Peter Griffin

📻 On The Business of Tech podcast, Vanessa Sorenson, Microsoft's NZ managing director, joins me to talk about the hits and misses of Microsoft's 50 years, the differences between Bill Gates and his CEO successors, and the evolution of Microsoft's 34 year-old New Zealand operation.
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Future of Crown Research Institutes to be revealed A long-delayed report expected to overhaul the science sector is due to be released.

Spare a thought for your science friends today (again). Whatever it is will undoubtedly leave everyone feeling a bit of uncertainty

Future of Crown Research Institutes to be revealed www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

So Judith Collins loses science, tech and research portfolio, which goes to Shane Reti. So much for tech and innovation being central to powering economic growth.

So the app we've been calling RedNote is actually ... Charlwin Mao's Little Red Book??? Someone please reboot the simulation

I've had some fateful encounters on Ponsonby Road, but nothing that ever led to anything like that!

I never knew he was a Scientologist early on, explains a lot. But doesn't excuse the butter incident.

Yeah, it's grim, especially the butter incident.

Meta is making big changes to hiring practices, sources told me and @mikeisaac.bsky.social

- no more teams devoted to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- no diversity preference for working with outside minority owned supplier businesses
- no goals for hiring women and minorities

But in its panicked retreat from the system it spent years building, Meta may now be putting billions of users at risk. Just because Meta deleted that line about hateful speech causing offline violence doesn't mean it isn't true. And now the company has all but declared open season on immigrants, transgender people and whatever other targets that Trump and his allies find useful in their fascist project. "I can't tell you how much harm comes from non-illegal but harmful content," a longtime former trust and safety employee at the company told me. The classifiers that the company is now switching off meaningfully reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms, they said. "This is not the climate change debate, or pro-life vs. pro-choice. This is degrading, horrible content that leads to violence and that has the intent to harm other people."

I talked to 10 current and former Meta employees about the company's surrender to the right on speech issues. All were upset. One person called the changes "a precursor to genocide" www.platformer.news/meta-fact-ch...

Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried Google says its new AI model family has a curious feature: the ability to “identify” emotions. Announced on Thursday, the PaliGemma 2 family of models can analyze images, enabling the AI to generate captions and answer questions about people it “sees” in…

Google says its new AI models can identify emotions — and that has experts worried

🕴‍ Really enjoyed having Steve Vamos on The Business of Tech this week to reflect on what he has learned from an impressive career in leadership at IBM, Microsoft, Apple, NineMSN and Xero. Plus @bentm.bsky.social and I discuss all that's wrong with Aussie's social media ban. lnkd.in/gDcNGzUq

🧾 On The Business of Tech this week, Projectworks' Matthew Hayter and Mark Orttung on the company's recent US$5 million raise, building a team in the US, and the power of the Xero ecosystem. 📻 Streaming wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to 2degrees. @bentm.bsky.social
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The UK is done with coal. How’s the rest of the world doing? The country’s final coal-fired power plant just shut down, marking a major milestone for the notoriously polluting fossil fuel.

The UK phased out coal-fired electricity in 2024 after a decade of declining generation. Gas generation is also on the decline. If you want to meet growing electricity demand, it’s now cheaper to do so with renewables than fossil fuels. 🧪🔌💡 www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/30/1...

At Seattle’s Boeing Field, Real-Time Video Offers a Rare Glimpse of America’s Troubled Deportation Flights Key details about what happens inside ICE Air would still be hidden if not for a group of Washington activists and researchers, who are now using a live video feed from the tarmac to document the…

What happens inside America's vast network of privately run deportation flights?

Earlier this year, ProPublica's @mckenziefunk.com‬ reported on a group of Washington activists and researchers who use a live video feed from the tarmac to document these flights at Seattle’s Boeing Field.