New brain chips, going incognito, and web3 burgers

Apr 18, 2024

Hello again.

As a reminder, I’m Chris Bakke.

…And you are?

Please respond, internet friend.

Let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly from the past few days. As always, we’ll flip it so we don’t end the newsletter on a bad note.

Google’s incognito mode wasn’t actually incognito Google finished a multi-year legal battle over their use of “Incognito” for incognito mode in Chrome. Spoiler: it wasn’t incognito, and was actually tracking user data. Even though they deleted the records last week, I need to get ahead of any bad PR from my searches leaking out, so here they are:
- how stock options work
- why cant i sell stock options at startup
- what is a private company
- what is a series b
- how many series b companies go public
- second mortgage on house
Here’s ChatGPT for Spotify, whatever that means. Every good tech stock needs a bit of AI juicing, and Spotify wants in. They just launched a feature that creates a playlist from a single prompt. I just tried it, and I wasn’t impressed with the results from, “a prog rock playlist to calm down my cofounder after he found out I spent most of the seed money on a custom super bowl ad that actually aired during the puppy bowl”. Didn’t work, he’s still livid.

The bad

Famously competent California government chalks up rare L. There’s a bill making its way through the California legislature that would force companies like Google to pay news publishers for their content. Thanks to California for standing up to the real enemy: the platforms that gave news outlets life.
A new brain chip enters the arena. Synchron, a Brooklyn-based startup, has a new brain chip to rival Neuralink. Many are saying this is great for human progress and blah blah blah, but I can’t handle another platform war. I don’t want to worry about my Neuralink messages to my Synchron friends showing up as green text in their brain. Can we just agree on a monopoly, just this once?

Apple allows game emulators on the app store. Big news for your friend who plays D&D and has a bacon tattoo: Apple is allowing game emulators on the iPhone, finally. Now, your kids can buy $99.99 microtransactions for the same game you played as a kid. What a trip down memory lane. Don’t expect this to be the end; the EU is slowly chipping away at everything that made iOS the safest platform.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club burger store closed. Looooooooooooooooool.

Okay, that’s all.

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