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A grant posted by the US State Department wants to counter Russian disinformation in video games through video games. Here's a summary from the grant: 

"Leveraging the popularity and penetration of video games in Eastern Europe, the implementer will develop an eSports program at American Spaces in Ukraine. eSports athletes will need professional training to form a talent pipeline to professional teams in Ukraine. In tandem with traditional eSports training, these athletes will receive counter disinformation/conflict resolution training to confront foreign propaganda and disinformation in competitive online gaming spaces. The project will culminate with an eSports tournament and coalition-building event on the sidelines of the tournament."

Is this a good idea or a bad idea? 

This stuff turns into pulque, the most delightful, mildly alcoholic beverage. 

Two investors want to re-invent news. And it’s the worst journalism idea I’ve heard in a long time.

Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz and Sam Koppelman — both 27 years old — are creating a newsroom that will be monetized by investments based on “scoops” produced by the newsroom, according to exclusive reporting by the Financial Times.

In other words, their investment firm, the $100 million hedge fund Hunterbrook Capital, is using journalists to write stories designed to affect the stock market. They’ll buy or sell stock based on those “market-moving” stories before the market moves — before other investors know about the stories — thereby profiting.

Read it all on Mike's List.

In a pickup of a Wall Street Journal article, the Tech Times re-reports that AI companies have nearly exhausted the available resources of the open internet -- they've already hoovered up most content on the internet to train their AI models. The piece expressed this in the headline by saying "AI Companies Are Running Out of Internet."

First Post expressed the idea by saying "AI companies have consumed the entire internet."

Meetings waste time, destroy solitary deep work and make a mockery of flex work and a globally distributed workforces. Here's the good news: We now have the data, the management systems and, above all, the technology to replace meetings with something much better. Read my opinion column at Computerworld.

A major shift in how cyber insurance works started with an attack on the pharmaceutical giant Merck. Or did it start somewhere else? Read my piece at SecurityIntelligence. 

Amira and I went to a friend's birthday party at a wine bar in San Francisco, and our friends Charlie and Julia (who are on the list to ride Waymo cars) called a Waymo. And it was Waymo fun than I thought it would be. 

Watch out, nomads. If you're using Google Fi, you need to spend at least some of your time in the US. Last month Google threatened to suspend my account if I didn't spend at least a week in the US during the month of March. (Which I'm doing now.) 

Amira got this from a baker in Italy, North of Venice. It's around 600 years old. This timelapse covers only four hours. 

The Aztec Calendar in Mexico City. 

The Silicon Valley city of San Jose lashed cameras to city vehicles to record video of the streets, then they process that video through AI to identify potholes, illegally parked cars. Now, they've added a new element: The hunt for homeless vans, RVs and encampments. This proves yet again that California will do anything to the homeless except house them. (A resident would have to earn nearly $100,000 per year to afford a minimal one-bedroom apartment in San Jose.) 

The companies San Ho is partnering with include Ash Sensors, Sensen.AI, Xloop Digital, Blue Dome Technologies and CityRover. 

AI's plan to replace humanity is proceeding according to plan, apparently. New research published in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education found that college students who rely on ChatGPT in their schoolwork are suffering from memory loss and tanking academic performance.

From a paper by DK Lee and Eric Zhou, called "Generative artificial intelligence, human creativity, and art" comes the fantastic term "generative synesthesia," which refers to "the harmonious blending of human senses and AI mechanics to discover new creative workflows."

Robots. Cyborgs. Artificial intelligence. AR glasses. Here’s my Computerworld column on why employees are about to get heavily augmented.

And beef, chiles and cheese sauce.

In this exciting episode of Mike's List, I talk about my experience using a highly conversational and highly personalized AI chatbot via my Ray-Ban Meta glasses while walking around Mexico City. 

Everything here in Mexico City was barricaded against vandalism by Women’s Day marchers; my Mexican friends advised caution (in a past March, my son was threatened with a taser by a protester). But nothing bad happened except defacement of the barricades themselves.

(Here’s why I say Mexico City is the chocolate capital.) 

My Computerworld column in which I make the case that AI glasses represent the technology revolution of the decade.

HEADLINE: "TikTok is encouraging its users to call their representatives about attempts to ban the app"

ALT HEADLINE: "TikTok, which is a threat mainly because of its power to sway public opinion, is swaying public opinion to affect US lawmaking" 

Bonus nugget: TikTok users are asking: "What's a Congressman?" 

Great reporting by Karissa Bell.