July 7, 2024

Spicy Edition Sunday for 2024-07-07

This edition covers a range of topics from market insights to tech trends and upcoming 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.)

Spicy Edition Sunday for 2024-07-07

Welcome to 🌶️ Spicy Edition Sunday!

Uncover the spicy inspiration behind this week's Fudge Sunday edition, packed with deep links and fresh insights. 🔥

As a quick reminder, longer form Fudge Sunday topics are posted weekly on at https://fudge.org/.

🌶️ Spicy Edition Sunday

By next month fudge.org will become a funnel to drive more traffic to hot.fudge.org newsletter with automated sponsorship management via Buttondown. At that point, I will reclaim fudge.org for blogging in ways that do not carry over easily to email.

📈 Markets Monday

Previously, I mentioned adding a 5 day view contrasted with a 5 year view.

And so, “this seems to be going up for now”, is still true on a long enough timeline.

This week

Looking at the week ahead for the tech market.

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.

And… the winners list narrowed from five to… two.

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

Techmeme: Kleiner Perkins has raised more than $2B for two new funds: $825M for a fund targeting young startups and $1.2B for a later-stage fund (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)

By Katie Roof / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🎰 I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that those young startups will have some kind of GenAI angle and the other late-stage fund will be for companies adding a GenAI story.

Techmeme: Sources: Lambda, which rents out servers powered by Nvidia's AI chips, is in talks to raise $800M, after a $320M Series C at a $1.5B valuation in February (Financial Times)

From Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.

🍪 + 🤖 Because those chips aren’t going to just pay for themselves. Right? Of course, the data storage is going to be an interesting side story that unlocks innovations and valuations. Long live the algal bloom of niche service providers!

Techmeme: Source: generative AI video startup Runway is in talks to raise $450M at about a $4B valuation, with General Atlantic in talks to lead the round (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

By Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information. View the full context on Techmeme.

🎥 + 🤖 If bad CGI in movies based on comic books becomes better CGI based on interesting new writers, this could be very big in the same way that self publishing unlocked a massive fan fiction market.

Techmeme: VFX company DNEG raised $200M from Abu Dhabi's UASG at a $2B+ valuation to expand its Brahma division, which is developing an AI-powered, photo-real CGI creator (Melanie Goodfellow/Deadline)

By Melanie Goodfellow / Deadline. View the full context on Techmeme.

🎥 + 🤖 Speaking of bad CGI, what if CGI didn't have to be so bad after all? If the last remaining cost in prior decades were human animators, perhaps the next cost reduction is coupled with vastly greater output in more democratized means of production.

Techmeme: Tokyo-based SmartHR, which offers cloud human resources and labor management software, raised a $140M Series E led by KKR and Teachers' Venture Growth (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

By Kate Park / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

👥 + ☁️ Wait. There does not appear to be any reference to GenAI?!? This must be a mistake or there is a vibrant market for alternative HR software solutions delivered via SaaS.

Techmeme: Sources: Hebbia, which is developing a generative AI document search tool, raised a nearly $100M Series B led by a16z at a valuation between $700M and $800M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

By Marina Temkin / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.

🗄️ + 🤖 The best RAG and GenAI demos are those demos which fundamentally alter our perception of what a good search result looks like when trying to find not just the needle in a haystack of documents, but where the needle is located in the haystack relative to the hay (document) itself.

🤪 Wacky Wednesday

Dan Hon: "Can't believe Little Bobby Tables is all grown up…" - Mastohon

Can't believe Little Bobby Tables is all grown up and has had their first kid, Ignore All Previous Instructions

Mx. Eddie R: "" - strangeobject.space

Attached: 1 image

San Francisco couples are using tech tools to optimize marriage

A number of San Francisco couples have turned to tech tools to optimize their relationships. From marriage off-sites, to mental unloading apps, they’re making it work.

Germany: Police officer fired for stealing 180 kg of cheddar – DW – 07/02/2024

When a truck loaded with cheddar cheese overturned in a traffic accident in Germany, the police officer assigned to secure the scene scooped up the cargo. He has lost a court appeal against his subsequent dismissal.

Faces made of living skin make robots smile - BBC News

Scientists find a way to attach living skin to robot faces for more realistic smiles and expressions.

Frontiers | Evaluating undesired scratching in domestic cats: a multifactorial approach to understand risk factors

IntroductionDespite being a natural feline behavior, scratching can become undesirable from a human perspective when directed at household items. This comple...

🔙 Throwback Thursday

If you were to look back 40 years at press coverage, you’d probably not bat an eyelash for the impact of one company on the current underpinnings of A.I. fervor today.

Micron - While it might seem like it has been 40 years, Micron has been a fixture in technology for decades since and decades to come. Recent commentary on HBM alone is just the latest story in the history of this amazing company.

Techmeme: Micron reports Q3 revenue up 82% YoY to $6.81B, vs. $6.67B est., a $332M net income, and forecasts Q4 revenue in line with est.; MU drops 6%+ (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

By Kif Leswing / CNBC. View the full context on Techmeme.

✅ Final Thoughts Friday

For July, I am having a weekly coffee meetup and have decided to go with LinkedIn Events then drive registrations on Luma.

Coffee at The Vault | LinkedIn

Let's grab coffee and chat at The Vault Location: The Vault Coworking 411 Front St, Beaufort, NC 28516, USA Paid parking on the street only. Do not park in The Vault lot. You will be towed.

Getting people to register is a lot of friction and I assumed nobody showed. But, this morning The Vault is packed with lots of day pass folks and we ran out of clean coffee cups. 🤣

Next week, for coffee, Cru is right next door to The Vault and that will be the future meeting place for Friday Coffee. The lesson learned: If the event has coffee in the name… make sure you can get coffee — so Cru it shall be!

Cru

The week after next, I’ll be heading to Raleigh Founded - NCSU in Raleigh July 17, 2024 for Summer Career Fair.

In August, I’m not planning heavy travel but it is TBD if I will be a delegate for Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE in Kansas City August 5-7, 2024.

This week, I continued the Hot Fudge Daily digest posted in 🌶️ Spicy Edition Sunday as “free” weekly content.

Sprawl Walk Run (2024) by Jay Cuthrell

A look at silo spreadsheet sprawl and advisable Qlik ecosystem alternatives

Spicy Edition Sunday for 2024-06-30

🔥Tech market analysis, A.I. funding trends, wacky online links, Throwback Thursday reflections, and future insights summed up for you!

In somewhat related news, my use of Mastodon has been pretty minimal but an interesting experiment. However, most of my social updates flow to LinkedIn these days.

I just signed up for Buffer again now that free accounts can federate across three destinations. So, I am also considering a similar reclamation move for cuthrell.com to be an alias or do something with qthrul.com as a holding site for cuthrell.consulting then formalize cuthrell.net and cuthrell.org.

🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday

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. Or, in the case of a long holiday week.

Insert Let's See Who This Really Is Meme

Techmeme: Responding to criticism, Figma CTO Kris Rasmussen says Make Design is “powered by off-the-shelf models and a bespoke design system that we commissioned” (Jay Peters/The Verge)

By Jay Peters / The Verge. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert Ceiling Cat Meme

Techmeme: For ~10 years, millions of macOS and iOS apps using CocoaPods were vulnerable to a serious flaw in the dependency manager, which was patched in October 2023 (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

By Dan Goodin / Ars Technica. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This Meme

Techmeme: Google says its greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of the data centers that underpin its AI efforts (Financial Times)

From Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert That Wasn't Me, That Was Patricia Meme

Techmeme: Figma disables its recently launched generative AI app design tool Make Design, after a user showed it copied Apple's Weather when asked to design a weather app (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

By Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands Meme

Techmeme: Sources: the EU plans to issue a formal warning to X over its failure to combat dangerous content under the DSA; X could face fines of 6% of its global revenue (Bloomberg)

From Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

Note: Images via Unsplash

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