Image: Mathew Schwartz / Protocol
Meet the next decade of computers

Good morning! This Wednesday, Arm made its biggest chip moves in a decade, Mozilla is still trying to fix the internet, the Clubhouse clones keep coming, AR glasses get a little more real and there's chaos at the Free Software Foundation.
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Self-driving cars. Ubiquitous VR headsets. Massive AI data sets. Connected cities. Totally automated factories. Hey, even smart washing machines. That's the tech industry of the next decade, and Arm's plan is to power all of it.
Arm introduced its new v9 architecture yesterday, the biggest leap the company has made in its designs since 2011. It expects the first v9-powered devices to come as soon as this year. In general, v9 is meant to support a much wider range of chips and use cases, as Arm chips go from "the chips inside mobile phones" to "the chips inside, like, everything."
Arm's chip designs are getting better-suited to machine learning as AI becomes more a part of every layer of computing. Segars said that can be tough, especially as low- and no-code tools let people build things at even higher layers of abstraction. Abstraction is the enemy of efficiency, of course; true believers write as close to ones and zeros as possible.
Arm needs this to pay off. Competition is heating up on multiple fronts: On one side, Intel's making a concerted effort to license its IP; on the other, RISC-V presents an increasingly popular open-source Arm alternative, particularly in the embedded space that Arm's targeting.
Oh, and the chip shortage? Segars didn't seem terribly worried, at least not in the long run: "If absolutely every wafer that can be manufactured is being sold right now, that seems to me like that's the strongest the industry could be." He said long-term forecasting is still a challenge for chip makers, and expects the next few years will bring a boom in semiconductor and chip manufacturing. Which would likely be very good news for Arm.
"Technology does not solve human nature." That's what Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker told me on today's episode of the Source Code podcast. She said she's excited about the possibilities that blockchain and other new tech bring to the internet, but cautioned that we can't rely on technology solutions to human problems. And as both the tech industry and its regulators move forward, she said everyone should be thinking less about how things work and more about how they're used.
Transparency is the starting point for everything else. "Transparency is a necessary prerequisite to so much of what we need," Baker said. "It's not enough, but it's hard to do really positive, effective things when someone else has all the information."
Baker's take on privacy is also pretty interesting: She said Mozilla has come to realize that saying "don't give us your data, we don't want it" doesn't actually accomplish much. The better approach is to figure out how to use people's data in a way that actually advocates for and adds value to the user. And "better ads" doesn't count.
Greg Goldfarb, who is VP of Products and Commerce at GoDaddy, admires the resilience and ingenuity of small business owners. "It is amazing to see entrepreneurs figuring out the new context really quickly to adapt and survive." We sat down with Goldfarb to talk about the rise in ecommerce, the impact of COVID-19, the major trends emerging this year and more.
On Protocol: Mimi Fox Melton said she's found the best time to make a company care about diversity is while it's still fairly small:
Nick Clegg said Facebook would give users more control over its algorithms, but also pushed back against the idea that polarization was all social media's fault:
The chip shortage might get worse before it gets better, Foxconn's Young Liu said:
On Protocol | Fintech: Western Union doesn't yet see crypto as a useful money-sending tool, CFO Raj Agrawal said:
Gavriella Schuster is leaving Microsoft after 25 years. Rodney Clark is getting a new job within the company, as CVP of global channel sales.
David Fischer is leaving Facebook after more than a decade at the company. Facebook's now on the hiring prowl for a new chief business officer.
Carla Cooper is the new CFO at Contentful, joining from Salesforce.
Dave Heiner is Truveta's new chief policy officerand general counsel, joining from Microsoft.
Brett Redfearn is Coinbase's new head of capital markets, joining from the SEC.
SoftBank is office-hunting in Miami. It's looking for up to 100,000 square feet of new space, as it tries to find ways to spend the $100 million it has earmarked for the region.
Francis Ngannou made about $500,000 by knocking out his opponent in a UFC fight on Saturday. He's going to make even more from his first line of NFTs, including the one above, called "The Crowned King," that sold for $283,500. It's like I always say: NFTs, they're better than a kick in the head.
Greg Goldfarb, who is VP of Products and Commerce at GoDaddy, admires the resilience and ingenuity of small business owners. "It is amazing to see entrepreneurs figuring out the new context really quickly to adapt and survive." We sat down with Goldfarb to talk about the rise in ecommerce, the impact of COVID-19, the major trends emerging this year and more.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
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