Tesla Recalls, TikTok Bans, Net Neutrality, and Taylor Swift

Weekly Roundup of News in Technology, UX and AI

Kyle Evans

Apr 21, 2024

If you haven’t followed us on Tiktok or Twitter, now is a great chance.

Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

🕹️ Tech Innovations
🚙 Tesla Recalls
📱 TikTok Ban
📶 Net Neutrality
💃 Taylor Swift

Podcast

Navigating Tech Innovations and Strategic Partnerships with Varag Gharibjanian

In this episode, I sit down with Varag Gharibjanian, the founding partner of Actuate, a boutique advisory firm. Varag shares his personal journey from an engineering background to pioneering in business strategy and technology partnerships, especially within AR/VR spaces. We delve into his early career challenges, significant milestones at major tech companies, and the lessons learned from merging technology with business. Varag also discusses the current trends in XR and AI technologies, providing insights into future developments. If you're interested in business strategy, the future of technology, or growing a business, you won't want to miss this discussion.

News and Useful Reads

Tesla Recalls Cybertruck Over Faulty Pedals—Its Worst Flaw Yet

I’m no fan of the Cybertruck. It’s a 7000 pound monstrosity. But the thoughtlessness behind so much of its design continues:

Tesla’s Cybertruck has been widely derided. Its panel gaps are wide and amateurish, it’s prone to rust, and it looks like an ergonomic cheese grater. Its most serious flaw to date, though, has resulted in a recall of nearly 4,000 vehicles…At issue is the accelerator pedal: Its pad can become dislodged, resulting in the pedal becoming trapped in the trim above it. This is, needless to say, quite bad.

TikTok ‘ban’ passes in the House again, moving to the Senate in foreign aid package

Why is our government so desperate to ban TikTok? Spoiler, it isn’t because they care about your data or your privacy, because they don’t. It’s about power, control, and money. Always has been. And this time it seems more likely to move through.

The House once again passed a bill that could ban TikTok from the US unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance divests it — but this time, it’s in a way that will be harder for the Senate to stall.
The bill passed 360-58 as part of a larger bill related to sanctions on foreign adversaries like Russia. It’s part of a package of foreign aid bills that seek to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Due to the urgency of the funds, packaging the TikTok bill with these measures means that the Senate will need to consider the proposal more swiftly that it would as a standalone bill.

What does the revival of net neutrality mean?

The FCC is taking up net neutrality again next week, which will be interesting.

Net neutrality is a broad term for a collection of policies that mandate internet service providers can’t meaningfully interfere with the way that web traffic is transmitted, including speeding up, slowing down, or explicitly granting paid access to websites or pieces of content.

Other Interesting Finds

Taylor Swift Is Having Quality-Control Issues

Far be it from me to speak ill of Taylor Swift. But as I listened to her latest album, I couldn’t shake the feeling of “meh.” I agree with many reviews that there wasn’t anything bad about it. But there wasn’t anything that really stood out either, which was disappointing.

The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album, could recalibrate the way we talk about her. Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic. This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests—it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy.

And a great discussion on TikTok: