🌎 Billionaire No More: Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company

Plus: Adobe to Buy Figma for About $20 Billion, Ethereum Completes Long-Awaited Energy-Saving 'Merge' Upgrade, and more…

Today’s pick

Billionaire No More: Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company. A half century after founding the outdoor apparel maker Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, the eccentric rock climber who became a reluctant billionaire with his unconventional spin on capitalism, has given the company away. Rather than selling the company… (David Gelles / The New York Times)

David Gelles @dgelles

🚨EXCLUSIVE: Yvon Chouinard, who founded the outdoor apparel maker Patagonia and became a reluctant billionaire with his unconventional spin on capitalism, has given away the company. All Patagonia’s profits will now be used to fight climate change.🧵 nytimes.com/2022/09/14/cli…

nytimes.comBillionaire No More: Patagonia Founder Gives Away the CompanyYvon Chouinard has forfeited ownership of the company he founded 49 years ago. The profits will now be used to fight climate change.

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Adobe to Buy Figma for About $20 Billion. Adobe is in advanced talks to buy Figma for around $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would be the software company's largest. A deal, to be paid for roughly half in stock, half in cash, could be completed as… (Cara Lombardo / Wall Street Journal)

Anthony DeRosa @Anthony

WSJ EXCLUSIVE: Adobe is in advanced talks to buy Figma for around $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would be the software company’s largest

wsj.comAdobe to Buy Figma for About $20 BillionAdobe is in advanced talks to buy Figma for around $20 billion, in a deal that would be the software company’s largest.

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Ethereum Completes Long-Awaited Energy-Saving 'Merge' Upgrade. Software revision seen cutting network electricity use by 99% Danger of bugs and other hiccups remains as the chain forks Crypto's most important commercial highway, Ethereum, just got repaved. The blockchain network completed the crypto world's… (Olga Kharif / Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Crypto @crypto

BREAKING: Ethereum blockchain completes its upgrade known as the "Merge," a revamp that slashes its energy use by 99% and shakes up the crypto universe trib.al/QQlZCkt

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There's no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI. It's not rare for similar AIs to limit users from generating certain types of content. DALL-E 2 prohibits sexual content, faces of public figures, or medical treatment images. But the case of ERNIE-ViLG underlines the question of where exactly the… (Zeyi Yang / MIT Technology Review)

Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅 @ZeyiYang

My latest: Baidu's new text-to-image AI ERNIE-ViLG can generate accurate images of Chinese food, pop cultural celebrities, and poems. But you won't see Tiananmen Square, Robin Li (Baidu founder), or 翻墙 (metaphor for using a VPN) in ERNIE-ViLG's world.

technologyreview.comThere’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AIThe new text-to-image AI developed by Baidu can generate images that show Chinese objects and celebrities more accurately than existing AIs. But a built-in censorship mechanism will filter out politically sensitive words.

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The Reactionary Geeks. Maybe you've heard that people are mad about Black actors being cast in Lord of the Rings. Or Game of Thrones. Or maybe it was Star Wars. Or perhaps Thor. Wait, maybe it was Titans, or Superman. The Witcher ? Or maybe you heard that people are… (Adam Serwer / The Atlantic)

Adam Serwer 🍝 @AdamSerwer

Wrote about the very stupid and unfortunately frequent backlashes to Black actors being cast as elves, mermaids, hobbits, superheroes, sith, etc and the more serious stuff behind it.

theatlantic.comFear of a Black HobbitThe demand to keep politics out of art is too often a demand for art to conform to conservative politics.

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