Tag: Tech

I Wanted to Be Wrong About eFishery. I Really Did.

I remember the pitch. I remember the guy. I remember sitting in the same room as him around ten years ago, listening to people praising his tenacity, seeing well regarded people and startup figures laud him as a visionary, and walking away feeling that gnawing sense I’ve come to trust over the years. When the story feels too clean, too heartwarming, too startup-perfect.

But I didn’t say anything publicly to avoid being called out for having a markedly opposing view and being highly skeptic about it, not to mention the predictable judgment that would have come, accusing me of being envious while not being anywhere near successful. It was after all a gut feeling with little to back it up and I wasn’t about to go on a mission to take down the latest tech darling of the nation, the pride and Joy of the Indonesian startup community, with no support. This company was an international sensation and people in my circle knew of my doubts but I don’t recall posting publicly about it.

When everyone else was throwing praise and cash at a fish-feeder startup like it’s the second coming of Grameen Bank, it’s easy to start wondering if maybe you’re just being cynical. Maybe you’re jaded. Maybe the founder really was a scrappy visionary from East Jakarta who’s cracked aquaculture and was about to scale empathy and catfish across Southeast Asia. I mean look at all those articles about the company and how this guy appearing out of nowhere becoming something of a tech startup prophet.

Except now, here we are: $300 million gone, farmers screwed, machines abandoned, and the poster child of “tech for good” exposed as a meticulously constructed con.

And you know what? I’m not surprised. I’m pissed.

Because I wanted to be wrong. I wanted this story to be true. I wanted this to be the one that proved that impact and innovation and bottom-of-the-pyramid hustle could build something real. But from the beginning, eFishery had all the wrong kinds of charm: the underdog myth polished to perfection, the handcrafted pitch deck trauma-bonding with VCs who wanted to save the world without leaving the hotel lounge.

He said all the right things. He did all the right gestures, looking all pious and revered. And when the numbers didn’t line up? When the tech was too expensive for the people it was supposed to help? When the revenue made zero sense for a company claiming to transform Indonesia’s rural fish farms? Everyone just nodded harder.

I watched as global investors, SoftBank, Temasek, Sequoia (Peak XV), Social Capital, lined up to outbid each other for a slice of this sweet, scalable fiction. And the media? Oh, we played along too. We love a redemption arc. We love a startup that feeds fish and our desire to feel like capitalism might still be capable of doing something decent. Again, with all these big name international funds coming in to feed the fish feeding startup, who am I to contradict their supposed intellect and superior judgment?

But deep down, I kept thinking: this doesn’t smell like fish. It smells like a fishy performance.

Now that it’s unraveled, this wasn’t just a few optimistic numbers or an overzealous forecast. This was systemic. Two sets of books. Ghost transactions. Fake shell companies. A finance operation so convoluted it’d make a crypto bro blush. All of it propped up by a moral calculus so warped it might as well have been cribbed from a freshman philosophy seminar: “Yes, I lied, but I helped some farmers, so doesn’t that count for something?”

No, it doesn’t. You don’t get to run over everyone with the trolley and call it “net positive.”

The real damage here isn’t just financial. It’s reputational. It’s trust. It’s yet another blow to the already fragile belief that startups in emerging markets can build something real without burning down the ecosystem around them. This kind of fraud doesn’t just hurt investors. It makes it harder for every honest founder grinding away on a real solution with real traction and real limitations.

And don’t get me started on due diligence. Multiple rounds of funding, multiple term sheets, global funds with armies of analysts, and no one noticed the company stopped filing basic financials in Singapore? That feeder machines were supposedly deployed at scale with zero supply chain footprint? That fish feed producers weren’t even aware of this supposed revolution happening in their own backyard?

The worst part? Some people will still excuse it. They’ll frame it as a tragedy. As a good person corrupted by pressure. A “lesson” for the ecosystem. I get it. That’s cleaner. Easier. But I can’t do that. Not after watching people celebrate this company like it was changing the world, when some of us knew it wasn’t adding up.

There were moments when I wondered if I was just being too harsh, too skeptical. I thought, maybe I’m just tired of the hype machine. Maybe I’m projecting.

Turns out I wasn’t projecting. I was just paying attention and my gut was screaming against my rationale.

And now, here’s the wreckage: laid-off staff, bankrupt farmers, investors licking wounds, and a founder who thinks starting a frozen seafood business is part of his redemption arc.

No. You don’t get to fail upward on the backs of people you lied to.

This wasn’t inevitable. This wasn’t an honest mistake. This was a choice, repeated, amplified, and dressed up as progress. And he did it because everyone he asked told him it’s okay to do it because they all did it too. They all failed him and everyone paid the price. Fake it til you make it, they said. Well, in this story, nobody made it.

And I hate that my gut feeling was right.

On the other hand he managed to hoodwink Chamath Palihapitiya who deserves everything coming at him.

How platforms like TikTok and Twitter are like life itself

Social platforms reflect people’s behaviors but unlike life, you can uninstall and stop visiting them.

TikTok and Twitter are often described as mirrors of life; chaotic, messy, sometimes brilliant, sometimes horrifying. But here’s the thing: life didn’t come with an “uninstall” button. These platforms do, sort of (you can remove the apps or stop visiting them altogether). And that makes it a lot harder to accept their messiness as something we just have to live with.

The harm they cause is undeniable. The misinformation, the rabbit holes, the amplification of violence and hate, it’s all right there, front and center. And because these aren’t immutable forces of nature but products of human design, it feels logical to think: Why not just turn them off? If a bridge kept collapsing under people’s feet, we’d stop letting people walk on it. If a factory was spewing toxins into the air, we wouldn’t celebrate the occasional mural painted on its walls, we’d shut the thing down.

But TikTok and Twitter aren’t just digital bridges or toxic factories, they’re also marketplaces, stages, classrooms, protest grounds, and cultural archives. They’ve been instrumental in amplifying marginalized voices, organizing grassroots movements, and spreading ideas that would’ve otherwise been silenced. Shutting them down wouldn’t just erase the harm, it would also erase the joy, the connection, the organizing power, and the little moments of humanity they enable.

That’s the tension we’re stuck with: the pull between “this is causing so much damage” and “this is doing so much good.” And it’s not a tension we can resolve cleanly, because both are true. These platforms are not neutral, they’re shaped by design choices, incentives, and algorithms that reward outrage, escalate conflict, and keep users scrolling no matter the emotional cost. But they’re also spaces where real, meaningful things happen, sometimes in spite of those same algorithms.

It’s easier to point fingers at the platforms themselves than to reckon with the fact that their messiness isn’t an anomaly, it’s a reflection. They thrive on the same things we do: conflict, validation, novelty, and the occasional hit of collective catharsis. The darkness they expose isn’t artificially generated, it’s drawn out from people who were always capable of it. TikTok and Twitter didn’t invent bad faith arguments, moral panic cycles, or performative empathy, they just turned them into highly optimized content formats.

That’s why it’s so tempting to reach for the “off” switch. Because these platforms don’t just show us other people’s mess, they show us our own. They force us to confront the uncomfortable reality that the world doesn’t just have ugliness, it produces it. And no matter how advanced our moderation tools get, or how many advisory panels are assembled, there’s no elegant way to algorithm our way out of human nature.

But accepting that doesn’t mean we stop holding these platforms accountable. They’re still products of human design, and every design choice, from the algorithm’s preferences to the placement of a “like” button, shapes behavior and incentives. The companies behind them can and should do better. But even if they do, the fundamental tension remains: these spaces are built on human behavior, and human behavior will always be messy.

Maybe the real discomfort isn’t just about what TikTok and Twitter are. It’s about what they reveal about us. The chaos, the harm, the brilliance, the joy, it’s all a reflection. And if we can’t figure out how to look at that reflection without flinching, no amount of platform reform is going to save us from ourselves.

P.S: Let me just add that I’m talking about the old Twitter, not the cesspool of unhinged miseducated misinformed mass of misguided white supremacists that it has increasingly become, a.k.a discount 4Chan. On top of that, outside of the English speaking sphere of the platform, the old Twitter still exists unbothered or unaffected by what’s happening outside of their spheres partly due to cultural differences, partly due to lack of relevance, partly due to language, and perhaps a handful of other reasons.

Study shows AI overwhelmingly favors white male in hiring job seekers

Just read an article at Ars Technica that highlights something we should all be paying more attention to: AI-driven hiring tools still have a long way to go in terms of fairness. Tests show these systems tend to favor white and male candidates, confirming that even with all our tech advances, biases persist in ways we can’t ignore. And this isn’t the only article discussing this, it’s only the latest, which means it’s a long known problem that hasn’t been rectified.

For all the hype around AI’s potential to revolutionize hiring, if it’s just reinforcing biases, what’s the point? How are these algorithms trained and why are they showing a such a strong bias towards white male candidates?

If you’re a recruiter or decision-maker, it might be time to rethink the role of AI in hiring. We all understand the basic tenet of data processing, garbage in, garbage out. Until there’s a proper process in the middle that takes away such biases, people shouldn’t be fully reliant on technology for such purposes because it’ll only reinforce them.

These high end filters make “decisions” based on their training data and will reflect biases that are already incorporated. I’m sure you’ve heard about facial identification or hand sensors that don’t work properly or have high error rates when the skin color is darker.

Not saying human-led processes aren’t prone to bias, I mean these tech “solutions” were after all built to minimize the impact of biases from human judgements, but when the outcome is no different or maybe even worse, that’s no solution at all.

Angry Indonesian Internet Users Create Virtual Roadblocks on Google Maps in Response to Mob Murder

Indonesian internet users have flooded Google Maps with virtual roadblocks on nearly every road and street in the Sukolilo district, Pati, Central Java.

This digital protest comes in the wake of a tragic incident where a mob of local residents set fire to a rental car owner and his vehicle, resulting in his death. The victim was reportedly attempting to retrieve the car from suspected car thieves when the mob attacked. Three other men who accompanied the deceased victim were also assaulted and are in a coma in a hospital.

Several rental car business owners have come forward, revealing that they have long blacklisted rentals to individuals carrying Pati-issued identification cards due to concerns about vehicle theft. They claim that the regency is widely known within the industry as a hub for stolen motor vehicles, with many vehicles in the area lacking license plates.

Sukolilo subdistrict head Andrik Sulaksono rejected the allegations, saying the area is not a fencing hub and that it was all said by angry netizens reacting to the news of the murder.

Until recently, law enforcement authorities have reportedly taken little action in response to suspicions and public reports of vehicle theft in the region. This apparent lack of action has prompted some angry Indonesians to resort to vigilante justice.

The incident has sparked outrage among Indonesian internet users, leading to the virtual roadblock campaign on Google Maps as a form of protest and a call for increased attention to the issue of vehicle theft and the need for improved law enforcement in the area.

Police have apprehended ten suspects with evidence belonging to the victims found at their homes, and seized 27 motorcycles and 6 cars with fake registration papers, from one property.

Composite image of one neighborhood in Sukolilo showing virtual roadblocks on Google Maps on nearly every road.

Adam Mosseri further clarifies position about news on Threads

Instagram and Threads Chief Adam Mosseri posted on Threads to clarify what people perceive to be suppression of news on the platform.

I don’t believe the IG team and especially leadership are sneaky or malicious in any way but it’s difficult to see this statement and take it at face value.

Just to clarify, and this is on me for not being specific enough in my language historically, we’re not trying to avoid being a place for any news. News about sports, music, fashion, culture is something we’re actively pursuing. Political news is the topic where are looking to be more careful. Politics is already very much on threads, and that’s okay, we’re just not looking to amplify it.

He said that the kind of news (and presumably other types of discussions) they want on the platform is around sports, music, fashion, and culture. They prefer those to be driving the conversation instead of hard news or politics which are not actually banned but they want to be “more careful” about those topics, presumably, and it’s my guess, because of how sensitive and delicate they can be, not to mention Meta’s issue and history with the news media in general.

Everything in life is about politics. Sports is a battleground for political ideologies (Colin Kaepernick, anyone?), the fashion scene is a statement of political allegiances (Cate Blanchett, we see you), and music is a hotbed of political discourse (where do I even start?). As for culture, oh boy, if it’s not a political minefield then what is?

These are hot button arenas rife with debates over subjects such as race, social justice, equality, opportunity, and exploitation—topics that Meta appears to prefer to avoid. It seems Meta’s ideal platform is one of superficial harmony and feel-good aesthetics, shunning the gritty realities of societal discourse in favor of saccharine content and elaborate platitudes.

The more fundamental issue

Choosing what topics to focus on isn’t even their main problem. The Threads platform’s algorithmic approach to content curation is fundamentally flawed, prioritizing stale content and undermining the user experience.

The default ‘For You’ feed is plagued by a glaring disconnect between user expectations and delivery, as it frequently surfaces posts that are either already two days old—a virtual eon in the text-based social media space—or irrelevant and unwanted. This not only diminishes the freshness of the feed but also calls into question the platform’s understanding of ‘relevancy,’ which is intrinsically tied to the timeliness of content.

Additionally, the apparently elusive ‘Following’ feed, which offers a chronological timeline, is marred by its clunky activation and its baffling tendency to revert to the ‘For You’ feed at random. This erratic behavior disrupts the user’s control over their own social media experience, forcing them back into a loop of outdated content.

Threads says it wants to be a conversation platform but its default feed still struggles to surface timely and relevant posts. It is certainly a challenge to algorithmically deliver content that matches everyone’s unique sets of interests, and it has to be algorithmically driven if they want to ensure people don’t miss posts that they may be interested.

Clearly it’s not impossible to run a purely chronologically driven feed because Twitter did it before and Mastodon, along with its ActivityPub gang, still do, but unless you’re chronically online, the likelihood of seeing posts that are published while you’re away is small.

Without an algorithm that can be tuned to identify your interests and serve you posts that match them you’ll have to rely on other people surfacing them to you either by replying to those posts or have someone repost them and for some people that works just fine but when you run a platform with the intention of keeping as much of people’s time and attention, an algorithm is necessary.

In essence, Threads still has some ways to go to address the critical issue of recency, leaving users drowning in a sea of irrelevance. The platform’s inability to provide a consistently up-to-date and relevant feed not only frustrates users but also undermines the very purpose of social media—to connect people with what matters to them, here and now.

A text based social platform is inherently different to one that’s based on images or videos. Usage on TikTok and Instagram are driven more by entertainment value while text platforms are about what’s happening. If Meta wants Threads to be a place for conversations, let people follow their interests, not just accounts, and tune the algorithm to lean heavier on recency.

Why Apple debuted the M4 on the iPad Pro instead of the Mac

I’m working on a longer piece about iPads but I just want to put this out first. Fast Company’s Harry McCracken sat down with Apple Senior Vice Presidents Greg Joswiak and John Ternus to talk about the latest iPad models that just came out this week.

I’ve been wondering why Apple decided to launch the M4 with the iPad, breaking “tradition” with previous M series chip releases. Apple did mention previously that this generation of iPad Pro wouldn’t have been possible without the M4 and there’s been plenty of dicsussions about the M4’s capabilities and significance, but for some, the M series had unofficially stood for “Mac”. It’s a high performance class chip designed to do deliver the most power but also incredibly long battery life. While it does make sense for it to eventually make it to the iPad, I didn’t expect a brand new version to debut on the iPad. It had debuted on a Mac and new versions had been showcased first on Macs, until now.

According to Joz, Apple’s engineers were able to incorporate in the M4 the capabilities they need to support the technologies they want to include in the latest iPad Pro, which was why they went with it.

That Apple is in a position to incorporate the technologies it needs into the chips it designs doesn’t just explain how it was able to build the thin, powerful iPad Pro. It’s also why the M4 is showing up first in the iPad Pro rather than a Mac: Rather than being a Mac processor repurposed for an iPad, it was conceived from the start to drive the iPad Pro’s new OLED screen.

“Our chip team was able to build that controller into the road map,” explains Joswiak. “And the place they could put it was the M4.”

This to me is a sign that Apple remains faithful to the iPad line despite years of seeming neglect in terms of the direction of the product. At some point the iPad was going to be the future of Apple’s computing, potentially replacing the Mac, at least for the masses, but with the release of Vision Pro and the resurgence of the Mac thanks to the M series chips, that plan isn’t so clear anymore. Maybe now the plan is to offer different devices for different types of consumers. I’ll get into that and more in the upcoming piece.

Artifact News Reader is Being Shut Down

I’ve enjoyed using Artifact and it’s upsetting that it’s being shut down because it really seemed like it was on its way to be a really good news reader. It’s often the first or second app I open to kickstart the day. I like that Artifact lets you load an AI-generated article summary if you don’t have time to read the full story.

Artifact at some point added social elements but people just didn’t see it that way because it’s a news reader first and foremost. It also let you publish your own takes of the news linking to them, making it a blog platform. This part I enjoyed a lot. I didn’t post too many times but enough to keep me writing my thoughts on things that bugged me.

They said Artifact will remain up until til the end of February. I’ll be spending some time to republish those posts here and backdating them accordingly.

Ultimately for a blogger it all comes back to running your own space if you want to keep your published thoughts available to read on the web. Maybe one day I’ll eventually decide to have my own self hosted blog and social web instance like it’s always meant to be and move everything to that because platforms like there, including Medium and Tumblr, may one day shut down if they can’t justify keeping them around whether through lack of revenue or something else.

For my daily news reading there’s always Flipboard which I also still use regularly but I’m going to miss Artifact.

Shutting down Artifact

fastcodesign:

Stick-On Circuit Could Put Your Phone On Your Finger For Pocket Change

Related to my previous post, this would convince me the wearable era is progressing faster than perhaps most people expected.

Source: fastcodesign.com

Wearable Devices Are Still Overrated

I haven’t worn a watch since the year 2000 but prior to that, four or five years went by when I didn’t wear a watch. The last time I remember wearing one regularly was back at high school when my gym teacher always shouted in my ear to remind me to take it off during gym class. So after a few weeks, I decided to just dump the watch.

At first it was noticeable, not having a watch on my arm, but it didn’t take long before I got used to it. There were clocks almost everywhere I go and there’s always someone to ask for the time when a clock wasn’t around, so it stopped becoming a big deal.

Not having a watch was made even less significant when I got my first mobile phone upon starting university. The phone lasted several days on a single charge, unlike today’s smartphones, and it was always on. I didn’t have to bring a charger anywhere. A portable battery pack was unheard of, perhaps even laughable at that time.

Fast forward to 2011 when I began to stop wearing glasses and made the switch to contact lenses. The fundamental issue with both the glasses and the watch is that you simply have to take them off and put them back on from time to time depending on your activity. Maybe for some people this isn’t such a big deal, but for me it is. You can put it down to being forgetful but I’m one of those people who probably would accidentally leave his head if it wasn’t attached.

In university I had to tape a sign at the door of my apartment to remind me to carry my wallet, monthly tram/train tickets, keys, and phone. There had been countless times prior to that, and even a few after, that I had managed to leave the house without my ticket, my wallet, or my keys. I don’t recall leaving anywhere without my phone though.

Since 2010 though, I’ve managed to lose two iPhones and left one in the cab while on an overseas trip (thankfully it was returned), although I haven’t lost another one so far.

Which brings me to the growing trend in wearable electronic devices. Anyone remember those slap bands that you put on your wrists? The ones that served absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than being flashy accessories? I hadn’t seen one since the 80s until recently at a toy fair.

Anyway, the whole notion of putting something around the arm feels very unnatural and unnecessary to me regardless of the purpose. Sports bands offer measure your physical activities, track your run, and some other supposedly useful bio analytics. I’m not a runner and I don’t feel a pressing need to have my physical activities tracked and measured, no matter what anyone says.

Mobile phone makers are also trying their hands at making multipurpose armbands that not only tell the time but also serve as an extension of your smartphone. Is pulling a phone from your pocket that much of a nuisance to you? Is it such a terrible exercise to flick your mobile-phone-holding hand to see the screen that you have to put a proxy device on your arm to save you a single movement?

Sure, it may help locate your phone when you can’t find it or give you information when the phone is tucked inside your bag and you’re on a bike run or doing some other activity, but when these things run out of power around the same time as your phone, then what’s the point? Why bother?

I’ve given up wearing glasses in favor of contact lenses to save me from having to locate my glasses each time I take them off. Some of you will scold me for this but I don’t take my contact lenses unless I’m off for a swim. Even then I sometimes forget until I realized my vision was suddenly blurry upon resurfacing from the water. I take them off once in a while to clean them but they go back on soon after.

I’ve gone through about half a dozen glasses over 20 years having broken them accidentally each time. One or two even broke a number of times. Similar to my experience after not wearing watches anymore, after a few months, I’ve simply grown used to not wearing glasses and in the occasions that I had to, they felt really uncomfortable.

Which brings me to the head gear. I’ve had an opportunity to use Google Glass. Having that wrapped around my forehead is even worse than having to wear glasses. Maybe one day this sort of device will be more akin to regular glasses than the additional attachment that we’re familiar with today, and then people won’t feel that these things are too alien or too intrusive anymore. Maybe they will be embedded into future contact lenses.

In any case, these wearable gears at this point don’t really present that much of a value to most people as their creators and proponents would like you to think.

By no means am I a laggard. My entire life has been lived surrounded by electronic gadgets from game consoles to video players, laser discs, home stereo systems, portable music players, to desktop and mobile computers, to feature phones and smart phones, and I’ve even tried Oculus Rift.

Every consumer goods manufacturer will want to try their hands at making wearable devices that would work, and a handful of them will make millions from people who think that they need them. But at this point, I haven’t seen a real value out of those devices. They don’t present that much of a use other than as vanity accessories, unlike the iPhone after Apple introduced the App Store. At that point the smartphone had been around for almost ten years, all terrible devices.

Maybe we’re still at the very beginning of the wearable computer era, a time when everyone is still trying to figure things out. A time when you still would end up looking like a Borg when you wear them.

Let me know when they’ve managed to build holo projectors and the holo suite.

I want iOS to be modernized a bit more

The lack of gesture support on the iPod touch and iPhone makes for an awkward moment when you’re far more used to using the iPad which has a greater range of gesture recognition.

Not being able to do things like switching between apps simply by swiping from the side edges of the screen as opposed to a four finger swipe on the iPad or closing the app by pushing up from the bottom of the screen makes these tall screen devices feel rather quaint and underdeveloped.

I realize that Apple can be both revolutionary and conservative with regards to introducing interface features but after more than five and a half years of iOS, it needs a little more of the modern abilities not just to compete with offerings from other platform providers but also as a milestone in its own software development roadmap.

As it stands, the iPhone remains a safe bet for consumers who don’t want to have to learn too many new things as its comes with arguably the easiest and simplest mobile OS to learn and use.

I’ve got high hopes for Jony Ive to reboot iOS. – Read on Path.