Happy Friday, this is LGTM. The newsletter that’s the peanut butter to your jelly, the blue-light blocking glasses to your cold plunge.. you get the idea

Here’s what we have for you this week:

• Where the tech jobs actually are

• Is Lyft over?

• Can AI deepfakes ruin your career?

Where the tech jobs actually are

Amid the barrage of constant layoffs, we thought it would be helpful to highlight where you can actually find a job. Here’s what we found:

Cybersecurity, apparently

Cybersecurity jobs seem to be more secure as work from home brings new security challenges, as well as increasing scrutiny from governments on data usage and app security. The bad news is that these cyber security jobs are a typically lot less lucrative that being a software dev.

Senior roles

According to interesting data compiled from Hacker News job postings, Full-Stack developers in senior positions are still in demand. This isn’t what someone just starting out may want to hear, but it’s reassuring news to code veterans out there. Also of note: remote jobs are still the norm, despite FAANG’s back-to-the-office push.

MapReduce & Big Data

According to data compiled by Dice, a tech recruiting platform, there’s big demand for tech workers who can work with big data. This is great news for data scientists, analysts, architects and engineers out there.

Mastering MapReduce, Elasticsearch, Apache Kafka and Teradata can surely set you apart from others and make you an attractive candidate, particularly if you are just breaking into tech. 

Is Lyft Doomed?

Lyft’s just founders stepped down and now an ex-Amazon and Microsoft exec will take the helm.

The company had a poor financial standing in the last quarter of last year, and its shares have declined 12.9% year to date.

David Risher, the new CEO claims that he will bring the company “back to basics” and made a bold claim: Uber is not their competition.

Risher claims that the biggest problem for Lyft is getting people out of their houses. The company faced a major decline around Covid, obviously, but this claim seems dubious.

Honestly, it seems like every CEO blames poor performance on people wanting to stay home lately. Where are they getting this information from? There has been a notable resurgence in travel demand, so Risher’s claims really don’t add up.  

If Lyft can’t offer a better or comparable ride-share experience at a better price than Uber, then they should just get out of the game. Because despite what tech CEOs are saying, people are actually leaving their homes.

Can AI deepfakes ruin your career?

There has been a huge influx of AI generated images on the internet. 

The most popular use we’ve been seeing has been making memes, but even though most of these images are just made for laughs, you have to admit that the images are getting eerily realistic.

Where is this tech heading? And what will stop people in the future from making fake images of you? As the tech improves, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that we might reach a point where it’s possible to generate images of random people based on the photos they post on social media. Think of a world where some psycho online can create fake incriminating photos or audio recordings and use them for blackmail. Pretty scary, right?

This might not be as big of a problem as it might seem. Luckily, the way the AI works makes it prone to creating these weird visual artifacts that make no sense.

Take the recent Balenciaga pope example: an AI image of the pope wearing a puffer went viral recently because it looked pretty dang real. But a more astute eye could tell it was AI due to features like blurred edges, mangled fingers, and distorted eyeglasses. Every image you encounter could be a deepfake: the future is here and it’s distorted.

Other Noteworthy Stories 🔍

📣 Hey, Google: Bye. Google voice assistant seems likely to be cut as the division has been “reshuffled” to focus on Bard instead. Google Assistant’s last hardware release was 2021 and has never made money, and only loses money. So maybe Google actually isn’t spying on you??

📣  Party with Zuck? According to an employee, Meta has brought a in DJ to play music in a cafe on its Menlo Park campus. This seems like part of the desperate push to make the office desirable again, and Zuck sure knows how to bring out all the stops.

📣 Midjourney abuse Remember when we at LGTM suggested you fire up Midjourney and get cranking on selling AI art a while back? Well, apparently you listened as the AI image generator has stopped their free trials amid claims of abuse and extraordinary demand.

📣 Twitter slams dev GitHub must provide identifying information on a user who posted some of Twitter’s source code, under subpoena. The code leaker is believed to be an ex-employee, who goes by “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub.

Well, that's all we have for you this week. Until next week 👋 LGTM. If you want more, be sure to follow our Twitter (@ReadLGTM) and Instagram (@ReadLGTM).