2023 in Review
Warning:
Some will find this text too “negative”. It is not. I hope it is sarcastic enough to make you smile, if not laugh. There are plenty of folks on Linkedin who focus on the “positive”, whatever that means or refuse to venture an opinion, even of the most absurd situations. I have never been afraid to clearly state my opinions (and they are only my opinions). I usually try to back those opinions with facts and data. I do not pretend to be right, however I claim to be ethical in the sense that what I write, I mean.
The beat goes on….
This is how I started my 2022 year in review:
“Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, wars, famine, hurricanes, forest fires, etc etc. The usual ugliness of our world, year after year (except that a war in Europe, for someone like me raised during the cold war, is very scary). Can we do something about all of these ugly things (some of them quite preventable like malnutrition in some poor country)?”
The very sad thing is this equation: 2023 = 2022 + war in the Middle East.
We should be better than that. We aren’t!
Now for the review of 2023 events…at least some that should make you pause and think what kind of world we live in.
What is a Covid?
Remember the first time you saw that?
Well after shutting down the entire universe for the better part of two years, it is as if we barely remember that little bugger. Yet, the world saw 702 million cases and close to 7 million deaths (close to 10% death rate). In the middle of all that, there are some that (1) believe Covid is a government ploy and/or (2) vaccines do not work and/or (3) the virus was manufactured by the US government and Bill Gates so they could inject us a vaccine that includes a GPS tracker in it. You’ve got to give it to conspiracy “theorists”, they’ve got a wild imagination.
Thanks to E. MusX and Space-X, the word “success” has a new definition:
Twice during 2023 (April and November) Space-X tried to launch their Starship rocket. And twice it blew up. Nonetheless, Musk called these failures “success”. OK, I got you! Let me try that with another famous event: “The Titanic successfully hit the iceberg and successfully sank”.
Oh, and we have a new definition of “explosion”: it is now called “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. That really sounds like success. WOW!
By the way, between 1967 and 1973, NASA launched 13 Saturn V rockets. None of them exploded, 6 of them allowing lunar landing. Cheers for the ol’folks.
AI AI AI AI AI AI we cannot get enough AI (btw “ail” in French means “garlic”…I just thought I would insert a stupid factoid in the AI section):
AI is everywhere these days. Well, I thought about typing the name of something and checking if there was somewhere an association with AI. So, I googled: hot dog “AI”. Sure enough…
Then I googled “Toilet AI”….what do you know!
Now for how this stuff works. Notice all the sensors…and imagine you sitting
I don’t know about you, but the thought of having a conversation with the toilet bowl is not one that is the first thing that comes to my mind when I get up in the morning. By the way, you can ask ChatGPT pretty much anything. Here is my latest “conversation”:
Any tech marketeers, feel free to use the sentence in your commercial literature 😊
AI makes math and statistics “cool” again
I have always loved math. And I adore statistics. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite topics as a student was statistical thermodynamics. I know, it sounds like torture but, believe me, when you get a taste of it you become addicted. :-)
Well, the folks who are full of AI these days are just doing math and statistics. They probably don’t want you to know that because “I am using artificial intelligence to do such and such” sounds 100 times way more awesome than “I am using math and statistics to do such and such”. But that’s all it is: math and statistics. And the bit about “AI” taking over the world? Come on, please. Be real. Ever heard of an “on/off” switch.
The openAI saga
OpenAI was supposed to be a non-profit. The CEO, Sam Altman, saw it otherwise. Board clash: Altman out. But wait, Microsoft essentially owns OpenAI: so, Altman back as CEO with a different focus but the same master. All in week.
Altman was a signatory of the letter warning the world that AI was going to take over. Oh but wait “IT’S THEIR AI”, not ours. Ours is “good AI”. A few other points: (1) Altman sanctimoniously declared in Davos (where the world rich and famous make the deals we never know about) that AI needs a lot of electricity. Damn right it does! Is he going to pay for the new powerplants that the orgy of AI models will require to be built? And he is being sued by the NYT for copyright infringement to which his response was, to paraphrase: “Well if we cannot steel content all over the world to train our models., then we are screwed. You can’t let that happen! We need free access to content so we can repackaged it and make billions. As for content creators, sorry, it’s a tough world out there”.
Twitter becomes X
Now, ask any marketeer with her/his grain of salt and they will tell you that a well-known brand is gold, especially a brand that is known worldwide.
Well, I can assert that this memo never crossed EMUSK’s desk since he decided to rename Twitter. And what’s the new name: “X”. As the result, you routinely see this kind of sentence in various media “So&So tweeted this on X (formerly Twitter)”.
This happy idiot was not even able to destroy the Twitter brand. And tweets are still tweets.
Now imagine the equivalent at Coca-Cola. And the new name would be “Z”. So, you go to a convenient store and ask: “I’d like a diet Z, please”. And the person on duty would respond: “Oh yeah, a diet Coke”.
But, believe it or not, some folks still think LEON MEUSQUE (that’s the French spelling…I think it looks and sound kinda cool…like “Paris-chic”) is a genius. Oh well!
NFT are now worthless
95% of NFTs are worth zero. I don’t know who got the idea that having a unique digital file was a great reservoir of growing wealth but it did not turn out that way. I guess it’s another instance of the “a sucker is born every minute”.
Read this for more info on this debacle: The vast majority of NFTs are now worthless, new report shows | Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) | The Guardian
The FTX “rapid unscheduled disassembly”
One day, master of the universe, next day you are in jail. That’s pretty much what happened to Bankman-Fried who was the head honcho at FTX and presided over a mighty melt down to the tune of $8B and which resulted in severe losses throughout the crypto space.
I don’t get crypto other than either a purely speculative instrument or a way to fraud or evade the tax man. It certainly isn’t “safe”. As for the democratization of money, talk to all the folks who saw their crypto assets with FTX “democratized” to zero.
Here is a good link that outlines the whole story: The Collapse of FTX: What Went Wrong With the Crypto Exchange? (investopedia.com)
Speaking of “rapid unscheduled disassembly, how about Silicon Valley Bank?
I remember when I lived and worked in the Silicon Valley, SVB was not just a bank. It was THE bank. A bank where hundreds of startup deposited the money from their VCs financial partners.
All was fine until a very unfortunate perfect storm of rising interest rates, lack of diversification in SVB’s asset portfolio, inability to liquidate some of these assets without incurring huge losses and a classic bank run. In other words, the proverbial sh..t hit the fan and it was quite a messy affair. Imagine that you just got a $10M round, deposited it at SVB which proceeds to collapse, and you are only insured (FDIC) to the tune of $250K. Gigantic ooopppsss in Silicon Valley.
In the end, it was not only SVB that went belly up but also Signature Bank, less visible but whose collapse was just as destructive. And guess what, the Feds and the FDIC stepped up to make everybody whole. The famous: “Privatizing profits and socializing losses”.
Wrapping up our trifecta of “rapid unscheduled disassembly”: WeWork
WeWork was never more that a commercial real-estate company. That’s it. It never was a high-tech company. You buy or lease some buildings, you rent the space + provide some services. You are a commercial real-estate company.
Except when a mega-crook like Adam Neumann convinces investors that he has “invented the future of work”, and that WeWork will indefinitely expand like the universe. But this fellow burnt cash like there was no tomorrow. After a failed IPO, things turned sour and he was fired with a golden parachute in the $1B range. I don’t know if crime ever pays, but being a white collar crook sure does.
WeWork filed for Chapter 11 on November 7th 2023. The nonguaranteed creditors will see $3B of debt wiped out from their pocket while the “visionary” enjoys his golden parachute and got $350M from Andreessen Horowitz to start something just as shady as WeWork. And get this, as of writing of this masterpiece of a paper, he wants to buy back WeWork from bankruptcy.
You cannot make this stuff up!
We lost the METAVERSE
Where is it? Has someone visited it recently? I mean, it was supposed to be the place where we would all spend our lives with a VR helmet on, buying meta properties, dating meta people, having meta jobs. Folks, where is it? May be in the same place the Atlantis is…who knows…even MarkZ does not know and refuses to answer…
A new way to fight climate change
Climate change is real. And it’s going to get worse. And I can’t see anything today that is being done about reversing the impact of GHG in a meaningful way.
Wait, I take that back. A new revolutionary methodology emerged in 2023 to fight climate change. That methodology is amazingly simple and extremely effective. And it goes like this:
Pick a museum where cherished works of art are exhibited. Then arm yourself with cans of liquid. Does not matter what liquid: paint, soup, etc. Go visit the museum while hiding the liquid. And then plant yourself in front of a seminal piece of art, start yelling and throw your liquid at said piece of art. Wait for the cops to arrest you.
Now, some people have witnessed CO2 molecules disintegrate on the spot after an art treasure had been desecrated this way. The temperature inside the museum went down to freezing. Pollutants looked for the way out in a hurry. How ingenious!
So, I suggest we ALL buy a can of paint and let us walk “en masse” to all the museums in all our cities and start throwing paint or soup or whatever at arts. Problem solved in a New York second. And we should do that on Earth Day.
What do you all say?
Speaking of climate change and energy: Germany closes nuclear plants and re-opens coal plants:
Well, thanks to the folks who throw soup at the Joconde, Germany terminated its nuclear power plant program (while having never experienced any kind of major accident).
But as the result of the Ukraine war, Germany simply ran out of electricity. Oops.
Solution: re-opened the coal plants.
OK so let me digest this: nuclear = clean and safe -> close. Coal = dirty, very dirty -> open.
I am afraid my intellect is not developed enough to understand the logic. Oh well!
Meanwhile mayors of some cities (Paris, Montreal, etc), want to transform their cities (large, spread out, sometimes 10s of miles) into Amsterdam and make sure that cars and car drivers are banned from said cities. The impact has been like this: (1) traffic in these cities has gotten worse (2) people have decided that it’s not worth going to these cities (like Montreal for instance, where there has been a major exodus from the city to the suburb), (3) nothing, and I mean NOTHING was planned to accommodate the fact that NOT EVERYBODY CAN BIKE. Duuuhhhh. Let me count the ways: my 92 old mother, parents with three young kids, people going to a business meeting, handicapped, etc etc. Oh yes, mass transportation. Except when it does not work, or is on strike or leave you a mile from your destination. The amazing part in all of that: Montreal’s mayor is p….off because we (suburban folks) are not going to Montreal any longer to shop. Seriously, Valerie! Seriously! Meanwhile the streets are now the playground of a bunch of folks ignoring the driving code, not wearing helmets, and shooting you the bird if you dare crossing the street while they ignore the red sign. Eco-dogmatism = bad urban planning.
Meanwhile self driving is not what it used to be (because it never was)
Inside the final seconds of a deadly Tesla Autopilot crash — Washington Post
Tesla Autopilot crashes on cross traffic — The Washington Post
Tesla Has The Highest Accident Rate Of Any Auto Brand (forbes.com)
NHTSA investigating Tesla Autopilot after yet another fatal crash | Ars Technica
Cruise under NHTSA probe into autonomous driving pedestrian injuries (cnbc.com)
Waymo self-driving car collides with cyclist in San FranciscoThis (wallstreet-now.com)
This stuff does not work. It is dangerous. There is no real use case for it. It is also a scam (there is no such thing as a “robotaxi”). They should be banned from the streets and highways.
Enough with this dangerous B.S already!
The U.K. has a new king.
I checked the calendar again. Yep, 2024. But to tell you the truth, this picture says it all..
Meanwhile, in the gene editing labs…hidden from the public light..
Every year I make the same comment: if you want to be really scared about a field of technology, take a look at genetic engineering. So if and when you have time, read any one of these articles, better if you read all three.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/22/1085809/gene-editing-had-a-banner-year-in-2023/
https://www.genengnews.com/industry-news/2023-biotechnology-developments/
This stuff is making steady progress every single year, pushing the boundaries every step of the way, and without public scrutiny. One of these days, it is going to blow up in our face, count on it. So instead of listening to the happy idiots who believe or want to make you believe that an LLM is conscious, pay a lot closer attention to what the genetic engineering folks are doing in their labs, far away from the limelight.
