James Farrell
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Peter Thiel seeking Silicon Valley ‘brain trust’ to guide Trump on tech issues
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has been approaching other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in an attempt to form a “brain trust” to help President-elect Donald Trump. Although Thiel, a member of the Trump transition team, declined to comment to the Washington Post when approached, The Post reports that Thiel has struggled to find members for the ...
A programmer regrets creating code designed to deceive teen girls
“Boiler room” workers at investment firms quickly realize that their position as “financial consultants” actually can mean that they’re “thieves.” Now, a software programmer has found himself in the same situation. A story published last week shows how one programmer ended up working for pretty much the antithesis of his own ethics. Canadian programmer Bill Sourour had ...
Commercial pizza delivery by drone has finally landed – in New Zealand
Food delivery by drone is on its way to the mainstream. This year saw 7-Eleven Inc., with independent drone delivery service startup Flirtey, deliver a bunch of sugary snacks to a resident’s house in Reno, Nev. The arrival of a Slurpee to a customer’s house courtesy of a flying robot was said to be a first in ...
Google Earth VR: mesmerizing, but with a few glitches
The Mars virtual reality experience, since it was first unveiled in January this year, was generally accepted as being literally and figuratively an “out of the this world” experience – the kind of the thing we might only have dreamed about when we first started seeing VR depicted in the movies. According to some critics, ...
With A.I. Experiments, Google lets anyone play with machine learning
Machine learning has led to breakthroughs in fields such as speech recognition and language translation, but mere mortals and even coders often still aren’t sure how to use it and what to do with it. Now Google Inc., one of the leaders in machine learning, which enables computers to learn without explicit programming, has opened ...
Who’s responsible for separating truth from lies – Facebook, Google or us?
Perhaps one of the catchiest memes that made the rounds of the Internet since President-elect Donald J. Trump decided to run was the one in which he’s quoted by People magazine back in 1998 as saying that if he ran for president he’d do it as a Republican. His purported reason: “They are the dumbest ...
Tech CEOs call for unity following outburst of negativity over Trump victory
Shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, many big names in the tech industry expressed their deep regret at the result. Now chief executives from some of the world’s biggest tech companies have called for calm. Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (above), currently facing criticism over the proliferation of mendacious news articles on ...
President-elect Trump’s victory just turned Silicon Valley’s world black
U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump was never popular with the tech industry. After a $1.25 million donation was made to his campaign by the investor Peter Thiel, an uproar ensued, with seemingly intractable divisions in Silicon Valley. The reaction of tech executives to Trump’s victory ranges from shocked and heartbroken to cautious acceptance. Only Thiel, it seems, was ...
Life after automation: Elon Musk echoes Karl Marx, but skeptics don’t believe in Silicon Valley’s goodwill
One of Silicon Valley’s most iconoclastic entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, just told us something we’ve heard countless times over the last few years: The likelihood of a robot doing your job in the future is high. The end is far from nigh, though, according to Musk, who mulled over the advent of a Universal Basic Income and ...
YouTube to clean up the most vulgar part of the web: its own comments section
“Why are YouTube users so rude?” It’s a question we’ve all likely asked from time to time when startled by the ignorance and verbal violence of YouTube users in the comments section. This has not escaped the attention of the world’s better-natured internet users, with Buzzfeed voting YouTube commenters as the nadir of online debate, calling the ...