Competitive Pressures and Emerging Scandals in Tech

Why is Google feeling lucky, and the Intel situation slips into pure lunacy. Plus, thoughts on the C# Type Union proposal.

Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $2 a month off for the lifetime of your membership and contribute to our show directly Promo Code: jarjar

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
• OpenAI on X: "We’re testing SearchGPT" — We’re testing SearchGPT, a temporary prototype of new AI search features that give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.
• Google’s antitrust defense could benefit from the threat of SearchGPT — The new risk Google faces from AI challengers could play a role in the ultimate outcome of a landmark antitrust trial where a judge must decide whether the tech giant illegally monopolized online search.
• Intel's Biggest Failure in Years: Confirmed Oxidation & Excessive Voltage - YouTube
• Intel confirms that any Raptor Lake instability damage is permanent, and no, it's not planning a recall — Microcode patch can't reverse the damage caused by the elevated voltage - only prevent further harm.
• CrowdStrike Outage Losses Estimated at a Staggering $5.4B — Parametrix researchers have found that roughly 25% of Fortune 500 companies experienced disruptions due to the incident, the most heavily affected industries financially being healthcare ($1.94 billion in estimated losses) and banking ($1.15 billion). In addition, a shocking 100% of the transportation and airlines sector was affected, and the group will rack up an estimated $0.86 billion in losses, according to the forecast. The $5.4 billion estimate excludes Microsoft.
• Parametrix Analysis.pdf
• proposals/TypeUnions.md — A proposal for type unions (aka discriminated unions) in C#.
• California DMV puts 42 million car titles on blockchain to fight fraud — The project, in collaboration with tech company Oxhead Alpha on Ava Labs' Avalanche blockchain, will allow California's more than 39 million residents to claim their vehicle titles through a mobile app, the first such move in the United States.
• How Kamala Harris Could Usher in a Clean Slate for Crypto Regulation — She may not be appearing at Bitcoin Nashville this year alongside Donald Trump. But, if elected president, Kamala Harris could reshape the U.S.'s policy on digital assets.
• What is Operation Choke Point 2.0? Trump promises to end it. - YouTube — It was one of the many promises made by former President Donald Trump to a cryptocurrency crowd at this year’s Bitcoin conference. Crypto advocates have dubbed efforts to cut off the cryptocurrency industry from banking services “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” and Trump is vowing to end it.
• Operation Choke Point 2.0 — Crypto still needs on- and off-ramps for US dollars, but the US is making it increasingly difficult to maintain them
• Operation Choke Point 2.0: How U.S. Regulators Fight Bitcoin With Financial Censorship — “The clandestine Operation Choke Point had more in common with a purge of ideological foes than a regulatory enforcement action”, wrote Frank Keating, a former governor of Oklahoma who served in the DOJ during the Reagan administration, in a 2018 editorial for The Hill. “It targeted wide swaths of businesses with little regard for whether legal businesses were swept up and harmed. In fact, that seemed to be the goal.”