The new episode of Spinoff's The Fold podcast is a fascinating listen. Hal Crawford talks about Newshub and the future of news, a frankly dispiriting account that walks right to the edge of predicting the end of "general news" i.e. not specific to one subject area.
thespinoff.co.nz/podcasts/the...
Also about working on the gaming/crypto crossover. Every suspicion is confirmed - lots of money poured in to make crypto in games a thing, but there was no demand. (Crawford doesn't see this is because the offering is nonsense; he recites the usual "verify ownership of virtual goods" BS).
I've been beating the drum on here that "all the decision makers saying we gotta get into AI are credulous rubes, because they all fell for NFTs" - well here is one of those credulous rubes, blithely unaware of what he fell for. He doesn't mention AI in the interview but I doubt he's a sceptic.
particularly tagging @maetl.bsky.social, Mark if you want to listen to something that absolutely confirms everything you have already surmised it's right here, presented as a "funny and wild adventure"
Thanks for this. It’s immensely frustrating to me how our media-pols culture demands cost benefit analysis for basic things like feeding children school lunches but has continually failed to critically reflect on anything to do with crypto/NFTs and ‘AI futures’
Also people’s lack of understanding of technology plays into this, and I would say a lack of curiosity in asking lower level questions about the economics and supply-chains of computing.
2019: “Why are all those crypto people buying up all the GPUs?”
2022: “Why are we suddenly pivoting to ‘AI’?”
I am a regular listener to it. There's definitely a here's a good news story to tell about kiwi businesses but these two were particularly fawning. It's definitely no how I built this.
