Curated Commons // Edition 106
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the 106th edition of Curated Commons. Happy reading, and do pass on the newsletter and share it on your social networks if you find it interesting! It’s free!
Let’s dive right in ($ indicates potential paywall).
The Streisand effect is real
There’s apparently a weird ‘viral’ challenge of cooking raw meat in medicine. The Internet is a messed-up place, so nothing surprising in there. But the FDA took notice and issued an alert. And good ol’ Streisand took over! - Read here
According to data a TikTok spokesperson sent to BuzzFeed News, there were only five searches for NyQuil chicken content on the app on Sept. 14, one day before the FDA posted its statement. By Sept. 21, there were 1,400 times as many searches on the topic, with around 7,000 searches recorded.
Don’t be Morgan Stanley
They discarded a bunch of hard drives containing unencrypted customer data. And the hard drives ended up on eBay! - Read here
There’s a new carbon offsets marketplace in town
Salesforce has launched one, and it just might be what is needed for companies that want to do good by the environment (as shady as offsets may be), but are, as Nat Bullard points in this piece, structurally constrained - Read here ($)
Once a startupper, always a startupper
When NewYorker meets Axios
The Axios founders wrote a book on how to write concisely. The New Yorker did not like it. - Read here ($)
The decoupling of economic growth and carbon emissions
More countries are now able to grow, while keeping emissions in check. All thanks to the falling cost of wind and solar energy. - Read here ($)
Is the world over-populated?
The planet is expected to hit 8 billion people in a few weeks. Bezos thinks we will hit a trillion humans. What does it mean for our future? - Read here
Mathematics is a secret superpower. Hiding in plain sight.
What happens when you try to re-learn Mathematics the young age of 65? You get a whole new perspective. - Read here ($)
What happens when everyone charges their EVs at night?
The growth of EVs is great. But if everyone starts charging their vehicles at the night, what does it mean for grid design? - Read here ($)
AI and the steps to a creative world
Good read from Sequoia on the rise of Generative AI and what it means for creative fields - Read here
The fields that generative AI addresses—knowledge work and creative work—comprise billions of workers. Generative AI can make these workers at least 10% more efficient and/or creative: they become not only faster and more efficient, but more capable than before. Therefore, Generative AI has the potential to generate trillions of dollars of economic value.
YouTube dislikes you hitting the dislike button
Study from Mozilla Foundation shows you hitting that dislike button might not mean much - Read here
A DB with “100 Bn records” added each day
Apparently there is a private security firm that offers Governments and business access to a database that “claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic”. Did someone say ‘privacy’? - Read here
“Mensa’s members seemed to be, on average, as dumb as the general populace”
A journalist spent a week at the annual gathering for Mensans. Makes for an…interesting read. Sometimes, being less intelligent is a blessing ;-) - Read here ($)
More interesting reads:
“Digital health care has its advantages. Privacy isn’t one of them.” - Read here ($)
Will Tesla’s Optimus robot become a reality? - See here ($)
There’s apparently a whole category of ‘accountability’ apps that are sold to churches and parents to police online activity - Read here
Patients immersed in virtual reality during surgery may need less anesthetic - Read here
Inside Russia’s surveillance state - Read here ($)
An interview with the last standing person in the floppy disk business. Lovely pics in there - Read here
Facial recognition is crazy. No wonder the leading vendor found one rare case where they come across as the savior! - Read here ($)
Apple’s trying to reduce its China dependence. And India’s the likely winner
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