from a garden hose. In January, Consumer Reports profiled a man in Manassas who had lived in the same house for nearly forty years and opened an electricity bill for $281 - roughly triple what he'd paid the month before. He is not a heavy user. He did not buy a data center. He simply happens to live near Data Center Alley," [...]The post The NVIDIA Tax first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

A while back I asked in this space what would happen if Dario Amodei was wrong. I want to come back to that, because I think the question matters more now than it did then, and for a reason that has nothing to do with whether I like Dario or his company. I do, for the record. That's not the point. The point is a document. In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism - or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open - was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of [...]The post The Permission Slip first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I owe you all an explanation of where I have been. The story starts in 2022 when ChatGPT came out and everyone decided to get rich. I know I did. So, I bullied my dear friend - a legendary lawyer - into building a legal writing tool. Within a week we knew our mission was close to impossible because of failures in GenAI. There were imperfect products we could have sold but didn't - dooming ourselves instead to a three-year product cycle to defeat the nightmare called LLM hallucinations. I was the chief architect, in over my head despite starting at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978. Then last July I had a heart attack and a stroke followed by 10 weeks in [...]The post Where the heck have I been all this time? first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I'm Writing Again For those of you who are still here - and given how long it's been, still here" is a real act of patience - thank you. I haven't written a column since 2022. Just like everyone else, I've been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains (why it wasn't 3Brains I'll never know) that I will explain to you shortly. The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it's not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me. Writing is part of how I think; not writing for three years has felt like holding my breath. So I'm back. Not on a fixed [...]The post I'm writing again... first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I've been following the press and social media coverage of Apple's pricey new Vision Pro Augmented Reality headset, which now totals hundreds of stories and thousands of comments and I've noticed one idea missing from all of them: what would Steve (Jobs) say? Steve would call the Vision Pro a hobby," just as he did with the original Apple TV. You know I'm correct about this. And the fact that Apple hasn't gone for the H-word and no other writers are suggesting it is the topic of this column, not the Vision Pro, itself. It would appear that nobody at Apple has the balls to call the Vision Pro a hobby, which is to say it is not expected to make a profit for the [...]The post Apple's Vision Pro headset is a hobby. Why won't Tim Cook say that? first appeared on I, Cringely.

Sorry I've been away: time flies when you are not having fun. But now I'm back. Moore's Law, which began with a random observation by the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that transistor densities on silicon substrates were doubling every 18 months, has over the intervening 60+ years been both borne-out yet also changed from a lithography technical feature to an economic law. It's getting harder to etch ever-thinner lines, so we've taken as a culture to emphasizing the cost part of Moore's Law (chips drop in price by 50 percent on an area basis (dollars per acre of silicon) every 18 months). We can accomplish this economic effect through a variety of techniques including multiple cores, System-On-Chip design, and unified memory - anything to [...]The post AI and Moore's Law: It's the Chips, Stupid first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT's letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you'd never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he's a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren't among them. The key problem here has to do with Machine Learning. ChatGPT's language model [...]The post If you want to reduce ChatGPT mediocrity, do it promptly first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 - 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I'd buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We're right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I'm here to tell you that the current situation - despite the news coverage - is no big deal. [...]The post What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF??? first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Last week there was a press release you might easily have missed. A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs. Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class. Big deal, it's Y Combinator Junior, right? Wrong. It's Y Combinatoron steroids. This second-generation YC has been released in the wild where it will replicate and grow unconstrained. Expect to see more deals like this one. A Distributed Autonomous Organization [...]The post Paul Graham's Legacy first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I took the summer off to move with my family from California to Virginia, thus escaping the inevitable fires of doom. I deliberately left my Apple/Globalstar column up so it would be still staring at readers when Apple made its eventual announcement, which was yesterday. That was a gutsy move on my part, but clearly I was correct. Today’s column — my first from our new home in Virginia — looks at specifics of the Apple satellite announcement, placing it in a more informed context. Apple spent only five out of 65 minutes in yesterday’s product announcements talking about satellites, yet the title of the event — Far Out — and the starry logo suggest those were very important minutes to Apple. The satellite part […]The post What yesterday’s Apple satellite announcement really means first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Last summer, a couple weeks before the iPhone 13 announcement, Chinese market analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote that the iPhone 13 would include satellite communication capability. Huh? This was a bolt from the blue. No other Apple analysts were writing about satellites at that time. And while Ming has a very good track record based on finding out from Apple’s supply chain about likely details in upcoming products, there was nothing about this satellite tip that even made sense, since it didn’t seem to involve hardware at all. Generally speaking, a Ming tip is a hardware tip, but this one was not. Ming’s prediction was widely and quizzically reported, but to my knowledge it was never confirmed by other writers at the time, though I later […]The post Apple’s Space Ambitions are Real first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

It doesn’t look good for the Russian military in Ukraine. Better-supplied and -motivated Ukrainian troops are pushing-back Russian forces even in Donbas— Moscow’s more modest pivot objective after failing to take Kyiv. What gives? Could Ukraine actually win this war? Could Russia actually lose? Or could Putin even be deposed by a coup? Probably not. That’s because, while everyone outside of Moscow was gloating over Russia’s lack of military success, Putin was quietly playing his asshole card. Yes, his asshole card. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said last week that Russia has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian civilians and is holding them hostage in Russian prison camps. “Ukrainians from these camps—the survivors—are sent further into the occupied territories and to Russia. The facts of deportation of our citizens […]The post Putin plays his asshole card first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

President Zelenskyy of Ukraine is begging NATO for a no-fly zone they can’t risk providing. So I came up with another solution — $10 laser pointers. Buy 100,000 laser pointers and give them to Ukrainian mothers (not kids — too dangerous). Even the puniest lockable laser pointer (notice the keys?) can temporarily blind a pilot at a distance of more than a mile, so what will 100 non-puny laser pointers do to the same aircraft? It would not only create an effective no-fly zone, it might kill hundreds of Russian pilots before they figure it out. Though outdoor laser pointer pictures are usually shot at night so the beam is easier to see, they can do just as much damage during the day. In the […]The post How to quickly end the war in Ukraine with $10 laser pointers first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

President Putin of Russia has been talking a lot lately about his forces using nuclear weapons — presumably tactical nuclear weapons — in the war with Ukraine. It’s an easy threat to make but a difficult one to follow-through for reasons I’ll explain here in some detail. I’m not saying Mr Putin won’t order nuclear strikes. He might. Dictators do such things from time to time. But if Mr Putin does push that button, I’d estimate there is perhaps a 20- percent chance that nukes will be actually launched and a 100 percent chance that Mr. Putin will end that day with a bullet in his brain. Given that I don’t think Mr. Putin really wants a bullet in his brain, my goal here is […]The post Here’s why Putin won’t use nukes in Ukraine — Pass it on. first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

This was the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. Post-war Germany was partitioned into sectors administered separately by the major Allied powers. The city of Berlin, buried deep in the Soviet sector of Germany, was similarly partitioned. So there were American- and British- and French-administered parts of Berlin. Access from the rest of Europe was by road, rail, or air with trains and trucks passing through a Soviet-ruled countryside. That was until the Russians decided to shut down those roads and railways in 1948, keeping Berlin from receiving both fuel and food. The only remaining access to Berlin was by air and so the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force flew everything into Berlin for a year and a half. Four hundred airplanes flew […]The post When is a no-fly zone not a no-fly zone? When it’s an airlift. first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Some things are worth reading again. For the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here — unedited — is my column originally published September 13, 2001. My smarter and handsomer brother was in Northern New Jersey on Tuesday looking across the water at what was for just a moment longer the single remaining tower of the World Trade Center. A cold front had passed through the night before, leaving the day startlingly clear. The carnage was easy to see even from a distance. Only the rising cloud of smoke and ash marred the sky. And then that tower, too, was gone. The magnitude of this disaster and its sister at the Pentagon in Washington is too great to ponder, so we are left wondering […]The post Bob’s 9/11 post from 20 years ago — To a Man With a Hammer first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Almost 50 years ago I had the misfortune to take two statistics classes at the same time. One was a required introduction to statistics and the other was econometrics. Don’t ask why I took them both — I don’t remember. But I do remember one day in the Intro to Statistics class when another student asked about this distribution plot (below). “What was it? What did it indicate? What could it be used for?” they asked. “It’s nothing,” said the TA. “It’s useless.” But I had seen that shape before, in econometrics, where they called it a split normal distribution. that was said to be good for displaying time-series data. So not useless at all. The split-normal distribution was first drawn in 1897 and has […]The post Einstein’s Fridge: Who knew the history of thermodynamics was so much like high school? first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

There is lots of good news lately for SpaceX, especially NASA choosing the Hawthorne, CA-based company to build a $2.89 billion lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Moon landing slated for 2024. Key to that single-source contract, which eliminates two competitors including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, was SpaceX’s willingness to restructure payments to fit the $750 million appropriated by Congress this fiscal year for the project. Already the lowest Artemis bidder, Elon Musk’s company was willing to make the deal work for the customer, which is unusual thinking for space contractors, with many asking, Where did SpaceX get the money? They got the money from your phone bill. This Artemis win for SpaceX is just part of a bigger story that’s emerging about a company that […]The post Starlink is a global ISP built at ZERO COST to SpaceX, enabling NASA’s Artemis launch first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Ten years ago this month, 22,000 Japanese citizens died in a huge tsunami that also caused the second-worst nuclear accident in history at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility. Because I know about nuclear safety, I wrote a total of four columns about the accident in the month that followed. You can read them in order here, here, here and here. When I wrote within hours of the accident that none of the 11 reactors would ever operate again, I was the sole voice on the planet saying so out loud. Read the comments and you’ll see I took some flak for that, but 10 years later I was right. None of the 11 reactors will ever run again and it will take at least […]The post 10 years later Fukushima Daiichi still melts down my heart first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Six hundred and seventy-five thousand Americans died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, back when the total population of the United States was 103 million. In the current pandemic, American deaths are already above 540,000 (remember when a projection of 160,000 deaths seemed crazy?) but our population is now 331 million. While COVID-19 will undoubtedly kill more Americans than did the Spanish flu, the percentage of the population dying will be much lower than the 0.65 percent death rate in 1918. But the numbers are close enough that one might guess the long-term impact of this pandemic could be very similar to that one. I don’t think it will be. I think this pandemic will have greater long-term effects than that of 1918 and the […]The post Half a dozen little 2021 predictions about life after COVID-19 first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

To this point in my tech predictions for 2021 I have ignored COVID-19, which we all do at our peril. Now that we know the pandemic is real, that it won’t just disappear, and that half a million people are so far dead from it, what are predictable longer-term impacts? I see plenty changing in how we work, how we use social media, and how education has generally failed. Coming out the other side of this mess several aspects of life will be different, but school probably won’t be one of those. I have an unusual perspective on these times since I am a parent of three sons (19, 16, and 14), I have a background in IT, yet my first job out of college […]The post 2021 Prediction #6: COVID-19, Clubhouse, and the Great High School Reset first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Back on January 23rd, the New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by Kate Murphy titled America Has a GPS Problem, citing fear at the highest levels of government and industry that international bad actors might bring down the Global Positioning System satellite network, running your Tesla into a guardrail in the process. It’s just the sort of story you’d expect to read here, rather than in the Times, but what the heck. And the story is absolutely correct: we are all in danger. But Ms. Murphy, beyond wringing her hands, doesn’t say how the crisis will be averted or who will do the averting. I predict that Apple will fix the problem and save the day and they’ll probably do it this year. The […]The post 2021 Prediction #5: Apple (and maybe Google) saves the world first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Remember Bufferbloat? It’s a subject I was among the first to write about a decade ago, starting with a prediction column just like this one in 2011. The problem at the time was that every video or audio application — the big bandwidth consumers — was trying to solve performance issues through pre-buffering. You’d launch Netflix (just one example — they all did it) and it would pause for a few seconds filling a huge buffer intended to smooth-out any playing glitches. Except performance didn’t improve and in fact got worse because of buffers buffering buffers. These extra buffers were defeating TCP/IP’s own flow control mechanisms, often leading to total failure of the connection. Jim Gettys from Bell Labs called it Bufferbloat, then Jim and […]The post 2021 Prediction #4: WiFi 6 is a bust (for now) as Bufferbloat returns thanks to ISP greed first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Sorry I got my puts and calls mixed-up in the e-mail version of this column. It should now be fixed. My 16 year-old copy editor says he won’t make that mistake again. — Bob Today is my birthday. Thirty-five years ago today I was drinking coffee in my Palo Alto kitchen when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on TV. Thirty years ago today my father fell over, instantly dead of a heart attack while walking between gates in the American Airlines terminal at DFW. I was expecting a call, just not that one. Life is full of surprises and some of them aren’t good, as hedge funds are learning this week while their fortunes are determined by millennial traders in shares of GameStop, the venerable […]The post 2021 Prediction #3: Get ready for more GameStops as hedge funds are no longer the only bullies in town first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

If 2020 was a Trump- and Covid-inspired year of social media excess, 2021 can’t help but see some reversion. But it’s more than that, with big Internet companies coming under greater regulatory scrutiny worldwide, especially Facebook and Google. This year is going to be a tough one for Mark Zuckerberg, especially. And while I don’t expect Zuckerberg to abandon his CEO job this year, he eventually will, simply because it isn’t as much fun as it used to be and there will come a point (maybe in 2022) when leaving the top job will help Facebook’s stock. At this moment there’s reportedly a bot operating on Telegram selling for $20 or less the personal info including phone numbers of 500 million individual Facebook users. What’s […]The post 2021 Prediction #2: Peak Facebook as Zuck runs out of role models first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

I’m no Trumper. This prediction has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how social media actually works. Following the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6th, President Trump was bumped from nearly all social media, even YouTube, with many of those changes subsequently made permanent. These moves led to speculation that Trump would be hobbled without his beloved accounts, his immediate impact on public discourse muted without the ability to tweet. While this may be true in the very immediate sense, it won’t last. Even Trump, the technical luddite, will figure it out and roar back shortly with or without those accounts. This prediction is very similar in thinking to a column I wrote last August — President Trump thinks he can shut […]The post 2021 Prediction #1: Trump will do fine without Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

This is when I typically generate a list of technology predictions for the coming year. The challenge this year isn’t coming up with predictions, it’s finding a moment of calm to share them when people are most likely to read. With a pandemic rolling along and the nation in political and economic crises to boot, such a moment of clarity isn’t likely to ever arrive, so I’ve decided just to write the damned columns and see what happens. This is the column in which I’ll review my predictions from 2020 to see how I did and whether it is even worth your while to read further. Having done this for over 20 years, historically I’m correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year […]The post Bob’s 2021 Tech Predictions: What a Difference a Pandemic Makes first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

The history of instrument flight (originally called blind flying) has had three distinct phases. The first began with Elmer Sperry’s Gyro Horizon in the 1920s that allowed skilled pilots to fly through clouds by showing them where was the horizon they couldn’t otherwise see. Race pilot Jimmy Doolittle used Sperry’s gyro and a precision altimeter,… Continue reading The Big Sky is FallingThe post The Big Sky is Falling first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

A few weeks ago I wrote a column about helping our children cope with distance learning as we hide from COVID-19. Since then I’ve watched the progress of my own children — Cole (16) and Fallon (14) are still at home — and I’ve spoken to friends and teachers all over the world. It isn’t going well. In fact, the whole distance learning experience has been a disaster that will ultimately result in this academic year being forever assigned an asterisk to separate it from every other academic year, before or after. I hope your experience is better, but I doubt that is the case. And the fact that people aren’t generally saying what I am here is because there’s lag in the system and […]The post 2020-21 is the asterisk academic year first appeared on I, Cringely.

There was a time when I could figure something out, just plain figure it out of raw data, then blurt my conclusions out to the world through this rag just to see what would happen. And what would inevitably happen was a thousand experts would pipe up just to tell me to pipe down, saying that I was too frigging stupid to read, much less write. Except occasionally I got it right (pure luck) so, damn it, they had to keep reading my work. Well I’m back to try again and here it comes: When the history of autonomous cars is written, the winner will be Tesla. Heck, I think they’ve already won. Autonomous cars are like the graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, the Internet, […]The post Tesla won the self-driving car war, they just aren’t telling us first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

My friend Bob Litan, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is worried about COVID-19 herd immunity. Specifically, Bob worries that the only way our population can reach the 60-70 percent immunity rate required to protect us all from the novel coronavirus is if some people are paid to take the shot. And Bob may be correct: a Gallup poll last month concluded that 35 percent of Americans would refuse to be vaccinated. Uh-oh. Bob thinks the way around this problem is to pay people, giving them an economic incentive to do the right thing. This got me thinking about the whole concept of economic incentives, which I generally think are a bad idea. An incentive is a reward used to encourage a […]The post The Incentive Game first appeared on I, Cringely. Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Forty-five days from now, we’re told, President Trump will shut down TikTok and WeChat. TikTok, maybe, but WeChat? Impossible. Everything Donald Trump understands about the Internet could fit in a thimble. He’s a reckless leader who isn’t bothered by things like, well, facts, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he expects to command WeChat into oblivion. But what will happen to his already limited Internet authority when that doesn’t work? What Internet authority? Trump has a chance of taking down TikTok, the short form video sharing site, because that service is dependent on advertising. He can force the app out of U.S. app stores (though not out of foreign ones) and he can cut off the flow of ad dollars… at least those dollars that […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketingThe post President Trump thinks he can shut down WeChat: It won’t work first appeared on I, Cringely.

This is a column about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, but it starts with an old story about Intel and Monsanto from my book Accidental Empires. Stick with me here and you’ll soon understand why… There was a time in the early 1980s when Intel suffered terrible quality problems. It was building microprocessors and other parts by the millions and by the millions these parts tested bad. The problem was caused by dust, the major enemy of computer chip makers. Semiconductor companies fight dust by building their components in expensive clean rooms. Intel had plenty of clean rooms, but it still had a big dust problem, so the engineers cleverly decided that the wafers were probably dusty before they ever arrived at Intel. The wafers were […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketingThe post Mark Zuckerberg’s Pact with the Devil first appeared on I, Cringely.

Readers have been asking me to comment on Apple’s decision, announced at last week’s World Wide Developers’ Conference, to start switching to Apple-designed ARM processors for its Macintosh computers. I usually don’t like to do second-day (or, in the case, second-week) stories unless I can add something new to the discussion. Oddly, I usually can and that’s the case here, where Apple’s move to ARM has a big-picture strategy component that is absolutely vital to the company’s continued success. It also doesn’t seem to be covered yet anywhere but here. Forget all the talk about Apple moving to ARM because the chips are better than Intel’s or consume less power. You can even forget the idea that using its own chips allows Apple to be […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Big technology companies have been recently coming under increased scrutiny from federal regulators. Several tech companies are reportedly under investigation, but this column is only about Amazon, which seems to be in regulatory crosshairs in part because President Trump doesn’t like Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns one of Trump’s least-favorite newspapers, the Washington Post. Ironically, Trump’s goal of breaking-up Amazon would only make Jeff Bezos at least $35 billion richer. It’s simple: Amazon is worth a lot more in pieces than it is as a single company. Bezos is no fool, so he knows this about his company. Maybe being already the richest man on the planet is enough for him. Whatever the reason, Bezos, for now, seems to want to […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

My first job out of college was teaching biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture at Triway High School in rural Wooster, Ohio. I lasted for six weeks. The school environment was such a downer, from the smoke-filled teachers’ lounge to my young co-workers who were teaching mainly, it seemed to me, to avoid service in Vietnam. So when a reporting job became available, I jumped on it, leaving Ohio forever. Years later I returned to teaching, this time at Stanford University, where I worked for six years. Now, 37 years after Stanford, I’m teaching my kids at home thanks to COVID-19. You may be teaching your kids, too. This column is my attempt to make your job easier. It’s not that I’m God’s gift to […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

My last column was about crisis management lessons I learned back in 1979 while investigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (TMI). Let’s just say that FEMA wasn’t ready for a nuclear meltdown. Today we turn to the other federal agency I investigated at that same time — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While FEMA was simply unprepared and incompetent, the NRC was unprepared and lied about it. Like FEMA, the NRC had recently undergone a rebranding from its previous identity as the Atomic Energy Commission — a schizoid agency that had been charged with both regulating nuclear power and promoting it. It’s difficult to be the major booster of technology while at the same […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing

Forty-one years ago this summer I was a young investigator working in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, a big federal investigation chaired by Dartmouth Professor John Kemeny, who is best known as the father of the BASIC programming language. I learned a lot that summer and fall not only about nuclear accidents but about how governments and industries respond to crises. Some of those lessons apply to the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is also being poorly managed. This may surprise you (that 41-year-old lessons can still apply) but governments, especially, change at a glacial pace. The two federal agencies with which I mainly dealt were the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Nuclear […] Digital BrandingWeb DesignMarketing