Middle of August reads for ya’.

😭 or 😂: Do Your Emojis Make You Look Old? [multiple authors/NY Times] – The subhead tells you everything you need to know: When it comes to emoji usage, we’re all just following teen girls. “Teenagers now tend to use 🔥 where older people use 💯” and other pieces of fascinating/hilarious data/decoding, including Fastest Rising.

And of course, don’t sleep on 🚡

Chinese tech in Royal Navy drones exposes UK defence supply chain dilemma [Carly Page/Resilance Media] – From emojis to sovereign supply chains – I’m just that kind of guy. So it turns out that the UK military has been using British manufactured drones which promised ‘no Chinese components’ but (a) they had Chinese components and (b) it was discovered these components were sending “heartbeat” data (whether camera was on or not) back to an IP address in China. We’re entering a different age of security due to global politics, AI, supply chain risk, and the pervasiveness of software/chips in literally everything.

AI Is Rewiring South Korea’s Careers, Dating and Culture [multiple authors/Bloomberg] –

South Korea is dealing with similar issues to us – maybe even more acutely and rapidly:

“The more than 98% of workers who aren’t in the chip sector are increasingly feeling like bystanders to the bonanza. In a bid to spread the gains, the government plans to establish a dedicated fund to finance long-term investments in strategic industries, education, regional development and youth.The central bank has warned that gains from technology, equity markets and AI are disproportionately benefiting the affluent.”

New Media is Insider Media [Anu Atluru/Working Theories] – “Insider Media is the opposite of journalistic media—outsider media—made for outsiders by outsiders. Outsiders will call Insider Media an echo chamber or bubble, but the proximity is very much the product.” Proximity is the product. That’s such an interesting framing! There are 30 observations in this essay, and obviously I’d recommend reading them all. (for context, things like TBPN are considered ‘Insider Media’ by Anu, who was also early at Clubhouse).

Can Robots Save an Aging Japan? [multiple authors/NYTimes] – Turns out traditional cherry blossoms are grown and harvested by an aging population, without enough young people to replace them. This is true of several labor verticals within Japan (and I assume eventually the case in many below replacement rate societies).

“We had to do something,” said Mitsuya Kaneko, the head of the Nishikawa cherry blossom farmers’ union, whose parents, aged 75 and 84, still plod through the snow to prune and package winter sakura in a largely unheated shed. “We cannot just die out.”

The solution? Potentially robots.

Enter Monster Wolf, a made-in-Japan, fur-sheathed contraption with flashing red eyes and a piercing vocal range. As the couple’s cabbages grew sweet and crisp last season, Monster Wolf reported for duty courtesy of the Yamagata city government, emitting an assortment of sounds every half-hour that fluctuated between vastly annoying and genuinely terrifying. Motion also sets off the machine’s cacophony. The Sakurais were able to work without fear of an attack [from bears].

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Have a great rest of the summer!