Magic Leap, the $4.5 billion startup backed by Google building technology that “augments” human vision with digital imagery, is scrambling to finish a working prototype before an important board meeting next week.

WHEN I ASK people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would make almost any list of the world’s most powerful people. In retail, he’s clearly on top, and in tech, he’s close to it. In book publishing, he would be the undisputed No. 1 for 10 years running. In addition to a $65 billion stake in Amazon, Bezos owns the Blue Origin rocket company, The Washington Post, his own venture capital firm and a founder’s stake in Google. He might be the most powerful businessman alive, and his company is a credible contender to be the stock market’s first trillion-dollar corporation.

Ad sales are hard, but Medium had some early success. One of the sponsored ad series had generated over six digits in revenue all told, in part because Medium could run these ads on multiple publisher’s sites, one person said. It gave the business side hope. But that didn’t last. When the year ended, revenue fell short of projections, multiple people confirmed.

But as the “pseudo” in the name suggests, the numbers aren’t truly random. Because human beings create them using coded instructions, PRNGs can’t help but be a bit deterministic. (A true random number generator must be rooted in a phenomenon that is not manmade, such as radioactive decay.)

With fundamental technology change, we don’t so much get our predictions
wrong as make predictions about the wrong things.

When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.