BRS-004: In the News This Week

We interrupt the regular transmission of essays with this "In the News This Week" edition of Building Rome(s).

Dear Readers -

This week's Building Rome(s) will be a little different. I am enjoying writing the long-form essays. It gives me a chance to reflect on my career, experiences, the wisdom of the community and mentors I have been lucky to have in my professional life. I am working on an essay at the moment that needs a lot of thought and research so, for the time being, I am switching gears to focusing on tech news that you might find interesting, the mover and shakers in the industry.

As always, Building Rome(s) is a labour of love so please help spread the word and get your friends, family, significant other, colleagues, everyone to sign up.

Thank you for reading!

-Aadil

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📰 Movers and Shakers This Week

Microsoft revives Flight Simulator have nearly a decade and I so desperately want to buy a Gaming PC now.

Mozilla eyes revenue streams starting with laying off 250 people.

Belarus is in the midst of its own Arab Spring democratic revolution powered by Telegram.

Facebook just can’t catch a break; WSJ has a fascinating read on Facebook’s behavior monitoring hate-speech in India where Company execs are accused of favoritism towards the ruling political party.

Apple and Fornite creator, Epic Games, are gearing up for an epic showdown over App Store policies. This is a great explainer on the why this is happening. For the Techie Lawyers or Lawyer Techies here the lawsuit brief Epic filed; its a fun read.

It’s 2020 and Blackberry is still pumping out phones with physical keyboards.

The number of companies exploring buying TikTok keeps increasing but who is the right buyer?

As exciting as GPT-3 is, this op-ed in MIT Technology Review has doubt about how exciting the AI advancement is.

TikTokers wage a tech revolution against the Trump/Pence 2020 Campaign but Trump Team strikes back.

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📈 Wall Street In A Chart

Source: Google.

Did the stock market miss the Pandemic memo? Not really. Here is a graph that may shed some, I repeat, some light on why the tech stocks keep rising while businesses are shutting down left and right.

Apple became the 1st US company to hit $2 Trillion market cap.

Tesla is bigger than Walmart now (Why….)

Get excited, or not, for Apple stock split happens on Aug 31.

As tech stocks soar in a pandemic, this question comes up again - Are the Tech Stocks in a Bubble? This author doesn’t think so.

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📺 Video of the Week

This is perhaps my greatest find on YouTube. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, has some amazing videos on everything Physics. I found her via reddit and I have already burned a lot of time on her video which are so well done; even an average person like me grasped a lot of the concepts very easily. If you watch anything, this explainer on Do we need a Theory of Everything is what you should watch.

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That’s it for this week. See You Next Time! 👋🏽

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