July 21, 2024

🌶️ Spicy Edition Sunday for 2024-07-21

Discover spicy insights on technology, news, and market trends in this edition of Fudge Sunday 🔥.

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 2024-07-21

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

One challenge of writing a daily newsletter is that a lot can happen in 24 hours. While there is much I could share, I’ll adhere to my charter as a personal outlet for writing about technology and related news that I believe deserves attention.

To that end, I’m sharing a link to The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. The handbook image is now a decade old but is arguably more important today as increasingly rapid dissemination of highly automated and non-human generated information online spreads quickly with little or no vetting mechanisms.

The Breaking News Consumer's Handbook | On the Media | WNYC

Rampant misreporting following shootings and other breaking news events is so predictable that we unintentionally developed a formula for covering them. 

Next month fudge.org will become a funnel to drive more traffic to hot.fudge.org newsletter and eventually automate sponsorship via Buttondown. By end of August, I will reclaim fudge.org for blogging in ways that do not carry over easily to email.

This week, the digest is powered by Buttondown API and python scripts.

GitHub - JayCuthrell/buttondown-python-scripts: Simple python scripts for using the Buttondown API

Simple python scripts for using the Buttondown API - JayCuthrell/buttondown-python-scripts

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Hot Fudge Daily Digest

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📈 Markets Monday for 2024-07-15

Analyzing the past and future of the tech market in Markets Monday.

Last week

Looking at the week behind for the tech market.

I typically ask Siri how NASDAQ is doing and wait to hear it if is a big change or not. Siri logic on the definition of what to say if the there is +/- < 1% seems to be varied by day of attempts. More experimentation or going deeper into how Siri makes word choices will be interesting as the new Apple WWDC stories of Siri evolve over the year.

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

Last week I corrected my prior error and gathered the intended 5D view. I’m still working on an automation to be consistent in the future.

And again, “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.

The winners list last narrowed from five to… two.

Last week the expansion where the two (before the bell) went to fifteen. This week I waited for the bell.

This week went from 15 down to 13. Again, I waited for the bell and should probably begin to pull in some commentary once this view can be automated as well.

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 2024-07-09

Off the cuff analysis in a rapid fire format.

Let’s dig in…

Funds, Funding, and M&A

Techmeme: San Jose-based DreamBig, which develops chiplet platforms and was founded in 2019, raised a $75M equity round co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Sehat Sutardja (Chris Metinko/Crunchbase News)

By Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🍪 While $75M might not seem like a lot of capital, in the hands of open platform approach, it goes a very long way when the capital comes from an entity with A.I. hardware portfolio companies.

Techmeme: Vectara, which offers Retrieval Augmented Generation AI tools for enterprises, raised a $25M Series A, following a $28.5M seed in 2023 (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)

By Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat. View the full context on Techmeme.

🗄️ + 🤖 While others highlight the creative GenAI use cases of movie stars eating pasta, I continue to believe that RAG focused GenAI is a compelling area for Enterprise use cases.

Techmeme: London-based Huma Therapeutics, which uses AI to help developers make health apps, raised an $80M Series D at a nearly-$1B valuation, for $300M in total funding (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

By Saritha Rai / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.

🏥 + 🤖 While Star Wars has the “Medical Droid”, I think it is more useful to imagine your doctor or the nurse having recall for all of your medical history for your entire life then being able to keep the human element intact.

Techmeme: Kindo, which helps enterprises securely adopt and manage AI tools, raised $20.6M led by Drive Capital, and buys open-source security project WhiteRabbitNeo (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

By Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat. View the full context on Techmeme.

🔐 + 🤖 Money for cybersecurity companies is a thing and it also means that money M&A in the cybersecurity space is definitely a thing we’ll see more and more.

Techmeme: Sources: Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23B; Wiz raised $1B at a $12B valuation in May 2024 (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

By Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.

💰 + 🔐 I have no idea if this is real yet but if it turns out it is real then I have to mine up my LinkedIn post about Wiz from just 3 months ago…

🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2024-07-17

Explore the wild and wacky world of shared links from online Slack communities.

One unique thing about online Slack Communities is the use of #random channel. Sometimes you come across some real gems.

Each week I go through dozens of Slack communities and select the most interesting shared links found. This will be a safe for work list.

Join me in this collection of what is being shared that is wow, wild, wtf, and wacky each Wednesday.

Quanta Magazine

Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently.

xkcd: A Crossword Puzzle

Image tagged with strwrs – @systemic-dreams on Tumblr

Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified - The Verge

The new TUAW is ripping off its former writers.

German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement | Ars Technica

Four Brandenburg-class F123 warships employ floppies for data-acquisition systems.

Meet Cup Noodles' Latest Flavor: Campfire S'mores

Cup Noodles is at it again with its unconventional (and often polarizing) flavors. The global instant food giant just released its Campfire S'mores flavor, which is exclusively available at Walmart — and customers have been swift to react.

🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-07-18

Throwback Thursday will likely become a format based upon Fudge Sunday Weekly newsletter sections for "Shot and Chaser". Basically, this is a look back at a prior prediction or past news coverage and how that worked out in the present.

shot-and-chaser (2024) by Jay Cuthrell

the on again off again blog of Jay Cuthrell and Fudge Sunday 🤔💡🤯🤓 weekly newsletter

Past examples of "Shot and Chaser" included embedding content from Twitter (as it was known at the time) in the form of a specific tweet. As I come across Twitter URLs in my newsletter archive, I am finding that the change in Twitter ownership, degradation of URLs (link rot), and the transition between different newsletter platforms has made much of this content difficult or, sadly, impossible to follow.

For example, if you were to look back a few years or even a few months, you’d probably have wondering how many M&A stories would be happening at the rate they appear to be in 2024.

Wiz - At just over 4 years of age, this toddler has become a cybersecurity business growth success engine that has reportedly attracted the attention of Google.

Three months ago I highlighted a quote from the CEO of Wiz.

Jay Cuthrell on LinkedIn: Wiz CEO: 2024 Will Be the Year of Acquisitions

🔮🧠🤖🔐☁️📊
"So definitely we believe that 2024, for us, will be the year of acquisitions"
-- Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz

Three months later… a possible shot and chaser.

Techmeme: Sources: Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23B; Wiz raised $1B at a $12B valuation in May 2024 (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

By Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.

✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2024-07-19

Looking back at the week with an eye to the future.

(The elephant in the room is blue and it is a Friday when I write this update. So, I’ll update that topic in 🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday.)

I’ve committed to four events for the remainder of this year. I’ve also submitted a final version of a panel to PanelPicker for SXSW 2025 voting but I won’t be speaking on a panel but might submit a solo talk — maybe.

• AI Field Day 5 in Silicon Valley September 11-12, 2024 for Tech Field Day

• Monktoberfest in Portland October 2-4, 2024

• Cloud Field Day 21 in Silicon Valley October 23-24, 2024 for Tech Field Day

• All Things Open in Raleigh October 27-29, 2024 for CLS

• SXSW in Austin March 7 - 15, 2025

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

Spicy Edition Sunday for 2024-07-14

Unpack the spicy insights behind this week's edition, filled with deep links and fresh perspectives. 🔥

SXSW 2025: Senior Moments (2024) by Jay Cuthrell

A look at my SXSW 2025 PanelPicker submission

Next month, fudge.org Google Adsense goes live. Again, there will not be any annoying “please turn off your ad blocker” messages.

When I considered flattening hot.fudge.org newsletter via Buttondown it also occurred to me that I could write another newsletter too — possibly related to unicornjockeys.com or unicornjockey.com domains. However, it will need to be a deep niche and make a bigger splash to attract a following.

As fudge.org will be going through major revisions, this is a good time to think about changes. Again, we shall see.

Mastodon updates last week enabled a slightly different route for default.

Jay Cuthrell: "A #mastodonadmin workaround

$ git diff -…" - cuthrell.com is Jay's Mastodon instance

A #mastodonadmin workaround

$ git diff -- app/controllers/auth/sessions_controller.rb
def home_paths(resource)
- paths = [about_path, '/explore']
+ paths = [about_path, '/about']
paths << short_account_path(username: resource.account) if single_user_mode? && resource.is_a?(User)

So, now when someone on the interwebs visits cuthrell.com it sends them to "about" instead of the default which was set to "explore" which is of little use for a single-user instance.

So simple.

I think Buttondown supports code tags.

$ git diff -- app/controllers/auth/sessions_controller.rb

def home_paths(resource)
- paths = [about_path, '/explore']
+ paths = [about_path, '/about']

paths << short_account_path(username: resource.account) if single_user_mode? && resource.is_a?(User)

The result is /about vs. /explore which makes more sense for a single-user self-hosted instance.

I’ve been thinking more about using qthrul.com aka QTHRUL CORP as a holding. That would be a nice way to anchor all my other websites — including cuthrell.com, jaycuthrell.com, cuthrell.consulting, and maybe even fudge.org too.

🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2024-07-20

Unveiling overlooked tech news with a sprinkle of satire.

Peak 🏔️ vs. Peek 👀

Yes, a play on words.

By Friday, everything seems to be reaching the peak of getting news turned in before a deadline or dread-line.

Why Sneak Peak?

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.

This week was dominated by one story, Crowdstrike, that happened on a Friday.

Techmeme: CrowdStrike says a sensor configuration update to Windows systems triggered a logic error that resulted in a system crash and BSOD on impacted systems (CrowdStrike)

From CrowdStrike. View the full context on Techmeme.

Of course, other stories need to be seen too.

Insert Let's See Who This Really Is Meme

Techmeme: Oracle agrees to pay $115M to settle a lawsuit accusing it of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

By Jonathan Stempel / Reuters. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert Ceiling Cat Meme

Techmeme: Huawei sues MediaTek in China over alleged infringement of its intellectual property patents; filing: MediaTek says the lawsuit would have no significant impact (Nikkei Asia)

From Nikkei Asia. View the full context on Techmeme.

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

Techmeme: Xbox says an outage affecting Xbox Store and subscriptions is now resolved; the outage lasted for about five hours (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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

Insert That Wasn't Me, That Was Patricia Meme

Techmeme: Microsoft says it fixed an Azure configuration issue behind a Microsoft 365 outage, and “all previously impacted Microsoft 365 apps and services have recovered” (Simon Sharwood/The Register)

By Simon Sharwood / The Register. View the full context on Techmeme.

Insert Anthony Adams Rubbing Hands Meme

Techmeme: Venture funding to cybersecurity startups grew to $4.4B in Q2 2024, up 144% YoY; funding in H1 2024 was $7.1B, up from $4.7B in H1 2023 (Chris Metinko/Crunchbase News)

By Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News. View the full context on Techmeme.

Note: Images via Unsplash

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.