If you have had any nightmares about the singularity, aka robot apocalypse, let me put those fears to bed. In actuality the doomsday scenario will be much more clumsy and stupid looking than you ever thought robots could be.

As a Web Producer, I am entrenched in research – and today, I came across a site I hadn’t seen before – techzimo.com. After reading the first 2 sentences of an article about Uber, I began to think something felt a bit off about the writing.

Quotation marks were pressed right against the words before it, like”this”. Now the article didn’t include that many quotes, but what it did inhabit was a tangential synonym that didn’t quite contain.

If you felt your mind pause for a second while reading that last sentence, you’re not alone. You’ll notice some of the words almost work together, but not quite, and those kinds of mishmoshed sentences and punctuation faux pas are exactly what I was dealing with when reading the article.

Technically the quotes were around the right words, but the placement of the quotation marks in the rest of the sentence was all kinds of wrong. Also, some of the words used do technically equate to the concept the “writer” was looking to achieve, but given my experience, a real live human would use different words that are easier to understand…right?

After powering my way through the badly worded, weird misquoted article, I looked at who the author was. “Team TechZimo” wrote the piece, I immediately thought “Oh, well if there is a story no one wants to cover, maybe they throw a bot on the story and just let it go?”

Then I looked at how many articles “Team TechZimo” had written – 720 posts, but that’s not all, while writing to this point that number has reached 727. in the hour since I first looked at the site, 7 more articles were written, I thought “that has to be a bot.”

But that cant be…that’s an insane number of articles for a company to hand to a bot. So I looked at the home page to view all the articles, and I’ll bet you can guess what I found.

All were written by “Team TechZimo.”

That’s right. Every single article on this site was bot written.

My next question was “how long this had been going on?” So I investigated. The very first article was written on January 31st, 2020, and a 39 articles were written the day they opened the site!

To recap and to further drive home my point, this entire site did not exist 1 month ago but now has 729 articles up. Every one of those articles are filled with errors, but maybe not egregious enough issues to ring an average reader’s alarm bells.

So naturally the next thing I wondered was why? Why create a site that improperly writes news stories that people may want to read? My first guess is ad space, every page has ads. A single person can get a writing bot for free (I will not link one!), pay for a domain, get that bot a writin, and profit from generic ads.

I realize that by writing this and linking to the TechZimo site, I am almost contributing to the validity of this issue, but honestly I am more worried about the people who do not scrutinize their news sources.

Lucky for you (and other fact-driven readers), it seems many of the articles are mostly filled with plain facts. The only problem was with punctuation and word choice.

So while you are out inquiring the internet, be sure to”keep your eye to the grindstone,” and beware of this or any other one-authored sites that within 1 month, has 730 articles and zero comments.

Technology changes quickly and so does the skillset requirement by companies. Many people are finding themselves in the stage of their career path where they may want to try something new – and not surprisingly, make a nice salary doing it. The launch of coding bootcamps (starting with Code Academy and 2011) has been touted as the solution to educate those on a missing skillset and setting them up for well-paying J-O-Bs.

Coding bootcamps, now up to 95 full-time coding academies in the United States, offer job seekers training in an area where they can move in to a new career and also meet to provide much needed talent to employers who need people who can code. This doesn’t usually come for free though. Average coding bootcamps (6 months) can cost up to $21K with the promise you will land a high paying salary at the end of it. There are also many universities providing coding boot camp classes.

What does it mean when a free coding school launches (with the intent to provide an educational opportunity to those who maybe don’t have the funding for a large investment and/or the ability to take out more student loans) and simply asks for a portion of your starting salary once you land that incredible new Developer gig?

Sounds like a great idea. This meets the market demand for interested people to learn a new skill set and be ready for a new career in software development. Shouldn’t we be asking how easy it is for these folks to get hired after the program? The challenge with the Lambda School is that their curriculum and UX for online learning is in development.

While they intended to meet people where they were with an online platform (offering flexibility to the students and teachers), it has left a little bit to desire by its participants. The learning opportunities are constantly changing. The teachers are also not always available and most likely have other full-time obligations or employment.

Many students were left disappointed that they didn’t feel the education matched expectations and didn’t see how they were going to be able to be hired in to roles that would allow them to pay back the tuition. So much so they sent requests to get out of their signed contracts and halt the program.
It goes without saying that anything new has its challenges and businesses can only move so fast.

No matter how fast technology changes, we are humans and have certain human behaviors. Employers want to see real-world experience so even if you’ve taken classes, the candidate must be willing to do things above and beyond the class (volunteer projects and networking for sure). While we root for Lambda School to be a legitimate solution for those how may not have the budget for a full-time coding school, it might be worth the time to let them sort out their curriculum challenges and consider building up your skill set in this area in other ways.

While private investors remain wary of funding defense startups, they are still keeping an eye on the possible venture opportunities. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is hoping domestic investors will increase spending into these startups in order to compete with China’s strategy of creating private equity firms to invest into foreign technologies.

A major reason for the growing interest by venture capitalists is the shift in focus from traditional weapons to tools for information warfare, meaning software and tech systems. Defense startups are creating products that may have multiple benefits outside the DoD.

Changes in the defense venture landscape are slow with all three parties learning how to benefit from one another. Startups realize working with the DoD is a “mission-driven objective” as stated by Ryan Tseng, founder of Shield AI. “We went into this eyes wide open, knowing full well that to the venture community, the math doesn’t make sense.”

However, there are several big investor players already in the game. Andreessen Horowitz, a top-tier venture fund is banking on the economic sustainability of defense startups in the future. They’ve already invested in Shield AI and defense tech company Anduril Industries. Additionally, the Founders Fund, another big name venture firm led by Silicon investors Peter Thiel, Brian Singerman, and Ken Howery is investing in Anduril and goTenna after successfully backing SpaceX and Palantir Technologies.

Defense companies’ emphasis on tech could be the answer to challenges usually associated with DoD investments like competing against dominate manufacturers with steady government contracts and long procurement cycles. U.S. Code 2377 stipulates that commercially available items be considered first in procurement efforts. If defense startups can enter the market, they will also stand a chance of winning government contracts over bigger, traditional companies, thus diversifying the playing field.

But until there is a greater guarantee of a payoff, investors are likely to remain skeptical. The possibilities for this new generation of defense companies is going to needs some more wins to prove the future is in their corner.