🌶️ Hot Fudge Sunday for 2024-08-25

August 25, 2024

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Hot Fudge Sunday 🤔 💡 🤯 🤓 is a free weekly newsletter containing a digest of the Hot Fudge Daily paid newsletter at hot.fudge.org in a single easy to reach URL. This free weekly edition is posted every… wait for it… Sunday.

Hot Fudge Daily Digest

📈 Markets Monday for 2024-08-19

Analyzing the past and future of the tech market in Markets Monday.

Last week

As a recap, what I try to do each week is look at the same key indicator that I take from a simple yahoo finance webpage. It’s not much but it’s how I look at things and this is what I saw today after the bell closed.

This week

Previously, I decided on a view from Yahoo Finance. For example, this was a view of intraday in Technology which usually gets around a dozen or so interesting companies.

If you are using Yahoo Applied Filters for Stocks screener you can bookmark your own heat map view.

% Change in Price (Intraday):greater than 4
Region: United States
Market Cap (Intraday): Mid Cap and Large Cap and Mega Cap
Price (Intraday):greater than or equal 5
Volume:greater than 15000
Sector: Technology
Industry: Software—Infrastructure and Information Technology Services and Computer Hardware and Software—Application and Communication Equipment and Electronics & Computer Distribution and Consumer Electronics and Electronic Components and Scientific & Technical Instruments and Semiconductor Equipment & Materials and Semiconductors

Update: Here’s what this chart looked like just before building this digest for Sunday August 25, 2025.

Heatmap of tech stocks — A healthy mix of things as of Sunday August 25, 2025

🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-08-20

Off the cuff analysis in a rapid fire format.

First… a quick nerdy aside. My Pi-hole approved list of FQDNs grows one entry at a time. Better than 1/5 of objectionable (to me) traffic is being effectively blocked. 🙏

Dashboard of my pi-hole showing 22.4% of objectionable traffic being blocked — 22.4% less garbage in my Interwebs!

And back to our regular Hot Takes Tuesday…

Funds, Funding, and M&A

https://www.techmeme.com/240820/p13#a240820p13

💰 + 🪖 The amounts being raised related to pursuit of US Government / Military contracts seems to be getting more press recently as software and AI/ML becomes the latest in technological progression.

https://www.techmeme.com/240819/p11#a240819p11

💰 + 🔐 Seeing funding coverage for companies with “cryptography” in the name vs. cryptocurrency or $omethingCoin might just mean that nature is healing.

https://www.techmeme.com/240818/p1#a240818p1

💰 + 🤖 M&A is alive and well in 2024 which means this pattern will likely occur a few more times before end of the year.

https://www.techmeme.com/240819/p3#a240819p3

💰 + 🤖 Speaking of M&A, the vertical integration for solving key customer challenges is very impressive when there is a specific carve out intended to focus on the accretive value of the combination and simultaneously widen access to growth in the process for the remaining entity… and it probably anticipates regulatory approval questions before they are posed.

🤪 Wacky Wednesday for 2024-08-21

Each Wednesday I go through dozens of Slack communities and select the most interesting shared links found. This will always be a safe for work list. 🙈

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/the-long-and-underappreciated-history-of-male-witches-and-the-countries-where-more-people-accused-of-witchcraft-were-men-354563

https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking

https://github.com/drakh/acid-generator

https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/curtis-eckerman-photographer-moth-man/

🔙 Throwback Thursday for 2024-08-22

Throwback Thursday is based upon the classic Fudge Sunday Weekly newsletter sections for "Shot and Chaser".

Basically, Throwback Thursday is a look back at a prior prediction or past news coverage and how that worked out in the present.

Encryption has been an increasingly thorny topic in the news as technology, privacy, and policy collide. For example, if you were to look back a few years ago, you might have thought the Sky ECC story was over.

https://www.techmeme.com/210313/p3#a210313p3

In fact, the story was only just beginning. This week, Sky ECC made news again.

https://www.techmeme.com/240821/p18#a240821p18

What makes this story interesting is the parallels of accessing encrypted messages years later as we face a future Y2Q. Notably, NIST standards for PQC arrived recently as well.

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/nist-releases-first-3-finalized-post-quantum-encryption-standards

✅ Final Thoughts Friday for 2024-08-23

As a reminder, I’ve committed to four events for the remainder of this year.

AI Field Day 5 in Silicon Valley September 11-13, 2024 for Tech Field Day
Monktoberfest in Portland October 2-4, 2024
Cloud Field Day 21 in Silicon Valley October 23-25, 2024 for Tech Field Day
All Things Open in Raleigh October 27-29, 2024 for CLS
SXSW in Austin March 7 - 15, 2025

As for me, the week in review is about being thankful for new and ongoing client work, amazing weather, and catching up with folks I haven’t spoken to for years. I also got around to finishing some languishing personal projects that have nothing to do with technology.

Switching gears back to technology, the bigger tech stories this week seemed to be AMD+ZT, Twitter drama, Microsoft Recall, Apple iOS capitulation, and US DOJ vs RealPage. My thinking is this:

As I've said, in numerous digital locations, expect more mergers and acquisitions in pursuit of forming moats and furthering vertical integration. AMD combining with ZT makes a lot of sense when you consider the number of chips that go into hyperscale cloud service provider data centers.
I no longer use Twitter. However, coverage on Twitter drama is something I cannot escape apparently and boy is there drama.
Considering the recent security concerns with Microsoft in general, a slower rollout makes sense. If anything, this delay will likely provide a window for the required upgrades in systems and devices to keep up with the demands of a Microsoft Recall workload itself.
As someone that enjoys iOS beta releases, seeing the EU compel one of the most valuable companies on the planet to alter course can be a bit surreal. Ultimately, this change in course is a net benefit to all.
While I haven't been in the rental market recently, this allegation against RealPage is a bit of a confirmation for my prior bias. When I've considered relocating to other cities and reviewed rental pricing, anecdotally, the oddly similar patterns were hard to not notice, and perhaps the US DOJ will eventually prove this was not coincidental in a court of law.

https://www.techmeme.com/240819/p3#a240819p3

https://www.techmeme.com/240820/p9#a240820p9

https://www.techmeme.com/240821/p25#a240821p25

https://www.techmeme.com/240822/p23#a240822p23

https://www.techmeme.com/240823/p10#a240823p10

🔮 Sneak Peak Saturday for 2024-08-24

Peak 🏔️ vs. Peek 👀

By Friday, everything seems to be reaching the peak of getting news turned in before a deadline or dread-line. It sometimes seems like we reach a fever pitch in news coverage throughout the week.

Then there is a trope, cliché, or bromide about slow news days and the quietly mentioned news updates sent on a Friday — to try and sneak it past wider coverage. Or, in a nutshell, peak patronizing publishing.

In that spirit, here are a few stories that you might have missed on the slow news of a Friday.