Business, Spoken

I have superpowers, OK? One of them is predicting earthquakes. Don’t go showing me “government” “reports” disproving my awesome abilities. Twice already this year, I have shaken awake before my house has. So you will believe me when I tell you, unblessed mortals, that my seismological Spidey sense discerns a Third Event. This catastrophe won’t involve literal tectonics. What I’m detecting is the quivering instability of the metaphorical.

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Microsoft's programming language TypeScript has quietly become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. TypeScript jumped from number 16 to number 12, just behind Apple's programming language Swift, in RedMonk's semiannual rankings, which were last published in August.

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A couple of years ago, I fell in love with a color scheme: off-white text accented with a buttery yellow-orange and a neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer author William Gibson. The colors were part of a theme called "Solarized Dark" for the popular MacOS code editor TextMate. To be honest, I didn't think much of Solarized at first. But I soon found that I couldn't work with any other color scheme.

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In January 2018, the top policy executives from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter testified in a Senate hearing about terrorism and social media, touting their companies’ use of artificial intelligence to detect and remove terrorist content from groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

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On Tuesday, Facebook reached a historic settlement with civil rights groups that had accused the company of allowing advertisers to unlawfully discriminate against minorities, women, and older people by using the platform’s ad-targeting technology to exclude them from seeing ads for housing, jobs, and credit—three areas with legal protections for groups that have historically been disenfranchised.

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Fei-Fei Li heard the crackle of a cat’s brain cells a couple of decades ago and has never forgotten it. Researchers had inserted electrodes into the animal’s brain and connected them to a loudspeaker, filling a lab at Princeton with the eerie sound of firing neurons. “They played the symphony of a mammalian visual system,” Li told an audience Monday at Stanford, where she is now a professor.

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European officials Wednesday fined Google €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for more than a decade of abusive practices in how it brokered online ads for other websites like newspapers, blogs, and travel aggregators. This is the third billion-dollar antitrust penalty levied against Google by the European Commission, which has fined the company more than $9 billion for anticompetitive practices since 2017.

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After each new horrific mass shooting, an all-too-familiar cycle often plays out: Reporters (myself included) race to attempt to unpack an alleged shooter’s possible motivations by piecing together clues from their social media accounts and online postings before it all gets scrubbed from the internet.

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The college admissions bribery scandal has all the components of a made for TV movie, including celebrity cameos, suspense, and unexpected twists and turns. Behind the broken admissions process and the drama, however, a different educational crisis is looming. According to a 2018 Korn Ferry study, by 2030, there could be a global talent shortage of more than 85.2 million people, costing an estimated $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue. In the U.S. alone, the study forecasts $1.

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The internet is an ocean of algorithms trying to tell you what to do. YouTube and Netflix proffer videos they calculate you’ll watch. Facebook and Twitter filter and reorganize posts from your connections, avowedly in your interest—but also in their own. New York entrepreneur Brian Whitman helped create such a system.

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