ZD 24.11: On Drone Wars and Gen Alpha
We can talk to killer robots oh what a time to be alive!
🥃 The Distilled Spirit 🥃
🏉 NFL on Netflix and on Christmas. Is nothing sacred?
👧 Who you are really chatting with on OF.
💊 Nobody is dying from fentanyl-laced weed.
🍺 Business side-effects of cannabis legalization.
🐶 Emotional support animals are a racket.
📉 Quantifying the US Safe Harbor Premium.
🥗 Sweetgreen is losing money on $15 salads.
🧒 Finding Gen Alpha 🧒
As a parent I’m working hard on keeping ahead of things in a vain hope to be able to relate to my child. I’d like to share a few things that I have found useful:
💬 Brain Rot Meme Monologue is not an inaccurate way of describing how they communicate.
🏫 After School by Casey Lewis is a daily read. The newsletter is a great way to keep up with culture in general. There is a reason she is popping up on CNBC every other week or so. Today in Tabs is worth a look if you want to go deeper into the rabbit hole. And Perfectly Imperfect’s profiles capture the spirit of the generation’s cultural inspiration.
👨 Being a boy in 2024 sounds pretty tough. If the doomscrolling isn’t enough you could end up getting your lifestyle roasted on Boy Room.
💵 Gen Alpha and Gen Z will have an outsized financial impact.
💣Emerging Warfare Trends 💣
Generation Alpha will be coming of age in an age of conflict. Technology has changed a lot since we last had land war at this scale in Europe or Asia.
🛸 The Ukraine War has driven significant advances in drone warfare. Mass wave attacks are not a new concept in warfare but AI powered drone swarms make such attacks much more affordable and repeatable.
🚀 Stopping rocket, drone and glide bomb attacks with very expensive — often multimillion dollar — missiles does not scale. Over the long term defense must be cheaper than attack or it will be by definition overwhelmed. There is a glimmer of hope. New energy weapons are capable of shooting down drones at 13 cents a shot. The US is also investing in laser weapons.
🌻 The Bismarck Cables has an in-depth Ukraine War update. The ISW points out that Russia is exploiting restrictions on US weapons to strike Kharkov from a safe space.
💻 Technology of Things 💻
It was a big week in the non-military techno industrial complex too!
🤖 GPT-4o is really impressive. Ethan Mollick circles the reasons why it keeps OpenAI in the lead and how ubiquity is the most important feature. The demos show that we are all talking to computers. But is AI is about talking to a really cool computer or something more?
🐷 Now that AI is getting a lot better, faster and cheaper it is creating an ocean of AI unwanted AI generated content. You can call it slop.
🔊 How it feels to be the voice of Siri.
🤷♀️ The term ’Wi-Fi’ actually means nothing.
😣 Interface design hint of the week: don’t leave users on their own.
😎 Cool Links 😎
Some fun and interesting links to get you through the week.
💿 Strong week at the Ringer. See the Oral history of Green Day’s Dookie. And the 50 greatest diss tracks of all time. While we are talking about music, an analysis of which tracks stand the test of time.