🌶️ Hot Fudge Sunday for 2024-09-01
Weekly hot takes on market trends, funding news, wacky links, historical insights, and upcoming tech events.
Welcome to the latest Hot Fudge Daily. Each day of the week you get thematic value.
🌶️ Spicy Edition Sunday FREE (Hot Fudge Sunday weekly newsletter captures the best of Hot Fudge Daily and the most clicked links for the week.)
📈 Markets Monday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: What is moving markets and why does it matter for the week ahead?)
🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Get fast unfiltered thoughts on news of the day with just a dash of snark.)
🤪 Wacky Wednesday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Catch up on the wild and wooly memes from a variety of deep web #random channels.)
🔙 Throwback Thursday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Examine recent news in a thought provoking Shot and Chaser format.)
✅ Final Thoughts Friday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: A clear eyed look back on the week that was and could have been.)
🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday $ (Hot Fudge Daily: Steady and sober unpacking of the slow news day where muted press releases and disclosure stories try to get buried before the weekend takes all the attention.)
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Hot Fudge Sunday 🤔 💡 🤯 🤓 is a free weekly newsletter containing a digest of the Hot Fudge Daily paid newsletter at hot.fudge.org in a single easy to reach URL. This free weekly edition is posted every… wait for it… Sunday.
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📈 Markets Monday for 2024-08-26
According to the tech press, the future of the tech market in Markets Monday will hinge upon NVIDIA earnings on Wednesday August 28, 2024… if you believe the tech press. I kind of don’t but here we go.
Last week
As a recap, what I try to do each week is look at the same key indicator that I take from a simple yahoo finance webpage. It’s not much but it’s how I look at things.
This week
Previously, I decided on a view from Yahoo Finance. For example, this was a view of intraday in Technology which usually gets around a dozen or so interesting companies.
If you are using Yahoo Applied Filters for Stocks screener you can bookmark your own heat map view.
- % Change in Price (Intraday):greater than 4
- Region: United States
- Market Cap (Intraday): Mid Cap and Large Cap and Mega Cap
- Price (Intraday):greater than or equal 5
- Volume:greater than 15000
- Sector: Technology
- Industry: Software—Infrastructure and Information Technology Services and Computer Hardware and Software—Application and Communication Equipment and Electronics & Computer Distribution and Consumer Electronics and Electronic Components and Scientific & Technical Instruments and Semiconductor Equipment & Materials and Semiconductors
🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-08-27
First… an interesting post arrived from VMworld. For perspective, my first VMworld experience was in 2010 and the community I met there would alter the course of my career for the next decade.
I was even a one time vExpert in 2013 within the massive VMware community aka vCommunity… and since then, well, things have changed. Things have changed — drastically.
Mourning Our vCommunity: Navigating Grief After the Broadcom Acquisition
How has the Broadcom acquisition impacted the vCommunity? I think most of us are still in mourning. Why it's important to grieve this loss and what comes next..
And now, back to our regular Hot Takes Tuesday…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Let’s take a look at where the money is flowing.
Techmeme: Chicago-based G Squared raised $1.1B for a fund to buy secondary startup shares; G Squared bought ~$135M in Anthropic shares from FTX during FTX's bankruptcy (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times)
By Ivan Levingston / Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🥈 The secondary market is interesting but not as interesting as a $1B+ fund intended to take advantage of secondary market bargains.
Techmeme: Data infrastructure startup Cribl raised $200M led by GV, alongside a $119M secondary offering, at a $3.5B valuation, taking its total funding to $600M (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
By Katie Roof / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 📊 The hunt for better ways to harness data to deliver IT, security, and observability continues with the displacement of pre-cloud era solutions.
Techmeme: nOps, which helps companies optimize AWS spend, raised a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners and says its customer base grew 450% over the past 18 months (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💸 + ☁️ As I’ve said many times before, cloud fiscal responsibility (aka FinOps) is going to become synonymous with cloud excellence within the larger technology business management (TBM) space.
Techmeme: Viggle, which trained 3D video foundation model JST-1, raised a $19M Series A led by a16z; Viggle says the model is trained on public sources, including YouTube (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
By Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
📺 + 🤖 Perhaps I’m just not creative enough to be a video creator, but I get a vibe that ethically sourced ingredients is crossing over from food supply chains into A.I. video services training corpus chains.
Techmeme: Seattle-based startup Supio, which uses AI to help lawyers analyze documents, raised a $25M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)
By Taylor Soper / GeekWire. View the full context on Techmeme.
⚖️ + 🤖 Forensic examination of large volumes of materials in discover is arguably a better use case for RAG than attempting to cite a so-called hallucination.
🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2024-08-28
Each Wednesday I go through dozens of Slack communities and select the most interesting shared links. This will always be a safe for work list. 🙈
When People Used the Postal Service to 'Mail' Their Children | HISTORY
In the early days of U.S. parcel service, there weren’t clear guidelines about what you could and couldn’t mail.
The mystery of the medieval fighting snails
The pages of medieval books are stalked by a ferocious monster: the fighting snail.
Fighting Through Mental Struggles: Incredible Renderings Created with Only a Pencil - Core77
From a young age, artist Kohei Omori was diagnosed with OCD and struggled in school. He has described his obsession with detail as a disadvantage that makes everyday life difficult; and while he was able to gain an equivalency diploma after dropping out of high school, he was not able
Bingham plastic - Wikipedia
Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (1982) > National Security Agency/Central Security Service > Historical Releases View
On August 26, 2024, the National Security Agency (NSA) released a digital copy of a videotaped lecture, "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People" that Rear Adm. Grace Hopper gave to
How 'Corn Sweat' Can Add To Midwest Humidity During Heat Waves | Weather Underground
Humidity might be locally enhanced by cornfields as heat builds into the Midwest. Here's why.
ISDN History: Why It (Mostly) Failed To Make A Mark
For decades, the telephone industry supported ISDN, a technology designed to make copper lines more useful for consumers. It’s great—if you’re a voice actor.
🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-08-29
Data center power consumption has been a below the fold news topic in the past but has ramped along with coverage of recurring topics of A.I. which is even more power intensive. But how long has there been a data center energy crisis?
In short, the data center energy crisis has always been there. The difference is that modern data center demands are now hyperscale cloud service providers.
For example, if you were to look back to 2007, you might recall so-called green data center initiatives like “IBM Project Big Green” in response to the data center energy crisis.
Fast forward to the present… What makes “green” claims so interesting is how the established data center players are always looking for better power purchase agreements (PPAs) or virtual power purchase agreements(vPPAs) terms — but is always about more electrons, not less.
Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple do their own tracking as well. However, the coverage of how that tracking is done has raised more questions.
Techmeme: How Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta are using accounting techniques to hide their growing emissions, while working to influence pollution disclosure rules (Financial Times)
From Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2024-08-30
As a reminder, I’ve committed to four events for the remainder of this year.
- AI Field Day 5 in Silicon Valley September 11-13, 2024 for Tech Field Day
- Monktoberfest in Portland October 2-4, 2024
- Cloud Field Day 21 in Silicon Valley October 23-25, 2024 for Tech Field Day
- All Things Open in Raleigh October 27-29, 2024 for CLS
- SXSW in Austin March 7 - 15, 2025
As for me, the week in review is about being thankful for new and ongoing client work and catching up with folks I haven’t spoken to for years. I’m back in the gym again to reach personal goals and continuing to put in time for my own personal projects that have nothing to do with technology.
Switching gears back to technology, the bigger tech stories this week seemed to be the next iPhone, zero-day SD-WAN exploits, Telegram, OpenAI, and Twitter/X. My thinking is this:
Techmeme: Apple announces a September 9 event at Apple Park with the iPhone 16 lineup, new Apple Watch models, and AirPods 4 expected; the invitation says “It's Glowtime” (Juli Clover/MacRumors)
By Juli Clover / MacRumors. View the full context on Techmeme.
As a long time owner of tiny iPhone devices, I am wondering when my personal preference ride ends. My current daily driver is an iPhone 13 mini and my small hands still miss the 1st Gen iPhone SE form factor. While I don’t see myself moving to a flip phone, foldable phone, or similar, there is a growing demand somewhere for growing phone sizes… but that’s not me, at least not yet.
Techmeme: Sources: China-linked hackers penetrated deep into two big US ISPs and several smaller ones in recent months, using a zero-day flaw in Versa Networks software (Joseph Menn/Washington Post)
By Joseph Menn / Washington Post. View the full context on Techmeme.
My early career in late 1990s telecom and the ISP / MSP business reminds me of a tale I heard about digital phone switching infrastructure (aka Digital Multiplex System aka DMS for short). Of the hundreds of security features that could be enabled in the modern digital switch, less than 20% ever were enabled. As for reasons why, the security features were considered at the time to be extra work to keep track of, the cost of setting up a bastion host for OOB OAM&P, or speculatively avoided to prevent degradation in performance when enabled them for ongoing operation. Plus, it was “just a phone switch” that would only impact a small blast radius, or so the thinking went. Fast forwarding to our increasingly connected world, this latest SD-WAN zero-day exploit highlights how making it easier for a bad actor to make an impact opens the possibility for a well funded team of bad actors that can have global blast radius reach.
Techmeme: France charges Pavel Durov for complicity in the spread of CSAM and other crimes on Telegram; Durov posted a €5M bail and prosecutors banned him from traveling (Gaspard Sebag/Bloomberg)
By Gaspard Sebag / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
No shade intended, but, I briefly used Telegram many years ago until I determined other alternative solutions were more appropriate for my use case. However, the amount of reductive tech press coverage concerning the CEO of a communications platform company being charged in the country of their citizenship for allegedly breaking laws only appears shocking if the assumption is that a CEO is somehow unable to be charged or is somehow above the laws of the land. It seems that the microwave oven timeline for justice, due process, and straw-man argument construction continues to accelerate in line with technology advancement.
Techmeme: Sources: Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, the three most valuable tech companies, are in talks to participate in a funding round that would value OpenAI at $100B+ (Bloomberg)
From Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
It is quite normal that the largest market cap companies on this planet are investing in what might become the next largest market cap company on this planet. Please wake me up when there is anything to see here other than [ checks notes… ] protecting the shared interests of said largest market cap companies. Funding does not necessarily guarantee success but it can go a long way to getting a seat at the table of a board of directors that has only recently added more established personalities and polished pedigrees.
Techmeme: Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes orders X's suspension in Brazil after Elon Musk refused to name a legal representative in the country (Associated Press)
From Associated Press. View the full context on Techmeme.
Oh, what was I just saying about the audacity to hold a communications platform company operating within a country to uphold the laws of the land? Unposssible! Perhaps FAFO also stands for Forgot Another Financial Outcome.
🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2024-08-31
Peak 🏔️ vs. Peek 👀
By Friday, everything seems to be reaching the peak of getting news turned in before a deadline or dread-line. It sometimes seems like we reach a fever pitch in news coverage throughout the week.
Then there is a trope, cliché, or bromide about slow news days and the quietly mentioned news updates sent on a Friday — to try and sneak it past wider coverage. Or, in a nutshell, peak patronizing publishing.
In that spirit, here are a few stories that you might have missed on the slow news of a Friday.
Insert Let's See Who This Really Is Meme
Techmeme: The City of Columbus, OH, sues security researcher David Leroy Ross, aka Connor Goodwolf, accusing him of sharing data stolen by a ransomware gang with media (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
By Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert Ceiling Cat Meme
Techmeme: Microsoft says a North Korean hacking group earlier in August exploited a now-patched zero-day in a Chromium core engine to steal crypto from organizations (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This Meme
Techmeme: A reporter tries fixing his reputation with AI chatbots, including by adding a “strategic text sequence” to data sources, and via an AI optimization startup (Kevin Roose/New York Times)
By Kevin Roose / New York Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert That Wasn't Me, That Was Patricia Meme
Techmeme: Social media companies' reliance on Section 230 protections is in jeopardy after a US court ruled TikTok's algorithmic curation is not protected by Section 230 (Matt Stoller/BIG)
By Matt Stoller / BIG. View the full context on Techmeme.
Insert Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands Meme
Techmeme: Sources: OpenAI is in discussions about changing its corporate structure to become more investor-friendly, including removing a cap on profits for investors (Financial Times)
From Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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