Mar 13, 2023

FDIC Insured Daylight

Silicon Valley Bank failed, but we still saved daylight. The next big AI thing is gonna drop soon. You can apparently accidentally unlock the wrong Tesla. Twitter is charging absurd prices for their worse API. Also an asteroid probably wont hit us but you never know!

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BANKING STUFF

You have almost certainly already heard about this, but Silicon Valley Bank failed. The short version is this: they did an oopsie with their holdings and couldn't liquidate assets during a period where a bunch of people were withdrawing cash, making the bank go fwoomp. It's kind of a huge deal because its a very large bank used by a ton of companies who store lots of money there due to the bank actively working to try and skirt further regulation for financial gain.

Look at me, I am a regular financial analyst!

Anyway, the FDIC stepped in and took over the bank after they goofed, and a bunch of tech VCs were like "aaaaagh I better be made whole by the government" despite otherwise talking about how regulation is terrible and we need to have less taxes or something.

Things aren't looking super grim now though, as the fed has now said that they will do some fancy money stuff that I don't understand so that depositors at the bank can get their cash. This is Actually Kinda Good because otherwise hundreds of thousands of normal W-2 salaried workers would just not get their paychecks due to bankers and investors doing bullshit. But its also definitely a bailout in some regards, because this bank was purposefully used by a bunch of tech VCs trying to avoid further regulation.

Notably, this move isn't a bailout driven by tax dollars. Instead it will mostly affect major investors and such.

Oh, they also closed another bank citing systemic risk. Reminder that money is fake I guess.

Get ready for another trillion AI stories

GPT4—the next major iteration of the AI technology that powers stuff like ChatGPT—reportedly drops next week. Or at least, we'll see it.

The big headlining feature here is that this AI model will be "multimodal," which is just fancy talk for "it can do multiple formats of output" including text, image and video all in one.

Don't be fooled by people freaking out about it as some next generation AI that will be able to do everything or whatever. It's just a "better" version of stuff we already have, and is still not actually artificial intelligence, despite myriad viral TikToks about mind blowing AI stuff.

Oh, this? This is just my cane. I waggle it at the kids to get them off lawn.

Whoops, wrong Tesla

Using the Tesla app, a man accidentally unlocked and drove the wrong car. Somehow, he was able to unlock a nearly-identical Tesla vehicle, and it wasn't until he started noticing that things weren't quite where he left them that he took a moment to realize IT WASN'T HIS CAR.

Thankfully all people involved were just kinda like "what? lol" but also uh… WHAT? LOL.

Hey maybe cars shouldn't be able to be unlocked and turned on remotely by accident. Or at all???

Here is the kicker: The guy who found the glitch tried to reach out to Tesla, but their corporate email inbox bounced the emails back saying it was full. 👍

Daylight savings happened

and its bullshit

Twitter's new API will cost at least $42,000 per month

Okay real quick: An API is just a thing that lets developers interface with your system. Aight cool.

So Twitter's API used to be fairly accessible to developers, albeit not perfect. Twitter was originally built with a very open API which allowed for a nice ecosystem of 3rd party apps, but as Twitter started trying to turn a profit, they cut back on what you could do with the API.

After Musk's takeover, the Twitter API was announced to be shut down entirely, aside from enterprise stuff, which will now reportedly cost $42,000/mo at the cheapest tier, with far worse limitations.

For comparison, that is—put generously—14 times more expensive than the most expensive tier of their API before. The asterisk is that this is now only being billed as their "enterprise API", but that shuts out the vast, VAST majority of things that used the Twitter API. Research, analytics and safety investigations included.

In other news, Twitter was down again again again again a couple of days ago. Or rather, you couldn't tweet. Well, you could tweet, but only if you scheduled the tweet to be twote later. Its an actual mess. But it could be your mess for merely 42 grand a month!

Watch for falling rocks

There's reportedly some asteroid out there that could possibly collide with Earth in 2046. Specifically on Valentines day! Aww.

You don't need to live in fear: they put the chances of collision at "super very much extremely low," to be scientific about it. A 1 in 560 chance. And even then, we have previously proven that we can just kinda launch a rocket at an asteroid to make it change course so. Even still, its not particularly big and would probably just cause moderate damage to the immediate site of impact.

I dunno, I still thought it was pretty neat to know. But now that I've written this part, I'm realizing it is literally just "hey this thing could happen but probably not and even if it did it wont really matter". WHATEVER.