Improve your Memory, Great Job Freeze, Dashboard Deutschland

Ramblings in todays newsletter:

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Hello, and welcome to your Wednesday! It's officially "Big Tech earnings season," which means it's time for billionaires to tell us how much more money they made while we were all busy trying to remember why our credit card bill is €1000 more than expected (Amazon Prime day 🙃).

Not everyone in tech is having a five-star week. Netflix shares took a 10% nosedive after reporting lower-than-expected net income. The culprit? A one-time tax bill of over $600 million from Brazil. Apparently, even streaming giants have to pay their taxes (eventually).

Meanwhile, Tesla reported a return to revenue growth as buyers rushed to grab expiring tax credits, but its earnings-per-share still missed analyst estimates. The company blamed higher costs from... you guessed it... restructuring and investments in AI. Even when they miss, AI is the reason!!!

Money Matters

Speaking of uncertainty, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and global finance ministers have a new buzz-phrase for the world economy: "simultaneously resilient and fragile." In plain English? Nobody has a clue what's going on. We're not in a recession, but growth is sluggish, and the official forecast is basically a giant shrug emoji.

Science Scoop

While economists shrug, astronomers are looking up. We had a flurry of near-Earth asteroids buzz us this week, including one that passed at less than half the distance to the Moon. It’s just a fun, casual reminder that the solar system is a shooting gallery and we really, really need to fund those planet-hunting telescopes.

Elsewhere, the Gaza ceasefire is holding, but just barely. Meanwhile, North Korea fired another round of short-range ballistic missiles (its fifth launch this year), and European leaders are still just "calling for a halt" to the war in Ukraine. It's the classic global dance: one step forward, two steps back.

Our Money, Our Risk, Real Investment, No Advice

Imagine you’re driving your career down the motorway, throttle wide open, dreaming of the fast lane: job jump, salary bump, new challenge. Then someone slams on the brakes, not because traffic ahead is jammed, but because … well, no one knows. Welcome to the age of the “Great Freeze.”

In the US labour market right now, companies aren’t firing (good news!), but they’re also not hiring (less good news). Vacancies are thinning, hires are rare, job-movement has slowed to a crawl, and unless you’re settled in your current role and happy with “same again,” you’re stuck.

Let’s unpack the keys to this weird state of non-motion:

Even though many businesses are reporting decent earnings and consumer spend isn’t collapsing, there’s too much lurking uncertainty, tariffs, supply-chain glitches, AI transitions, pockets of weakness (construction, certain services). So instead of laying off talent (which would cost rebuilding later), many firms are just keeping what they have, and not risking new hires.

After the chaos of the “Great Resignation” and intense talent shortages in recent years, firms don’t want to find themselves scrambling later. So they hold on to staff,but don’t expand. That means fewer new gigs open up.

Economists quoted in the article note that as we approach year-end, there’s no big demand surge, policy shift or stimulus wave on the horizon that promises a hiring boom. So the freeze may linger.

What to do if you’re stuck (and I mean you, job-seeker or career-mover)?

Global flavour: Is this just US?

Nope. While this article focuses on the US, other advanced economies show similar “low-hire, low-fire” dynamics. The Financial Times noted labour markets across the G7 are stagnating, and this isn’t purely a US story.
For Germany, the automotive sector, or EU tech services, this could mean softer demand for talent exports, slower hiring for off-shore development, and competition intensifying.

So here’s the gist: the job market isn’t flaming hot, but it’s not a dormant volcano either,it’s more like molten lava under water. Safe, but stuck. If you’re in a job: count your blessings. If you’re hunting one: strap in for the wait.

And if you’re reading this - Thank you for subscribing!!! (Easter egg 😉😉)

Just five days after nearly 13 million shares of U.S. stock were sold in one day in 1929, an additional 16 million shares were sold this day, called “Black Tuesday,” further fueling the crisis known as the Great Depression.

Did you already know this or was I the only one living under the rock? Some really cool stastics about Germany are avialable here: https://www.dashboard-deutschland.de/

Germany's official data confirms that since 2012, building permits for multi-family apartment buildings have consistently blown past those for the traditional single-family home. The good old German eigenheim is officially taking a backseat to vertical living.

Economically, this switch is the pragmatic, "build-up-not-out" response to high land and construction costs, making single-family homes a luxury few can manage. Socially, it means denser, more urban futures for us all. We're building neighbors, not backyards. Are we finally building enough, or just getting better at packing ourselves into pricey boxes?

Oh, joy, another tiny German company promising to save the electric car! But seriously, this one might actually matter.

A Munich-based start-up, DeepDrive, is turning heads (and possibly the entire EV industry) with a dual-rotor electric motor that they claim delivers up to 20% greater efficiency than what's currently on the market. That's a huge bump! They are already testing this game-changer in prototype vehicles for major automakers, proving it's not just a fancy PowerPoint presentation.

The implications are massive, especially economically. If DeepDrive can scale this up, car manufacturers can use smaller, lighter battery packs to achieve the same driving range. Smaller batteries mean less expense, less weight (which itself improves efficiency, it’s a virtuous cycle!), and a lower environmental footprint from resource mining. Basically, this is the key to making EVs cheaper and easier to produce, which is crucial as government tax credits disappear and prices become the main battleground.

The challenge now is moving from a cool prototype to mass production, a hurdle that has tripped up many a clever start-up. But if they succeed, it could fundamentally redefine the economics of buying an electric vehicle.

Stop handing your private files over to some shady website! That’s the entire pitch behind Vert, a surprisingly slick, self-hosted file converter that the tech crowd is currently raving about.

On the surface, Vert just converts nearly every file format you can imagine, documents, images, audio, and video. But its "killer feature" is that it runs locally on your own hardware, usually via a Docker container. Why should you care? Because online conversion tools are terrible for your digital privacy, forcing you to upload sensitive data to third-party servers with fingers crossed that they actually delete it. Plus, those free online tools always hit you with frustrating file size limits or paywalls after a couple of uses.

🎙️Oz Pearlman: On the paradox of small things and reading minds

Oz Pearlman is one of the most succesful ‘magicians’ who knows what you are thinking, famously refered to as mentalist. In this podcast he talks about how it is ‘not’ magic but rather the art of observation (👀). What I like about it was the part about the ‘Paradox of small things’ and how you can improve your memory with one simple trick.

If you want to show off your mental skills , take inspiration from this Podcast!

IN OTHER NEWS

Just about half the internet you actually use, think streaming services going dark, your smart doorbell refusing to answer, and work platforms suddenly deciding it's nap time. It's the digital equivalent of the main power line to the entire neighborhood getting snipped by a very clumsy, very large squirrel.

Meta is giving the pink slip to about 600 folks in its AI division, leaving everyone scratching their heads and wondering if the company is hitting the brakes on artificial intelligence while the rest of Big Tech is flooring it. But hold onto your algorithms, because the plot thickens!

Starcloud is preparing to deploy AI-data-center capacity in orbit this November complete with NVIDIA H100 GPUs and solar-powered gizmos that make the most of space's perks. Picture it: AI servers floating around like they're on a zero-gravity vacation, soaking up the sun's rays like they're at a celestial beach party. Who knew outer space was the new Silicon Valley?

LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis: continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs) - LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"!

In 2006, a NASA astronaut lost a $100,000 tool bag during a spacewalk, it drifted off into orbit and became an accidental satellite. 🧰✨ Talk about “losing your tools at work.”

The Mimimum Viable Product Team: Amod, Damian, Vlad and Ferdinand read your emails and comments daily.

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