By Johnny-Come-Lately

Staff writer

A tech sell-off shook global markets on Tuesday as attention turned away from developments in the US war with Iran and toward the future of AI companies and chipmakers that have driven stock markets to record highs.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index opened 2% lower on Tuesday. The Dow and S&P 500 were also down at opening.

All three major US indices have hit record highs this year, riding off a rush of funding to support AI technology and infrastructure. Nasdaq is up 10% for the year, while the Dow jumped 6% so far this year, breaching past 51,000 points, and the S&P 500 is up 7.3%.

But some economists have warned that the influx of AI spending is a bubble reminiscent of the dot-com bubble that burst in the early 2000s. Seven tech companies make up 30% of the S&P 500’s value.

The heavy reliance on a single industry and a few key companies has some investors wondering if it’s a matter of when, not if, there will be a burst. Those concerns have been heightened by signals from the Federal Reserve last week that it may increase interest rates, and therefore the cost of borrowing, in order to tackle rising inflation.

I do so love it when the media catches on to red lights visible from space for a couple of years. But the insistence that this is at all similar in nature and scope to the dot-com crash is still head-in-sand.

Next up: “Why were none of our sources being honest with us? We’re victims just as much as you are! We thought contributing to an obvious hype cycle was a good thing!”

I’ve not worked with databases in … more time than I care to think about, so this is an interesting look into something I knew nothing about. Perhaps less so for the rest of y’all.

Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least.

If it weren’t for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based (“Postgres” was shorthand for “Post-Ingres”).

The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month, he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term “open source” was even uttered.

In a sense, “Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn’t belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation,” Stonebraker said.

Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker’s revolutionary extensible architecture.

I received a text message from my editor: “Um, is it unethical to ask you to get an AI bf?? You can prob say no.”

Resentment. Contempt! Sorrow. Unease. I love text messaging. I have text message exchanges with, let’s say, 15 people a day. If you want me to do something, you should ask via text message. My editor knows this. She also knows, though it’s more complicated, that I love boyfriends. An AI boyfriend is a boyfriend who always, only texts back, immediately.

I had never looked at a chatbot interface before I received my editor’s message, out of a conviction that chatbots have no place in the society I want to live in, which does not exist and never will. I am also repelled by the topic of AI in general. Of course, I already use artificial intelligence for administrative tasks – translation, transcription, taxes – and I can’t deny that it improves, or at least simplifies, my life. But I believe talking to an AI directly, as if it were a person, is a capitulation to the enemy, an acquiescence to a warped vision of the world in which what I care about most, other people, could be eliminated in pursuit of total seamlessness.

The editor’s question implied that she wanted me to have some uncomfortable realisations. Maybe she hoped I would be seduced, my beliefs challenged through the touching clarity of personal experience. A cynic softens! A cynic sexts ChatGPT! Everyone would learn something, especially me.

As my boyfriends know, I really don’t like it when someone tries to put words, or emotions, in my mouth. In adherence to what might be called, at this dispiriting point in history, my faith in the power of language, I usually respond with more words. So I said I would do it.

Spoiler: The author came away unimpressed. But it’s a good story, and ultimately, that’s all it was intended to be.

OpenAI is rapidly expanding its global advertising business to attract more users to its platform amid its push to meet ambitious revenue targets.

“The revenue that we make from the ads offering is going to subsidize and grow access to information,” OpenAI advertising chief David Dugan told reporters on Monday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

After years swearing off of advertising, the company now hopes its sprint into the ad business will help it generate $100 billion by the end of the decade. That’s about half of Meta’s current ad revenue. ChatGPT launched ads in February for users of its free and “go” tiers, making ads populate in queries and conversations. The AI giant said it already has thousands of advertisers in its seven test markets, including in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. OpenAI said it plans to launch in Brazil and Mexico in the coming weeks, and eventually in India.

But while ChatGPT astounded users for years when it burst onto the scene writing essays in seconds and rap verses instantaneously, its advertising offering is less transformational. Users see ads targeted to them based on what, when and how they are researching, said Dugan.

While the company remained mum about the specific revenue that advertising was bringing in, it said there were some signs that current users weren’t alienated by new AI ads in test markets. Dugan said the frequency that users were seeing an ad and clicking away - was “far lower” than when the company began testing ads.

That’s odd, given that everyone I know endlessly complains that there are still sites that don’t endlessly serve up ads. Surely, everyone will like this more, and the anticipated returns will come to fruition just as all “AI” prognostications have.

For Ina Shkurti, like so many Albanians, the island of Sazan has played an outsized role. As a child she bathed in its “always calm and emerald green” waters, as a teenager it figured in her dreams and as an adult it was an indelible part of the memory and desire that drew her back, every summer, to Vlore, her home town across the sea.

What Shkurti never imagined was that plans to build a mega-resort on Sazan – one of two luxurious complexes on Albania’s southern coast backed by Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner – would trigger a revolt, an uprising that has convulsed the Balkan state in a spasm of disgust over the perceived excesses of “a rotten oligarchic class” just as it hopes to complete accession talks with the EU.

“Am I outraged? Of course I am,” the cartographer said as the contours of the uninhabited outcrop came into view from a speedboat scudding towards its shores. “Sazan is our only island. It’s a small paradise that holds a special place in the hearts and minds of Albanians. Having some rich couple come in, develop it, and then deny us access, would be a crime.”

Not since the collapse of communism, more than three decades ago, has Albania been shaken by such collective fury. At 32, Shkurti, whose family emigrated to the US when she was 11, is typical of the tens of thousands, both in and outside the country, who have taken to the streets in what has become known as the “flamingo revolution” because of the threat posed by the proposed resorts to wildlife and delicate ecosystems on the sites.

“This government no longer represents us,” she said. “It has chosen to represent oligarch investors like Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. These protests are not going to stop, even if they’re no longer exclusively about them.”

People who work for McKinsey have a weird definition of “prestige.” If finding ruthless ways to coat layoffs and industry collapse in a veneer of “progress” is prestigious, you might be a sociopath. So forgive me for not shedding a tear that “AI” is coming for them. I mean, it’s fertile ground if the prompt is “Provide the most efficient way to cut costs at this firm, focusing on firing everyone with institutional knowledge without providing a severance package. Provide a slide deck that shows how much money will be freed up for executive compensation while touting imaginary efficiencies from AI.”

Consulting is a delicate contract: endure two challenging, formative years – and in return, get a golden ticket to anywhere. Firms like McKinsey tout themselves as the “CEO factory”, and boast they’re “not surprised” to be consistently named the best place for future leaders.

The skills they promise to build – synthesis, sharp analysis, crisp communication, client-readiness, hypothesis-driven thinking – have enticed every generation’s top graduates. Get an offer from a place like this, and everything else will fall into place: about as clear a guarantee of future success as you could get fresh out of a bachelors. These firms spent decades marketing themselves as production houses of excellence, and until recently, they were.

But that value proposition no longer holds in the age of AI. Analysts are “either using AI for their own efficiency or being told to”, Zain Mobarik, a former consultant, put it to me. Another former consultant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, recalled a year-one analyst on her team asking if she could help him get the work done. The conventional approach would be to carve time for coaching, a “give me two minutes and I’ll work it through with you,” the way that all of us learned. He corrected her: “No, could you just send me the prompts to put into AI?” She did. His output gleamed well beyond his year of experience.

Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would make their personal information more vulnerable to breaches and possible exploitation.

But if it refused, the East African nation would likely lose out on more than a billion dollars to address HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and other illnesses, even as its people face ongoing threats from Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases.

So, on Dec. 10, it agreed.

“If you take the deal, you’re going to be exploited. If you don’t take it, you’re going to die,” said Ssekamwa, an attorney and digital rights expert in Uganda. “It’s the essence of digital colonialism.”

Across Africa, countries have faced similar dilemmas as the U.S. has held a series of closed-door negotiations in which lifesaving aid has been conditioned on access to citizens’ health data. The negotiations come in the wake of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which — in contrast with the new contracts — provided billions of dollars in aid with few strings attached. Officials in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana have been so outraged by the demands that they rejected the initial deals.

An exhaustive analysis of over 3,242 articles by the New York Times covering transgender issues from 2014-2026 revealed a stark shift towards hostile framing in 2022.

In January 2015, the New York Times’ only trans opinion columnist Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote an op-ed titled “How to Save Your Life”. The piece was written in the aftermath of the suicide of Leelah Alcorn. The piece was a powerful reminder of the difficulties that transgender people face in society and that transgender young people are among the most vulnerable. The piece ended with a quote from Alcorn’s suicide note stating: “Fix society. Please.”

This was a poignant article and an incredibly important piece of writing that allowed an openly trans opinion columnist at the most prestigious newspaper in the United States to share the last words of a transgender youth with the world as she pleaded for people to make society better. What was remarkable about this is that there was no issue at the time with a transgender opinion columnist doing so. By early 2022, this would no longer be the case.

In early 2022, the New York Times declined to renew Boylan’s contributing writer contract and thus left the paper of record. This left the Times without a highly visible trans voice. This was just one of the major changes that shifted how the New York Times would cover transgender issues starting in 2022 and would result in the reputation of the New York Times being tarnished with the transgender community.

Starbucks Korea will simultaneously close all its stores for a mandatory history lesson, after a disastrous promotion that evoked memories of a pro-democracy massacre sparked public and political backlash.

More than 2,000 stores will temporarily close at 3pm on 22 June, the company said, so staff can watch recorded lectures on modern Korean history and engage in “social sensitivity” training. The half-day closures will cost Starbucks an estimated 2.1bn won ($1.4m) in lost sales, according to data firm IGAWorks.

The measures follow a public relations crisis triggered when Starbucks Korea ran a discount promotion for its “Tank” tumbler series on 18 May, the anniversary of a 1980 massacre in Gwangju. The promotion led to store boycotts, customers smashing Starbucks mugs and tumblers and government ministries cutting ties with the chain.

Chung Yong-jin, the billionaire chair of Shinsegae Group, which operates Starbucks Korea under licence from its US parent company, will take the same training on 24 June alongside other executives.

Perhaps most surprising here is that the entire thing was homegrown, not an idea someone had in Seattle and forced upon Korea.

I’m just going to leave this here. Linked by my college roommate.

Warning: long read.

Guests were enticed with the promise of luxury villas overlooking aquamarine seas; a world-first crypto resort where the tech elite could commune over the latest digital innovation in opulent surrounds.

The promotional material from June last year pitched a sprawling, futuristic development that would hug the coastline of Timor-Leste, one of the world’s poorest countries, and donate a percentage of profits to philanthropy.

But in February, when a joint investigative team visited the proposed site of the AB Digital Technology Resort – separated from Dili airport by a barbed-wire fence – we found an empty plot dotted with shrubs.

The planned resort is at the heart of a four-month investigation by the Guardian and Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project into an obscure cryptocurrency and blockchain network known as AB.

“There was no quid pro quo” was, I’m sure, claimed at some point.

The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The couple were taken to New York after their abduction in January to face charges of alleged drug trafficking, to which both have pleaded not guilty.

The lifting of the sanctions on Rodríguez, which was announced by the Treasury department on Wednesday, allows her to work more freely with US companies and investors. Without explicitly mentioning the sanctions targeting her, Rodríguez, in a statement, expressed hope for US-Venezuelan relations.

“We value President Donald Trump’s decision as a step toward normalising and strengthening relations between our countries,” she said on her Telegram channel after the Treasury’s announcement. “We trust that this progress will allow for the lifting of current sanctions against our country, enabling us to build and guarantee an effective bilateral cooperation agenda for the benefit of our people.”

A new Israeli law that would allow the execution of Palestinians convicted on terror charges for deadly attacks, but not Jewish extremists accused of similar crimes, would constitute a war crime if enacted, according to one of the UN’s most senior human rights officials.

Speaking amid mounting international condemnation of the bill, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, described the law as “patently inconsistent with Israel’s international law obligations, including in relation to the right to life”. He added that it “raises serious concerns about due process violations, is deeply discriminatory, and must be promptly repealed”.

“Its application in a discriminatory manner would constitute an additional, particularly egregious violation of international law. Its application to residents of the occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime,” Türk said.

The legislation, passed on Monday by the Israeli Knesset, has faced a wave of criticism, including from European leaders and human rights groups.

I have some thoughts, but as this is a topic that usually gets contentious, I won’t share them at this time. Keep it civil, folks.

The BBC has a new head honcho in waiting, the Director-General designate Matt Brittin. His job: helming one of the world’s most famous and oldest international media brands, one with a vast and sensitive domestic position. His last job: President of EMEA Business and Operations at Google. You can imagine a greater culture clash, but you’ll have to work at it.

It is far too early to predict how Brittin will steer the largely unsteerable BBC, an organization in perpetual crisis in a rapidly mutating media, political, and economic hellscape. Some say his decades of experience in Google and impeccable institutional background make him the ideal guide and defender for the Corporation, which until very recently didn’t even have a YouTube policy. Others point out his complete lack of broadcast, editorial, or media managerial experience, his lack of presence in the Google C-suite, and Google’s role as a predatory destroyer of journalism.

So, Bari Weiss, just across the pond.

The head of Canada’s largest airline is stepping down after his video tribute to pilots killed in a fatal collision became a public relations nightmare for Air Canada, prompting a wave of mockery and indignation at him from both the public and politicians for not speaking French.

Air Canada’s CEO, Michael Rousseau, will retire by the end of the third quarter of 2026, the company said on Monday. He will continue to lead the company and serve on the board of directors until that time, the carrier said.

Last week, an Air Canada Jazz flight landed at LaGuardia airport in New York and then collided with a fire truck on the runway, killing its two pilots, Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther. The pair were praised by aviation experts for taking actions that saved passengers’ lives.

In response to the tragedy, the company posted a four-minute condolence video in which Rousseau spoke only two French words – bonjour and merci.

Canada’s largest airline is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, where French is both widely spoken and the official language. Forest, the 30-year-old pilot, was francophone, as were a number of passengers onboard the flight.

The Brent crude oil price is on track for its biggest monthly gain on record in March after the Iran war caused mayhem in the markets.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed by 51% since the start of March, LSEG data shows, beating the previous monthly record of 46% in September 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf war.

Brent closed at $112.57 a barrel on Friday, up from $72.48 a barrel on 27 February, the day before the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Brent traded as high as $119.50 a barrel during March, its highest level since June 2022, after Iran all but closed the strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil and gas would normally pass.

US crude prices also rose during March; West Texas Intermediate has gained 48%, on track for its strongest month since May 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was disrupting the world economy.

Oil prices climbed through the month despite the coordinated release of 400m barrels of oil from emergency reserves announced on 11 March. Analysts at BloombergNEF estimate that 9m barrels of oil per day have been knocked off global oil supply by the Middle East conflict.

Donald Trump appeared to lose his ability to talk down the oil price as the war continued. Earlier in the month, the president’s claims of progress in negotiations pushed down crude prices, but by late March his declaration of a 10-day extension for Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz was followed by a rising oil price and falling stock markets.