Shift Print

Discoveries, discoveries, #discoveries. A short bout before the next article.

7,000 slide presentation

To celebrate the launch of its new model, the Swedish car manufacturer Saab prepared a slideshow with 7000 slides which was broadcasted via 80 projectors. A brilliant summary of the history of slides, along with the story of creating PPT, can be found here – get tea, a long but entertaining read.

Geo-dirigisme 

Political researchers in Italy and Austria published a paper reconstructing the evolution of EU industrial policy via the lens of falling behind other global players. In addition to digital sovereignty, it’s a helpful perspective to evaluate how the union moves through the geotech world. The empirical heavy weight of the paper (the authors relied on an original set of almost 67,000 documents) makes it an impressive read.

Search engine traffic in the age of AI (and fast culture)

The traffic on StackOverflow, a popular fora based resource for programmers, went down by 50% since the launch of ChatGPT (and in response it launched OverflowAI). If you think of LLM prompts as search queries then ChatGPT become an advanced search engine and this trend makes sense.

Though Google constantly updates its algorithm (historically based on backlinks), TikTok, Meta’s duo and other social media platforms which are full of user generated and ranked content are gaining an edge over the search engine. This Verge article makes a thought provoking argument about Google’s future if it continues to remain the echo of vitality vs its driver. 

Business (and) history podcast

I recently started listening to Acquired and I haven’t been able to stop. Ben and David’s ability to contextualise historic deep dives with present day market moves is unparalleled and provides for a satisfying 2-3 hour listen. Best episodes so far are Nintendo and Blue Coffee.

🧠 🤍 🍵 Would love your help

I’m researching NeuroTech and the privacy, inter alia, challenges that it presents. If you work in the field or know someone who does, I would be very grateful to connect and speak over a virtual tea.

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