👋 Hope today is a win. Speaking of wins, a voluptuous brown bear named 128 Glazer won Alaska’s Fat Bear Week contest for the second year in a row. The victory was extra sweet — Glazer beat out Chunk, a male bear who killed her cub, by 40k+ votes.
🎧On the pod:We tried an AI project that lets you talk to an older version of yourself.
NEWS FLASH
🔊 And you thought your neighbor’s leaf blower was bad: A group of residents in Granbury, Texas, filed a lawsuit against Marathon Digital, alleging that noise from the company’s 300-megawatt bitcoin mine has negatively impacted their quality of life. But the noise isn’t the only nuisance — the gas facility powering the bitcoin mine releases up to 760k additional tons of CO2 per year.
📱 Remember all that advice about how future job seekers shouldn’t be in photos of wild college parties? Startup Swsh is a photo-sharing platform that filters out alcohol, Solo cups, and images where users appear drunk. Its AI facial recognition tool can also identify people whose names you forgot because of all those beers you weren’t drinking.
💻 Have you been pwned? Great question if you’re one of the 31m people affected by a hack of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Troy Hunt, founder of data breach service Have I Been Pwned, said the alleged hacker shared a 6.4GB database containing members’ passwords, emails, and other info. There have been no demands, per an Internet Archive software curator, who said, “They’re doing it just to do it.”
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Tesla’s Powerwall has some competition: GM released its $12.7k PowerBank home battery unit, which lets users collect grid or solar panel energy at off-peak times and power their homes during outages or when energy prices peak.
Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz is out at The Washington Post and will start her own online outlet, User Mag. Lorenz said she enjoys being “very vocal online,” something that’s difficult when working for legacy media.
Horrible news: McDonald’s largest french fry supplier is shuttering a production plant in Washington and laying off workers, citing fast-food promotional deals that have driven more customers to downsize to a small fry.
TOOLBOX
Please enjoy your weekend — and also these helpful links:
🤝 Read:Four tips for people of color breaking into tech.
👀 Watch: Atlassian CMO Zeynep Ozdemir on how AI is making marketers 10x more productive.
🎧 Listen:This interview with marketing strategist Eman Ismail will help you plan more inclusive business events.
THE BIG IDEA
You can get the internet from lasers, but should you?
In 2023, a third of the planet’s population (~2.6B people!) still had no internet access.
Some days that seems enviable, but the internet has its benefits — like allowing us to easily source medical and educational info or to read this very sentence.
But many rural places simply lack the infrastructure to actually get hooked up or jacked in like everyone else.
Per CNN, a company called Attochron is hoping to help with a sci-fi-esque solution: lasers.
The technology to send data through lasers has existed since the ‘60s.
But we’re not blasting laser messages to each other like Stormtroopers because they’re easily disrupted by walls and atmospheric conditions like rain.
Attochron avoids this by transmitting short bursts of light, rather than one continuous beam, and using a broader light spectrum to provide a more stable signal.
With line of sight between a transmitter and a receiver, it’s capable of internet speeds on par with any regular connection.
Attochron’s setup is $30k for 10 gigabit connectivity and involves placing receivers on high towers — cheaper and easier than establishing traditional cable infrastructure, except that most of the planet already has it.
Are internet lasers the future?
Probably not. The $30k price tag on installation limits the target market and the overall vibe from CNN’s assembled experts is that they’re intrigued by its potential though hesitant about its technical limitations.
Attochron itself admits it’s an “enabling technology, not a replacement technology.” Besides, there are other, seemingly more viable solutions.
Satellite internet is widely available, but has its own drawbacks (e.g., inconsistent speeds, steep price tags).
WiLo — a combination of Wi-Fi and “Long Range” radio tech LoRa — could dramatically increase the size of wireless networks using existing hardware if researchers can make it more efficient.
While we wait for the last third of humanity to get online, feel free to print this out and share it their way.
It’s just a fact: Every newsletter writer everywhere drives a Lambo and slurps caviar by the gallon. How did email turn into such a profitable business? We’ll tell you all our moneymaking secrets.
You didn’t ask for three smart ways entrepreneurs are using AI, but are you really going to be upset about getting it?
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Share of logged-in Reddit users who are millennials, compared to Gen Z (29.6%), Gen X (19%), and boomers (7%). Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos speculates this could be because millennials still prefer reading and writing over video, and are at an age where Reddit’s many home improvement and finance topics appeal to them. Overall, Reddit usage is growing, with daily active users surging 51% YoY in Q2, as people target Reddit as a search tool — perhaps because, as we mentioned yesterday, Google can no longer tell you what a baby peacock looks like.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 2002, former President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.
