Spotify, Bluesky, AI Run Wild, Robots, Tesla Fires, and Infowars
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
🖼️ Visual Thinking
🎧 Spotify AI Slop
🟦 Bluesky
🛂 AI Regulation
🚙 Robots
🦾 Tesla Fires
🧅 Infowars
Podcast
The Power of Visual Thinking in Product Management with Christoph Steinlehner
In this episode of Prodity: Product by Design, host Kyle interviews Christoph Steinlehner, a product management coach with a background in interaction design. Christoph shares his journey from web development and multimedia production to product management coaching, where he helps product managers and teams navigate complex challenges, improve communication, and find focus. He emphasizes the importance of visual methods in facilitating better team collaboration and product strategy, offering insights into how product leaders can balance internal and external priorities. Christoph also introduces his "Mapper Method," a six-step framework designed to clarify assumptions, risks, and strategies through visual mapping. Our conversation also delves into practical advice for improving product processes, creating effective communication, and advancing careers in product management. If you are interested in starting or advancing your product career, you won't want to miss this discussion.
News and Useful Reads
Not even Spotify is safe from AI slop
We wrote last week about Medium and AI slop. Spotify is facing the same issue, much like everywhere on the internet.
Besides, AI is just an accelerant for a type of fraud that’s lived on Spotify for years, says Batey. Fraudsters used to dig up old, obscure albums and digitize them or slightly alter a song that already existed. AI has just cut down on the amount of work that’s required to make the fake song needed to get the streaming money.
Bluesky surges to 15 million users after getting a million sign-ups in one week
If you’re looking for an alternative to the hellscape that Twitter has become, Bluesky seems to be a growing option.
Bluesky may still be the underdog in the race for alternatives to X, but the once Twitter-affiliated service is gaining momentum. The app just passed the 15 million user mark after adding more than a million new users over the last week, the company said in an update.
Will Donald Trump let AI companies run wild?
Probably. Especially since most tech and AI companies will stroke his ego enough to curry favor to do whatever they want.
Trump hasn’t given many details about how exactly he’ll rejigger the regulatory approach to AI, but he has promised to repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which tasked every executive department and agency with developing common-sense rules to rein in AI while also exploring how they can use the technology to further their work.
Inside the Billion-Dollar Startup Bringing AI Into the Physical World
AI isn’t just for computers. Companies are bringing human understanding to robots more and more frequently.
Physical Intelligence believes it can give robots humanlike understanding of the physical world and dexterity by feeding sensor and motion data from robots performing vast numbers of demonstrations into its master AI model. “This is, for us, what it will take to ‘solve’ physical intelligence,” Hausman says. “To breathe intelligence into a robot just by connecting it to our model.”
Four Passengers Die in Burning Tesla After Electronic Doors Seemingly Won't Open
Teslas are fraught with bad design, but the reliance on power doors is one that continually comes up. Users are often unable to open the doors when it’s too cold or the car is on fire. This is just bad design.
Authorities are still investigating the crash and fire. But the details that we have so far implicate to some degree the electronic doors used by Tesla and other automakers, which require power to open.
Other Interesting Finds
The Onion Buys Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy
This seems like a headline straight out of the Onion, but it’s actually from the NY Times. I don’t pay much attention to either the Onion or Infowars, but I can’t wait to see what they do the misinformation site, and how it will mock itself.
The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.