It Doesn't Know What You Want Until You Teach It
1. An economist looks at the efficiency of the dark-web drug market.
"The facilitator rents a carefully vetted Airbnb and arranges for a naive student to be there to sign for the package. The student then takes it to a second location, often a convenience store where the facilitator has a relationship with the owner. He collects the package from there, splits it into smaller portions, and passes those on to street dealers for sale. For taking on the most risk, the facilitator gets 60% of Paul’s profits. That 60% got my attention. After all, the market for drugs is notoriously inefficient. Street dealers, who face the most risk of violence and arrest, aren’t compensated for it. But in Paul’s model, the biggest risk-taker was the facilitator, and he was getting the biggest share of the profits, just as economic theory said he should. If what Paul told me was true, I wondered, could the dark web be creating a better functioning and more efficient drug market?"
2. If there is money to be made in a networked system, there will be fraud.
"Ad fraud is top of mind in programmatic advertising, and the only debate is about the extent of the problem. Rather large, if you go by a bracingly frank presentation by AppNexus chief data scientist Catherine Williams at ExchangeWire’s ATS London event on Monday. According to Williams, filters deployed earlier this year by AppNexus flagged two thirds of its inventory (65 percent) as fraudulent."
3. The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.
"Then I clicked open some photographs Jencks had sent my father. Gazing at a surreal landscape of spiraling mounds and stark plateaus exploding with boulders, it felt as though I were falling through multiple levels of a futuristic video game that hadn't yet been invented. It was hard to believe these photos had been taken on planet Earth."
4. Kitchens are a great place to see the problems in most visions of the Internet of things.
"This isn't a new phenomenon. There's a rich history of 'efficiency enhancing' devices turning out to actually create more work, particularly for women. And in the case of smart devices, much of that work comes in the training. A smart stove is still just a machine; it doesn't know what you want until you teach it. Neither does the fork that tracks your calorie intake, or the cup that monitors your hydration, or the fridge that wants to tell you when it's time to buy more milk or eggs. Suddenly, each device in your kitchen demands attention beyond simply turning it on or off, or lifting it up or down. 'The technology becomes the most demanding child you'll ever have to deal with,' says Sarah Kember, a scholar at the University of London who studies how domestic technology affects women. 'Every gadget is asking what's this? What's this?'"
"The High-Energy Radiation Megavolt Electron Source, better known as HERMES III, has fired its 10,000th shot at Sandia National Laboratories. HERMES III, the world’s most powerful gamma ray generator, produces a highly energetic beam that tests how well electronics can survive a burst of radiation that approximates the output of a nuclear weapon. The machine can accommodate targets that range in size from a single transistor to a military tank."
So, I just got home from Tel Aviv, which, while I happened to be there, was hit by a massive sandstorm that swept across from Syria.
Now, sandstorms, or at least the one I saw, do not work like the ones in Mad Max. I woke up in my little hotel cocoon, threw back the blackout curtains and saw … nothing. Because that’s what sandstorms do: they make landscape into nothing. They disappear buildings and the sea and the horizon and even the sun. Beyond half a mile, everything fades into white-yellow nothing.
I went for a run up the beach until I got to an old crumbling stone jetty. An old shirtless man with a huge belly was fishing from it. All I could see was a few big hotels behind me rising into dust and this jetty with the man in front of me. And it was possible to imagine that this was all the world, that this little narrow spit of land was all that was left.
That’s the dystopian story.
But, at the same time, I could snap a photo of the sea and the sky and send it to my wife across the world and have her send me back a picture of our son. And I could go look up the sandstorm and see it from a NASA satellite. And Apple would put out a new version of their phone, and just down the road, hundreds of Israeli startups were building new things in the world. And as I wandered around Tel Aviv, the strange light of the sandstorm making every photo look as if it were taken in a dream, I thought to myself: there are so many futures happening at once.
When we imagine a utopia or dystopia, both represent a hope that human lives will somehow be less messy and complex in the future than they are now. Because, good or bad, that’s the most comforting lie we can tell ourselves about what’s going to come: that we might be able to process and understand it more easily than we do our own short moment.
It's good to be back.
1. qz.com | @reihan 2. digiday.com 3. atlasobscura.com 4. eater.com | @hels 5. pddnet.com
It Doesn't Know What You Want Until You Teach It