X 'Musks' The Spot
X 'Musks' The Spot
and you can sell your iris for free money!
Good morning everyone!
The tech world gets weirder and weirder…
Whats Been Cooking?
Musk Rebrands Twitter to ‘X’
To everyone's shock, Elon Musk is back in the news this week, and of course, it is regarding Twitter, which he bought back in October for $44 billion.
Twitter has now changed its logo and branding to ‘X’ and ditched the classic blue bird mascot. The blue bird, in its current form, has been part of twitter since 2012.
The reason for this change is for Musk to steer towards his ambition of creating an “everything app”, which he has hinted will be called ‘X’. In 2000, he registered the domain of X.com, which is now what you are redirected when accessing twitter.
In my opinion, I really don't know what to make of this change. Elon is an eccentric guy, for better or worse, and the impact of the rebranding is probably going to be negligible.
New Eyeball Scanning Based Crypto Currency
Do you want to make $50? Yeah? Well, by simply scanning your eyeball, you can get 25 Worldcoins!
This is Sam Altman’s, CEO and founder of OpenAI, current approach to get people to sign up to his new crypto currency, Worldcoin.
Users stare into a biometric ball that scans your iris, and gives a unique identifier. If you are in London, there is a site near Old Street where you can get some tokens if you fancy.
Altman’s goal with Worldcoin is to help distinguish between man and machine and also pave the way towards universal based income.
In my opinion, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder Ethereum, summarised it well when he referred to it as ‘Dystopian Vibez’.
Stack Overflow Announces OverflowAI
Since the release of generative AI tools, Stack Overflow has been struggling to retain its user base, and its traffic has greatly decreased since the turn of the year.
Originally, the developers of Stack Overflow banned any code generated by ChatGPT as responses to users' questions due to its unreliability.
However, Stack Overflow is now embracing generative AI into its platforms with the introduction of OverflowAI. The most notable is probably the OverflowAI plugin for VSCode, which assists users in writing code from Stack Overflow's solutions database.
In my opinion, this OverflowAI release is nothing too different from what we have already with other GenAI tools. I don't think OverflowAI will necessarily gain a substantial user base, but I guess we will need to wait and see!
Learning Highlights
Linear Programming
This week, I re-learned the mathematical optimisation technique of Linear Programming (LP). I remember studying LP in my A-Level decision maths course, along with other optimisation methods! While revising, I always wondered, "When on earth am I going to use it?" Well lo and behold, I am now applying it in my professional career. For anyone interested, I wrote a blog post about LP and how it can be solved using the simplex algorithm (there is nothing simple about it).
Reading & Listening
Medium Reading
Whilst be an active writer on Medium, I would also consider myself on active reader as well. I have listed a couple posts that caught my eye this week and might be of interest to any Data Scientists out there:
Oppenheimer
So this week, I watched Oppenheimer. Coming from a physics background with a specialisation in nuclear astrophysics, I already knew quite a bit about him and how atomic bombs work. However, the film delved more into the political situation at the time and focused on Oppenheimer’s life, which I found incredible. It's fair to say it was a spectacular film, and Cillian Murphy definitely deserves an Oscar.