Five tech things (see what I did there?) that made me think this week. One involves particles in the stratosphere. One involves developers losing their edge. And one is the best community response to a corporate collapse I have seen in years.

The throughline, if there is one: technology keeps moving faster than our ability to govern it, understand it, or even agree on whether it is good for us. Geoengineering gets trialed before regulation exists. AI gets mandated before anyone asks developers what it does to their craft. Cars ship as software black boxes and owners only find out what that means when the company goes under. The Fisker community figured it out anyway, and that gives me more hope than most funded startups I see right now.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

Can Some Very Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes.

The materials produced by Stardust are made from amorphous silica, which is used as a food additive and in some consumer products, and calcium carbonate, a compound found in eggshells and limestone. The company said its particles were biodegradable, were not harmful to people or animals, and would not accumulate in the oceans or soil. Released in the upper atmosphere, the particles could reflect a small amount of sunlight away from Earth, the company said.

Geoengineering - is it good or bad? This idea certainly sounds like something a mad scientist in a dystopian science-fiction movie would try to develop, only to be stopped by the good guys. Or can we really safely use this globally to keep the temperatures down and make hotter regions livable again?

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Venture Capital Is Concentrating Faster Than Ever. What Happens To Everyone Else?

The fundamental question for the venture world now is: Does the rapid growth and capital concentration for the largest companies come at the expense of smaller startups, or does the success of OpenAI, Anthropic and the like expand the total addressable market for tech startups so drastically that it promises to grow and reshape opportunities across the entire ecosystem?

Everybody wants to be in on the mega-rounds, the safe bets of the probable industry leaders. It makes it very hard for startups that target specialist niches to gain any traction in their fundraising efforts.

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Fisker went bankrupt and owners built open source car company from the ashes

Within months of the bankruptcy filing, thousands of Ocean owners formed the Fisker Owners Association (FOA) — a nonprofit that quickly grew to 4,000 members and began operating as something between a car club, a tech startup, and an independent automaker.

The FOA hired independent tech experts who began reverse-engineering Fisker’s proprietary software patches. Members taught each other how to flash firmware. They organized bulk purchases of replacement parts — negotiating the price of key fobs down from roughly $1,000 each to a fraction of that through coordinated group buys. They hosted free global key fob pairing events, saving each owner $100 to $250.

This is a genuinely cool response to what could have been a total desaster. Cars are software black boxes and we need to better regulate this. Also, I’d love to be able to configure my own Android Auto or whatever it is called, because the latest release, which was 2 months ago, ruined my bluetooth…

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Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.

Oh well, get used to it. I really am not that sympathetic. Change is coming fast and we have to embrace it. The job of a developer will change tremendously, but developers will stay valuable, or becoming even more valuable when we do agentic coding and need to orchestrate agents to build software.

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World’s first native color LiDAR gives machines human-like vision

Ouster's technology is built around its new L4 chip, which embeds Fujifilm 's color science – the same expertise behind the company's imaging technology – to deliver hardware-level color processing. It integrates 42.9 GMACs of processing capacity, detects up to 20 trillion photons per second, and operates at 40 kHz with picosecond-level precision. Those numbers are dense, but they mean a single sensor can now read a traffic sign, detect whether the car ahead is braking by the color of its brake lights or produce topographic maps with real-world color data – all without additional hardware or calibration.

That is just really amazing and will improve the safety of autonomous vehicles even more.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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AI agents are breaking GitHub, algae robots swarm like locusts, and Japan has run out of robot wolves. This is a normal week in tech now. We also look at how Claude cracked open Apple's most hardened security in five days, and ask whether Apple's decision to sit out the great CapEx arms race is genius or a slow-motion mistake. Spoiler: they have done this before. The pace at which these stories are arriving is insane. Every edition of Five Things Tech we sit down to curate and find that the world has moved again, in directions that would have seemed implausible a year ago. The gap between science fiction and the morning news is basically gone. Buckle up.

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Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

Chacon believes GitHub’s current reliability issues stem from the current tsunami of agentic work.

This is “ironic” because GitHub was built to scale Git, he said. “But an influx of agents is pushing the service to the brink.”

The problem lies not with Git itself, but with everyone using one service, Chacon argued. Last year, GitHub had about 180 million users working across 630 million repositories – with 121 million created in 2025 alone, according to the company’s most recent annual Octoverse report.

It really is not that ironic that a decentralized versioning mechanism gets centralized and then becomes a bottleneck itself. GitHub is a great resource, hopefully it will be able to transcend into the future. We are also using it daily now for our software projects, which are of course powered by agentic coding. But even more importantly: gazillions of open source software repositories can be found on GitHub, which makes it such a valuable platform.

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New Algae Robots Swarm Like Locusts at the Flick of a Switch

Microbots that deliver drugs, perform surgery, or act as environmental sentinels are no longer science fiction. Swarms of these robots have especially captured the imagination of roboticists. Tweaking a swarm’s shape and size can allow it to tunnel into small spaces and do work that would thwart any single sophisticated robot.

This kind of stuff is mindblowing, don’t you think? How do people even get the idea to research this?

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Apple’s Security Has Been Tough to Crack. Mythos Helped Find a Way In.

Earlier this year, Anthropic’s AI found over 100 high-severity vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser over a two-week period. That is how many the rest of the world typically finds in two months.

Last September, Apple said it leveraged its hardware and operating system expertise into a technology called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), which it described as “the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade.”

With Claude, building the code that exploited the two MacOS bugs took five days, Calif says.

So impressive. Both what Apple has done and how the team used Claude to find vulnerabilities.

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Apple’s Binary Bet

It’s just such a wild break from their peer group. And it keeps getting more wild. It seems like the most binary bet imaginable. Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions when all is said and done – of dollars on fire, or Apple is going to be in big trouble.

Obviously, there will be some nuance there. Apple’s bet relies on a few factors, including that someone else is spending this CapEx on which Apple can rely. This is the “hybrid” approach to such spend that Tim Cook and others at Apple keep referring to. They’re basically saying that while they’ll do some of their AI work in-house, on their own servers, for the most part, they’ll partner with the others to rely upon their capacity. Most famously, Apple is now doing this with Google.

I think Apple is doing just what they did with the iPod and the iPhone - they let everybody spend gazillion to figure out how to make money with a certain technology and then they release the product people actually want and desire so much that they’ll spend a premium price on it.

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Japan runs out of robot wolves in fight against bears

Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors. Its speakers are programmed with over 50 audio clips including human voices and sirens audible over half a mile away. These aren’t assembly line products, however. Each Monster Wolf is custom made, and Ohta simply can’t keep up with the current demand.

What a time to be alive.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Facebook for grown-ups. Bitcoin for the quantum age. War by drone. A chip that is embarrassingly efficient. And the man who turned Silicon Valley into a political force. I have been reading so you do not have to.

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Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time.

Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teens wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.

While facebook might not be the current teen magnet, I still think that it makes sense to position itself as the place for the grown-ups. If only the algorithm would push more friends into the feed.

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Quantum Computing Is Testing Bitcoin’s Most Important Assumption

Quantum Safe Bitcoin replaces Bitcoin’s elliptic curve signatures with a hash-based signature puzzle that a quantum computer cannot efficiently shortcut, all within Bitcoin’s existing legacy script framework. The trade-off is cost: each transaction requires an estimated $75 to $150 in GPU compute, which is why the researchers themselves frame the scheme as a last-resort mechanism for securing large balances rather than a scalable replacement for everyday transactions.

What QSB delivers is a way for an individual holder to make a quantum-resistant transaction today without waiting for a network-wide upgrade. That is meaningful, particularly for institutions, custodians and large BTC holders seeking contingency options against future quantum threats.

Maybe FIAT, which is the crypto term for real money, is not such a bad idea after all?

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Ukraine’s rapid rise as an anti-drone powerhouse

In other words, the biggest European war of the 21st century was looking a lot like the First World War of the 20th century. Instead of the fast maneuvering of forces combined with air superiority that is typical of modern combat, the two forces were well locked into what were essentially fixed frontiers and trenches with neither side gaining dominance in the skies.

But the truly unexpected thing was what came next. Instead of simply being bogged down and hammering on each other’s positions, the reaction of both sides was to embrace military drones of various sizes to spy on or attack the enemy. This not only changed the nature of war in Ukraine, it also turned the conflict into a laboratory yielding results that the rest of the world is still trying to adapt to and learn from. And it isn’t just theoretical. It’s having real world repercussions in the Iran conflict and elsewhere.

The Ukrainians are really pushing it on all fronts.

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This New Chip Could Make GPUs Far More Efficient

To overcome these challenges, the researchers developed a hybrid design that combines a piezoelectric resonator with small, commercially available capacitors arranged in a specific configuration. This approach enables the converter to handle larger voltage drops more effectively.

The design was integrated into a prototype chip and tested in the lab. It successfully converted 48 volts down to 4.8 volts — a level commonly required in data centers — reaching a peak efficiency of 96.2 percent. The chip also delivered about four times more output current compared to earlier piezoelectric-based designs.

Chipdesign is so fascinating, don’t you think?

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The Venture-Capital Populist

The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials. Leave us alone to do our magic, which you can’t possibly understand, and everyone will benefit.

But about a decade ago, tech’s free ride ran into trouble. In 2013 Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the first popular web browser in the ’90s and now one of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, predicted to me a public backlash against technology companies over privacy rights, intellectual property, and monopoly power. With more foresight he would have included the addictive and corrosive effects of social media. Three years later, in 2016, Facebook enabled Russian meddling in an election that inflamed American divisions and sent Trump to the White House.

These people have to much money, power and influence. We need more and better regulations.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Hyperscalers are spending billions, but only one layer is compounding—and it shows everywhere: Amazon is stockpiling chips and power while still searching for a winning model strategy, Google pulls ahead by embedding Gemini across its products, and Microsoft leans on distribution to mask model gaps. Meanwhile, the real profits are quietly shifting to the infrastructure layer with memory chips turning into luxury goods amid relentless AI demand, software itself is becoming fluid with “personal software on demand,” robots are learning to share skills across hardware, and even the foundations—like Linux—are showing cracks under the pressure of this new stack.

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The $112 Billion Quarter

Amazon is betting on vertical integration. It landed 2.1 million AI chips over the past twelve months & its chips business has crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate, growing triple-digit percentages year-over-year. OpenAI committed to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS starting in 2027. Anthropic secured up to 5 gigawatts.

But Amazon doesn’t own the model layer. Google does.

The hyperscaler that owns the model layer is growing the fastest.

Google can nicely integrate Gemini into their products. Amazon still tries to figure out how to make Alexa smart and Microsoft hopes that people stay ignorant about the “performance” of co-pilot.

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AI Has Made Memory Chips One of the World’s Most Profitable Products

While fears grow over whether AI services will eventually reap big profits, an epic windfall is flowing to the companies involved in the build-out of related infrastructure.

The historic run doesn’t look likely to end soon. Based on Samsung’s prebooked orders, the supply crunch is expected to grow worse next year, said Jaejune Kim, the company’s executive vice president for memory. “The available supply is far short of customer demand,” he said on a Thursday earnings call.

Since the start of this year, shares of Samsung have risen by 72%. SK Hynix’s shares are up 90% and Micron has gained 65%.

Memory is the new luxury.

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Why one longtime coder says vibe coding matters beyond tech

Up until now, no one has ever been able to get enough software. Engineering was very expensive. It took a lot of time. You had to buy stuff off the shelf.

What we don’t know is: A world in which it’s fast to customize, in which it’s easy to make something that’s really bespoke, and where engineering might be more of your service org — to help you as opposed to this alien entity bolted onto the org that does its own thing — how does that all fit into the future?

Personal Software on Demand - PSOD. I just coined the term, you read it here first.

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Robots With Different Designs Can Now Share Skills

Surprisingly, the approach doesn’t rely on AI. Instead, the researchers analyzed the physical properties of several robotic arms with three rotating joints—a popular design in commercial settings—to map out their limits.

To complete a task, a robotic arm must calculate how to bend each joint to reach its target. It also has to avoid pushing the joints past their physical limits or twisting them at weird angles. Engineers call these limits “singularities” because they cause the math governing the robots’ motion to break down. Failures can cause sudden and unsafe movements.

Turns out that robots can play together just nicely, which makes them more or less human? You decide…

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The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.

Just at the time when I get my own linux server up and running after like 20 years, it gets hit by CopyFail. Yikes.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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The week in tech is basically: build stuff in cowboy country, burn the planet to feed GPUs, turn war into a drone SaaS line item, and then fix our eyes with liquid metal while billionaires LARP as end-times prophets. In other words, we’re speed-running a cyberpunk timeline where Texan hard-tech playgrounds churn out the hardware, gas-fired data fortresses belch more CO₂ than entire nations, defense departments subscribe to autonomy like it’s an enterprise license, and the same guys warning you about Armageddon are quietly trying to own the off-ramp.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

‘Startup Cowboys’ Are Making This Texas Town the New Tech Hotspot

Aspiring software companies and AI firms are still flocking to San Francisco. But more robotics, energy and defense companies are setting up shop under the blistering Texan sun. Places like Proto-Town are the latest sign that Austin and its surroundings are becoming a base for these so-called “hard tech” companies.

In their downtime, the mix of Texans, company founders and engineers who live in Proto-Town like to ride around the flatlands on dirt bikes, head into Lockhart for barbecue or drive to downtown Austin to go two-step dancing.

Startups on the site are attracted to the state’s low regulation and the build-anything atmosphere of Proto-Town and the surrounding Caldwell County.

This sounds like fun and necessary - when tech companies turn too corporate, they lose the ability to innovate. It’s the classic innovator’ dilemma that is hitting the whole industry.

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How the Tech World Turned Evil

Class warfare doesn’t get more unhinged than this. Say what you will about the American plutocracy, it seldom frames its economic self-interest as a religious imperative. But even in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement in human consciousness. Now a prince of the technocratic elite was framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against agents of Satan, with Thunberg and Yudkowsky cast as Gog and Magog. Suggest Thiel’s dominion could stand a bit more government oversight and he just might toss you into a lake of fire.

I remember the time when the internet was still largely uncommercial. It sure changed a lot and greed didn’t really do the ecosystem any good.

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New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations

As tech companies race to secure massive power deals to build out hundreds of data centers across the country, these projects represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential climate cost of the AI boom.

The infrastructure on this list of large natural gas projects reviewed by WIRED is being developed to largely bypass the grid and provide power solely for data centers, a trend known as behind-the-meter power. As data center developers face long waits for connections to traditional utilities, and amid mounting public resistance to the possibility of higher energy bills, making their own power is becoming an increasingly popular option. These projects have either been announced or are under construction, with companies already submitting air permit application materials with state agencies.

Lawmakers should require new data centers only to use solar and wind power, which makes so much more sense than relying on fossile fuels for these huge buildings with their immense power consumption.

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Pentagon officials broadly detail $55 billion drone plan under DAWG

The DAWG essentially absorbed the Biden-era Replicator initiative designed to acquire thousands of low-cost “attritable” drones, particularly for use in the Pacific. In its latest iteration, the department is looking to supercharge development investments across an array of platforms and collaborative autonomy efforts.

But to do that, it will take a big investment in the form of a 24,070 percent increase over the $225.9 million DAWG received in fiscal 2026. Specifically, the Pentagon is seeking a $54.6 billion ask for research and development dollars in the FY27 budget request — $1 billion in the base budget and the remaining $53.6 billion coming from the more flexible future reconciliation pot.

These numbers are staggering. There are so many military and civilian use cases for drones that a whole new industry is currently spawning.

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This artificial retina doesn’t just aim to restore sight—it opens a hidden channel of vision

The artificial retina developed by this research team has two primary components: a phototransistor array and a set of liquid metal micropillar electrodes. The phototransistor array is a grid of tiny, light-sensitive devices that can detect near-infrared light (i.e., light that is just beyond visible wavelengths) and convert it into electrical signals.

Liquid metal micropillar electrodes, on the other hand, are pillar-shaped structures made of a soft liquid metal that conducts electricity. These structures deliver the electrical signals produced by the phototransistors directly to cells in the retina that send visual information to the brain, known as retinal ganglion cells. In most cases of retinal degeneration, these cells are less affected than photoreceptor cells, thus they might still be able to transmit information to the brain.

Ray-Ban Meta smart-glasses are so 2025.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Europe might actually have a shot at winning the quantum computing race because there is no legacy advantage to overcome, just pure math and capital deployment. But before you celebrate, consider this: Google and Cloudflare just moved their post-quantum cryptography deadlines up to 2029 (five years earlier than planned) because new research suggests cryptographically relevant quantum computers may arrive sooner than anyone expected. Meanwhile Anthropic’s Mythos model is already pulling off digital bank heists, orchestrating complete attacks from bypassing security protocols to breaking into digital vaults, the kind of critical bugs normally found only by the world’s best hackers. And while we worry about quantum threats and AI security risks, AI is already designing the next generation of chips that will accelerate both quantum computing development and AI capability itself, creating a feedback loop nobody fully understands yet.

Oh, and half of all PHP developers have over 15 years of experience with only 15% having five years or less, which means the language powering a massive chunk of the web is facing a retirement crisis with no replacement workforce in sight. So we have quantum computers racing toward breaking all our encryption, AI models that can hack entire systems, chip design entering an AI-accelerated era, and the infrastructure holding up the current web slowly aging out without successors. The rest of the 2020s are going to be wild.

Enjoy Five Things Tech!

Quantum computing: A tech race Europe could win?

“At the end of the day, it’s a math challenge. There is no unfair advantage from legacy technology like classical computing or something like that, so there is no reason to be shy.”

The main challenge, says Peronnin, is putting the capital together. “But Europe is definitely not poor and this is a technological opportunity for Europe to reshuffle a bit the cards in terms of autonomous strategy and our ability to have economic leading players,” he says.

There is a strong feeling that while Europe missed the boat on so many tech revolutions of recent years, at least when it came to transitioning from the research to the industrial stage, things could be different this time.

I currently have the feeling that while Europe is doing pretty okay with Quantum, we will soon be overtaken by USA and China when they utilize their AI compute to drastically advance Quantum research and design.

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Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Earlier this month, both Google and Cloudflare bumped up their internal deadline for PQC (post-quantum cryptography) readiness to 2029, an acceleration of roughly five years. The moves were largely prompted by two pieces of research showing that CRQC (cryptographically relevant quantum computing/computer) may arrive sooner than previously estimated.

While there’s little known evidence that a CRQC will emerge in the next four years, the revised deadlines set a good example for peers such as Amazon and Microsoft, whose timelines are two to six years longer. They also largely align with US government goals; the Defense Department is requiring all national security systems to use quantum-safe algorithms by December 31, 2031, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is calling for the deprecation of vulnerable algorithms by 2035. While many experts strongly doubt CRQC will arrive by 2029, others say an industry-wide acceleration is necessary given the stakes and the difficulty of the work required to be ready.

The next few years will be interesting. The Y2K situation was concerning, but this is really an important race to harden our systems.

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How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous for the Wild

Mythos orchestrated the digital equivalent of a bank robbery: getting past security protocols and through the front door of networks, and breaking into digital vaults that gave it access to online treasures. AI had picked locks, but now it could pull off an entire heist.

Carlini and some of his colleagues began alerting staff to what they’d found. And each day they continued to discover high-severity and critical bugs in the systems Mythos probed, the kind of flaws normally uncovered by the world’s best hackers.

Speaking of which, some stuff will break long before 2029, it seems.

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AI Could Democratize One of Tech’s Most Valuable Resources

Designing computer chips is one of the most consequential—and tricky—jobs on the planet. Chip engineers need to figure out how to arrange a vast number of components across a piece of silicon to optimize different functionality. After a chip is first designed, its performance has to be carefully tested and verified in an iterative process before the designs can be sent off to a foundry.

Nvidia’s designs are crucial for modern AI, with each new generation of chip allowing companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers.

So if this is already happening with “classical” silicon chips, I do not see why this won’t accel the development of Quantum computing real soon now.

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Who will maintain the web when PHP’s veterans retire?

The survey of over 700 developers worldwide indicated that over half of the PHP users surveyed reported having more than 15 years of experience with the language, while only 15% had five years of experience or less. This points to a maturing workforce with fewer new developers entering the ecosystem, Perforce officials said.

In fact, hiring rose to one of the top challenges facing PHP teams in 2026, and for managers and directors, it was the number one concern. Moreover, 24% of respondents cited a lack of personnel with the right skills and experience as a leading operational challenge.

I remember when PHP was still called PHP FI and I started using it with version 2.5 - a looong time ago, probably 30 years or so. Back then, the combination of PHP/MySQL was all the rage.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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This is great news to me: France is ditching Windows for Linux across its government by autumn 2026, driven by Trump's sanctions weaponized against critics and a broader EU push for sovereignty, with DINUM leading migrations that include collaboration tools, AI platforms, and databases; others like Austria, Denmark, and Schleswig-Holstein are already swapping Microsoft for open-source, proving it's doable and could redirect billions into building better alternatives.

NASA's Artemis II Orion capsule packs a radiation-hardened, fault-tolerant computer handling life support and comms 250k miles out where downtime kills, everything redundant except Outlook as usual.

Autonomous vehicles are going electric for high-utilization capex payback, sensors and GPUs guzzling power that combustion engince powered cars can't match efficiently; can't wait for my car to park itself.

The internet's bifurcating into agentic layers of structured data for bots negotiating at scale and human realms trading on trust and creativity, with wild economics splitting subscriptions from data markets we barely grasp.

Over-the-air computation flips radio interference from curse to feature, letting wireless networks sum or average data via superimposed signals before digital processing even kicks in, wild throwback to old interference woes now crunching numbers.

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France Orders Windows-to-Linux Switch Across Government

The pressure runs deeper than preference. Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration has weaponized sanctions against critics including International Criminal Court judges, effectively cutting them off from U.S. tech services, closing their bank accounts, and blocking transactions with American companies. For European governments running their digital infrastructure on U.S. software, that is not an abstract risk. It is a demonstrated capability.

The European Parliament voted in January to direct the European Commission to identify areas of excessive foreign dependency. France is not alone in acting on it. Austria’s armed forces have switched from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Denmark’s government committed to the same. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein migrated 44,000 employee inboxes away from Microsoft to open-source alternatives. Germany mandated the Open Document Format for all government files, explicitly excluding Microsoft’s proprietary formats.

This makes so much sense and is long overdue. European governments pay billions each year for Microsoft Software and if the use only a fraction of that each year, they can build amazing open source software.

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How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

This month’s Artemis II mission carrying a crew of four around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years is supported by one of the most fault-tolerant computer system built for spaceflight. Unlike Apollo, the Orion capsule’s computing architecture manages nearly all of the vessel’s safety-critical functions, from life support to communication routing.

When a mission is 250,000 miles from Earth, failure is unrecoverable. There are no runways for emergency landings and no technicians to swap out a fried motherboard. Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.

Everything worked, except for Outlook, of course.

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Autonomy is real now

Autonomous vehicles are generally going to be high-utilization vehicles. That’s true because they can be, but also because they need to be in order to justify such high capex. This is an ideal scenario for the electric drivetrain, which has lower maintenance and lower energy costs than the internal combustion engine.¹ The more a vehicle is utilized, the more these operational advantages matter when it comes to the total cost of ownership. Additionally, all of those expensive sensors and chips which need to be packed into an AV also need to be powered, which compounds the efficiency advantage of going electric. It’s just silly to contemplate running 13 cameras, 4 LiDAR units, 6 radar units and multiple GPUs on an internal combustion engine.

I am actually looking forward to letting my car find its parking spot somewhere nearby.

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The New Internet is Coming

This bifurcation won’t just be philosophical, but will reshape value exchange online. The agentic internet will become the backbone of automation, powering decisions, transactions, and supply chains. Its value will lie in speed, scale, and interoperability.

The human internet, on the other hand, will trade in trust, context, creativity, and emotional intelligence, qualities agents can’t fully replicate.

This is where the economics get interesting. Value flows will diverge. Subscription models, creator economies, and premium content will likely skew toward human audiences, while data licensing and training-data markets grow around the agentic mode.

I don’t think we have even begun to understand what this change means.

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Over-the-Air Computation Uses Radio Interference to Crunch Data

The idea takes advantage of a basic physical fact of electromagnetic radiation: When multiple devices transmit simultaneously, their wireless signals naturally combine in the air. Normally, such cross talk is seen as interference, which radios are designed to suppress—especially digital radios with their error-correcting schemes and inherent resistance to low-level noise.

But if we carefully design the transmissions, cross talk can enable a wireless network to directly perform some calculations, such as a sum or an average. Some prototypes today do this with analog-style signaling on otherwise digital radios—so that the superimposed waveforms represent numbers that have been added before digital signal processing takes place.

I remember radio interference from back in the day but I didn’t know it could be useful for data crunching.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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A college‑age researcher used a cat‑meme clip to socially engineer his way into clues about a massive residential‑proxy–based cyberweapon, eventually exposing a network that could have hit tens of millions of consumers and up to a quarter of the world’s corporations.

In the Persian Gulf, military‑grade GPS jamming and spoofing to counter drones and missiles are turning everyday delivery‑app drivers into analog navigators, forcing them to rely on memory and landmarks when their maps vanish, and underscoring how easily “defensive” electronic warfare can bleed into civilian workflow.

Meanwhile, in Wuhan, Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis suddenly froze mid‑traffic, stranding travelers and generating at least one highway collision, a reminder that even the most advanced autonomy still ships with the kind of “nothing works” moments drivers knew all too well in the analog age.

A look back at Apple in the 1990s shows that the company didn’t just sleepwalk through its post‑Jobs exile; it iterated the Mac, invented the PowerBook, and made strategic bets that quietly laid the groundwork for its later comeback, inviting a more nuanced take on the “Jobs‑as‑sole‑savior” narrative.

Finally, midway through the Artemis II lunar‑flyby mission, astronauts called down to Mission Control puzzled by “two Microsoft Outlooks” that refused to work, turning a low‑level office‑app quirk into a meme‑worthy question: who thought Outlook, of all terrestrial tools, belonged on a spaceship bound for the moon?

Enjoy Five Things Tech! Also, cherish the GPS signal! 🤖

The College Student—and His Cat Meme—Who Hunted the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon

At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat.

Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings—including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago.

Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

Social Engineering to take down an evil hacker, that is a nice twist and shows how important it is to understand your opponents.

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In the Gulf, GPS jamming leaves delivery drivers navigating blind

As the conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran rages on for the second month, gig workers say these kinds of GPS-related disruptions have become routine. Military forces across the region are increasingly deploying electronic systems that interfere with Global Navigation Satellite System signals, including GPS, to defend against drones and missile attacks. These systems can jam signals entirely or spoof them by feeding false location data to receivers. The interference often spills into civilian life, disrupting the lives of millions of people who rely on tools like maps. For delivery drivers, the breakdown is both immediate and disorienting.

I didn’t think of this angle before, but sure, if you need to rely on GPS to get your job done, you’re screwed.

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Robot Taxis Stop in Traffic in Chinese City, Stranding Travelers

The police in Wuhan, a large metropolis in central China, announced on Wednesday that they had received a “succession” of reports that self-driving cars had stopped. The cars were part of the extensive Apollo Go program of self-driving cars run in Wuhan by Baidu, a large Chinese internet company.

The police said an unspecified “system failure” had occurred, and did not say how many cars had been affected. Baidu has hundreds of the cars in Wuhan, where they have become a common sight.

I think self-driving cars will make our roads safer and our cities more livable. We will have to get used to these kind of scenarios though, where all of a sudden nothing works. Like back in the 70s when the car just wouldn’t start in the morning or would just go silent in the middle of an intersection. We tend to forget that new technology always needs some time.

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The triumphs and failures of Apple without Steve Jobs

It’s a famous story on its way to becoming legendary: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985, spent more than a decade in the wilderness, and then returned to Apple in 1997 to save it from bankruptcy and transform it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.

From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.

I remember that phase very well. I started university in 93 and bought a Mac Performa 600, later I bought a used Powerbook 145b, which I would carry into the library even though the battery would last only for 30 mins and of course there where no sockets anywhere as people still used pencil and paper.

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Artemis II Astronauts Have ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ and Neither Work

In 1969, the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission conducted a momentous “dress rehearsal” for putting humans on the lunar surface for the first time. It was a historic, inspiring moment for humanity; Astronaut John Young watched from a command module spacecraft as Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan broke away and flew a lunar module within 10 miles of the moon’s surface, then reunited to return home to Earth. It’s from this mission that we have one of the most powerful transcripts in NASA history:

“Who did what?” Young asked. “Where did that come from?” Cernan added.

“Give me a napkin quick,” Stafford said. “There’s a turd floating through the air.”

The provenance of the poop remains one of the great mysteries of spaceflight. Today, in the early Earth-morning hours of the Artemis II astronauts’ history-mirroring mission around the moon, we have another: Why is Microsoft Outlook not working in space?

How can they think that relying on a Microsoft product when flying to the moon would be a good idea?

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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The quiet comeback of the CPU, a solar‑powered tractor that walks behind the farmer, and a missile that costs less than a car are all quietly reshaping the world in ways that feel more like sci‑fi than business‑as‑usual headlines.

AI is reviving CPUs as workhorses for agentic workloads, solar micro tractors are lifting small‑scale farming in Malawi, cheap hypersonic missiles are reshaping global defense economics, and the quantum threat to today’s encryption is pushing a quiet but urgent shift to post‑quantum standards - all underscored by the simple idea that most of the energy we use already comes from the sun, if only we would stop treating it like a backup option instead of the default.

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The CPU Was Left for Dead by AI. Now AI Is Bringing It Back.

For the past few years, central processing units, or CPUs—the core engines of most computers, from laptops to smartphones to data-center servers—have been something of an afterthought in the world of artificial-intelligence computing. Now, thanks to how fast AI is changing, they are the belles of the ball.

The explosion of so-called agentic AI has driven a wave of demand for CPUs, and chip companies are moving quickly to capitalize on it. Nvidia, the semiconductor giant, is known best for making powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, which accelerate the computing needed to train and run complex AI models. It announced last week that it would offer a new server rack consisting only of its Vera CPUs, with no graphics cards attached.

We all love a good comeback story!

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Solar-powered micro electric tractors bring light to farmers in Malawi

Developed by Aftrak, a business spun out of Loughborough University, in England, the waist-height “micro electric tractor” powers itself forward, while a farmer steers it as they walk behind. It features a steel “hardpan breaker” that pierces the layer of compacted soil commonly found at the surface of manually farmed fields in sub-Saharan Africa.

Breaching this layer and making deep furrows allows roots and rainwater to penetrate the soil, which slows soil erosion and maxmizes water absorbtion, making the soil more resilient to droughts.

This is a great example of the power of technology. Just imagine how this can increase the standard of living for so many people.

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One Way or Another, Most of Our Electricity Comes From Solar Power

Of course, the Earth is curved, so that declines as you move toward the poles. But in a good spot, with a panel that has a conversion efficiency of 20 percent, you can get up to 200 W/m2. That means it takes just a few panels to provide all the electricity a home needs. So yes, most of the energy we use comes from the sun. You might even think of fossil fuel deposits as batteries, storing solar power for future civilizations. But with the old technologies, we’re getting that energy indirectly, after multiple conversions from one form to another—and inevitable losses along the way. Why not cut out the middlemen and go direct? No carbon emissions, no air pollution, no radioactive waste, no mining or transportation costs. And the sun’s going to keep shining for 5 billion years.

It’s so absurd that we are talking about gas prizes right now. We should all have EV and get energy from local solar and wind parks.

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China’s ‘dirt cheap’ hypersonic missiles could upend global defence markets

The ‘cement-coated’ YKJ-1000 could prove ‘formidably competitive’ internationally if sold at the relatively cheap price of US$99,000

Chinese aerospace firm Lingkong Tianxing unveiled a hypersonic glide missile last week that has a range of up to 1,300 km (800 miles) and a top speed of Mach 7.

A rocket that costs as much as a car and can be fired out of something that looks like a shipping container. While we are still trying to understand how drones change warfare, here comes the next huge challenge.

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Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear

Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures. The threat to encryption is relevant today with store-now-decrypt-later attacks, while digital signatures are a future threat that require the transition to PQC prior to a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC). That’s why we’ve adjusted our threat model to prioritize PQC migration for authentication services — an important component of online security and digital signature migrations. We recommend that other engineering teams follow suit.

2029 - that’s very soon. I guess it is time to start thinking about encryption again.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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China’s robotics boom feels equal parts thrilling and dystopian: deep‑learning‑driven humanoid robots are learning to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned language, by ingesting data until something vaguely like dexterity emerges, and the ambition is to replace legions of factory workers with machines that do not complain, unionize, or ask for bathroom breaks. At the same time, Russia is pulling off a spectacular self‑own: after systematically blocking Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Musk, and everyone else, the Kremlin has now turned much of its own connectivity into a rolling outage, leaving millions of citizens staring at dead‑end apps while their bot armies keep spamming Western inboxes. And on top of all that, Cloudflare’s CEO warns that bots will soon swamp human traffic online, so if you’re still building websites as if only people will visit them, you are already running your stack on an outdated assumption.

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The Myspace Dilemma Facing ChatGPT

Will the AI market be any different? No and yes. A year ago, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a generic name, the Coke or Kleenex of generative-AI chatbots. Today, its competitors, especially Anthropic’s Claude, are advancing quickly. OpenAI’s fall from favor looks inevitable.

But AI appears to work nothing like delivery apps, smartphones, social networks, or even computer operating systems. If ChatGPT becomes outmoded, it won’t be the result of OpenAI losing ground or failing to innovate. Instead, the entire generative-AI sector will have become a commodity, like soft drinks or facial tissues. That process has already begun.

None of the releases by OpenAI in the last 12 months got me excited. Claude and Gemini are setting the pace right now and also the direction of development. OpenAI sits between a rock and hard place now.

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How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable.

Interesting turn of events. Millions of people walk around catching imaginary pokemon figures and now those datapoints help delivery bots. I didn’t see that coming.

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Inside China’s robotics revolution

As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work. The technology behind China’s current robotics boom is deep learning, the mathematical engine behind large language models such as ChatGPT, which learn by discerning patterns from huge datasets. Many researchers believe that machines can learn to navigate the physical world the way ChatGPT learned to navigate language: not by following rules, but by absorbing enough data for something like human dexterity to emerge. The aim, for many technologists, is the development of humanoid robots capable of performing factory labour – work that employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The current developments in humanoid robotics are breathtaking, but still I can’t envision having these robots around us all the time.

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A superpower goes offline

Telegram would be joining a home screen’s worth of apps that have become useless to Russians. Kremlin policymakers have already blocked or limited access to WhatsApp, along with parent company Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube, Apple’s FaceTime, Snapchat and X, which like SpaceX is owned by Musk. Encrypted messaging apps Signal and Discord, as well as Japanese-owned Viber, have been inaccessible since 2024. Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecom operators to block cellular and fixed internet access at the request of the Federal Security Service. Shortly after it took effect on March 3, Moscow residents reported widespread problems with mobile internet, calls and text messages across all major operators for several days, with outages affecting mobile service and Wi-Fi even inside the State Duma.

I am sure that Russian people will continue to figure out how to circumvent the firewalls. Also, I wish they would also take their bot-armies offline that spam Western democracies with their crap.

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Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries.

“If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”

Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors.

I didn’t expect this to happen so soon. So now we have to build websites for humans and agents.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Iran's targeted cyber strikes on Gulf states' AI data centers, hitting Amazon-hosted services like Abu Dhabi banking and Careem apps, expose how these multi-billion hubs are soft targets in regional conflicts, especially with vulnerable undersea cables, likely redirecting investments to safer spots amid escalating tensions.

Meanwhile, offshore wind farms' radar interference is being flipped into a defense asset for better low-altitude missile detection via shared turbine signals, while Pentagon eyes Ukraine's rapid drone innovations to counter Iran's cheap swarms that outpace legacy U.S. missiles.

Tech's circular swings resurface old ideas in new guises until the right tweak clicks, much like MIT's photonic "ski jumps" beaming light off chips to turbocharge quantum computing by solving on-chip light-trapping woes.

Fascinating how geopolitics and engineering hacks keep reshaping our digital battlegrounds.

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Why Iran is targeting the artificial intelligence infrastructure of Gulf countries

Since Amazon is the preferred partner of many companies and governments in the region, the attacks caused immediate disruptions: customers of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in the Emirates, had trouble accessing their online banking services; readers of the business news outlet Enterprise were unable to access its website; and users of the Careem app were unable to order a taxi or food delivery.

Iranian attacks against the digital ecosystems of its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf are considered among the first military actions of their kind in the world, and have exposed new vulnerabilities in these countries, including their multi-billion-dollar investment to become a hub for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). For Iran, it has been a cheap and effective way to disrupt public and private services, while for its neighbors in the region, it has served as a warning about their economic diversification strategies.

Those big data centers are easy targets that are hard to defend - and the underwater fiber cables are also a vulnerability in a war. It will be interesting to see how the war in Iran will lead to a rededication of data center investment budgets as it probably now is easier to justify building datacenter in calmer regions.

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How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

I wasn’t aware of this issue with nationals security and windparks, but it is good to see that engineers are figuring out how to use windparks as an advantage when it comes to defense.

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The Circular Nature of Technology

One unexpected way artificial intelligence has changed my life is by making me nostalgic. Watching the technology sector evolve over the last few decades, I’ve begun noticing something less discussed: many trends in technology repeat in a circular fashion.

What looks like progress is often oscillation. Technology rarely moves in straight lines: it swings between extremes before settling into something more balanced. To express the case for this circularity, I’m going to outline a few examples out of several in different areas of technology.

The interesting thing about tech that oftentimes we need multiple approaches that differ just a tad and then we finally figure out how it works.

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Iran adds new urgency to Pentagon’s Ukraine drone deal

The Iranian counterattack with cheap, easily produced drones has exposed a vulnerability for the U.S. and its regional allies, adding new urgency for the Pentagon to close a deal with Ukraine that has been in the works for the better part of a year.

Any agreement on sharing technology to counter Iranian drones could be a boon for the U.S. and many of its closest partners, who are shooting multi-million dollar missiles at $50,000 drones. It also marks one of the few times Ukraine can publicly offer the U.S. something of immediate value as it seeks financial and military support for its four-year campaign against Russia.

Drone tech is evolving so quickly right now, it is so hard to keep up, especially for the legacy companies of the defense industry. The Ukrainians have perfected the release early, release often model of drone tech.

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MIT scientists built photonic ‘ski jumps’ that beam light off chips for faster quantum computing

Inside most photonic chips, light races through tiny optical wires. It carries information far faster than electricity can in many conventional systems. But once that light is trapped on the chip, sending it out into open space in a controlled, scalable way becomes much harder. A team led by researchers at MIT and MITRE now says it has built a way around that bottleneck. They did this using microscopic structures that curl upward from the chip surface like ski jumps.

Chip technology is something I do not understand the least bit (pun intended), but I find this utterly fascinating.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Meanwhile, philosopher Hans Jonas reminds us that organisms aren't mere machines and minds aren't just computers, a perspective gaining traction among neuroscientists and physicists as we wrestle with what makes intelligence actually intelligent.

Ukraine has flipped the script from weapon recipient to weapons innovator, with European nations like Germany now partnering through "Build With Ukraine" to access battle-tested drone and electronic warfare expertise, which I've seen firsthand working with a German startup that hired a Ukrainian AI drone specialist whose frontline experience is simply unmatched.

The debate over which arcade deserves the "world's largest" title matters less than the nostalgia it triggers, that symphony of trilling game sounds and pizza smell transporting any 80s kid back to simpler times when pockets full of coins meant an afternoon of pure joy.

These shifts in software creation, our understanding of life and intelligence, warfare innovation, and cultural memory all point to how quickly our assumptions about what's possible keep getting upended.

This is my very subjective and opinionated selection of articles you should read this week.

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The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering

New website creation is up 40% year over year. New iOS apps are up nearly 50%. GitHub code pushes jumped 35% in the US. All of these metrics were flat for years before late 2024. The graphs look like hockey sticks. People who have never written a line of code are building and launching software.

Keep in mind, we can and should note that more quantity does not necessarily mean better quality. But the fact remains that the barrier to creating software has dropped dramatically, and that is a fundamental shift in the landscape of software engineering.

The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.

This is such a huge change we are going through right now and most people do not even realize it. I am spending so much time with coding agents and I just enjoy it. Check out ANTIGRAVITY.md for a start with Google Antigravity.

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Why organisms are more than machines

There are basic technical grounds to be skeptical of that claim, but beyond that, a much deeper issue lies at the boundary between science and philosophy: What makes life different from non-life? Why is a rock inert and insensate, while even the simplest cell manifests open-ended activity in the relentless pursuit of staying alive? Since the only systems that indisputably display intelligence are alive, if we can’t understand life, we’re probably missing something essential about intelligence.

Sixty years ago, an influential but little-known philosopher named Hans Jonas gave a potent, creative, and radical answer to this question of what makes life different from non-life. In the decades since, the power and reach of his perspective have gained traction. Today, for a growing group of researchers — in fields ranging from neuroscience to the physics of complex systems — Jonas has become an incisive voice arguing forcefully that organisms are more than just machines, and minds are more than just computers.

This is something to think about.

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How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week

A project like this would normally take a team of engineers months, if not years. Several teams at various companies have attempted it, and the scope is just enormous. We tried once at Cloudflare! Two routers, 33+ module shims, server rendering pipelines, RSC streaming, file-system routing, middleware, caching, static export. There’s a reason nobody has pulled it off.

This time we did it in under a week. One engineer (technically engineering manager) directing AI.

The first commit landed on February 13. By the end of that same evening, both the Pages Router and App Router had basic SSR working, along with middleware, server actions, and streaming. By the next afternoon, App Router Playground was rendering 10 of 11 routes. By day three, vinext deploy was shipping apps to Cloudflare Workers with full client hydration. The rest of the week was hardening: fixing edge cases, expanding the test suite, bringing API coverage to 94%.

What changed from those earlier attempts? AI got better. Way better.

$1100 spent for coding agents and then Next.js got rebuilt.

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Ukraine Depended on Western Weaponry. Now That Script Has Flipped.

European nations are snapping up Ukrainian front-line know-how, helping NATO militaries rewire themselves for a transformed battlefield that is dominated by drones and electronic warfare, and where even new weapons can become obsolete in a few months.

For countries like Germany, the “Build With Ukraine” initiative allows them to couple state subsidies with Ukrainian innovation, revitalizing sluggish economies and retooling ailing factories. For Ukraine, it means more weapons to its troops—paid for by its allies.

I am working with a German drone startup that just hired a Ukrainian AI drone specialist and sureley he has a really strong experience that is hard to match anywhere else.

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Which of these two arcades is the “world largest”—and does it matter?

That’s just one of the arcade[s many rarities, all beautifully laid out in an expansive, red-carpeted room with just barely enough lighting to keep you from tripping over your friends as you wander around, mouth agape.

The constant trilling tones of all those vintage machines make for a discordant symphony better than any orchestra could produce. You also get a whiff of the pizza and french fries from the cafeteria down the hall. Like Proust with his madeleines, it’s enough to warp any child of the ’80s back to simpler times.

I remember quite well the time I spent in arcades when I was a kid. Great times, and so many coins in my pockets that I spent for awesome games.

(…continue reading.)

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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This is my very subjective and opinionated selection of articles you should read this week.

Enjoy Five Things Tech! 🤖

Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip

The quarter-mile long facility begins with a digital-era Stonehenge: a room of 35-foot-tall machines that grow torpedo-shaped silicon ingots weighing hundreds of pounds. The ingots are cut into wafers, polished and placed into special shipping containers that will carry them throughout the chip supply chain so their delicate properties aren’t ruined.

Apple is helping the company sell its wafers by pushing TSMC and other chip makers to use them, said Mark England, president of GlobalWafers’s U.S. operation. The company hopes Apple’s help will enable it to expand the facility faster, said England, in part to take advantage of tax credits.

Apple designs its own chips. TSMC makes them. Apple has helped anoint TSMC as the world’s dominant chip manufacturer by committing to use TSMC’s leading-edge technology, also called a process node, in its designs. That gives TSMC confidence to invest gigantic sums in the new plants each successive chip generation requires.

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Your smart TV may be crawling the web for AI

The catch? With Bright’s SDK, a viewer’s smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web. Including apps running on desktop PCs and mobile devices, the company claims to operate 150 million such residential proxies worldwide. Together, these devices gather petabytes of public web data from a wide range of different locations and IP addresses. This approach allows the company to capture localized versions of websites, but also helps to circumvent web crawler blacklists.

And I always wondered how those residential proxies really work. Now I know.

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A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’

Mr. Musk’s push for sustainable abundance is a window into what appears to be his rising techno-optimism. It is a major departure from his position a decade ago when he said unchecked A.I. would destroy the human race.

The concept gives Mr. Musk, 54, an organizing mission for his companies, which he can use to promote and expand his businesses through new technologies. It helps explain why Tesla is trying to shift from electric cars, where sales have flagged, to servant-like robots called Optimus. SpaceX, which merged with xAI this month, has said it wants to build A.I. data centers in space and “self-growing bases on the Moon,” as it prepares for an initial public offering that could take place as soon as June.

I think that Mr. Musk, 54, should shoot himself up to Mars and stay there.

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The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren’t always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.

Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds around the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.

I’m not alarmed by this. I think we are all running in high speed right now and trying to ty our shoelaces by doing so. We are still in the early days of figuring out the digital stuff around us.

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Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

Most people call them “internet cables,” but technically, fiber-optic transmission was developed for telephone calls. One of the people involved was an English scientist named Alec Reeves, who also spent his time working on psychokinesis and telepathy. With fiber, voices become light, pulsate across spiderweb-thin strings of glass, and become voices again in your handset on the other end. Maybe there isn’t that much of a conceptual leap between that and moving things with your mind. TAT is short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone, and TAT-8—built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom—was the eighth transoceanic system across the Atlantic. It was the first to use optical fibers to transmit traffic between Europe and the United States. Fiber optics for communication had only been worked out in theory in the 1960s, and terrestrial cables were first used in the 1970s. But using this technology to span continents was practically tantamount to human galactic expansion. When TAT-8 went into service on December 14, 1988, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov spoke on video link from New York to audiences in Paris and London: “Welcome everyone to this historic transatlantic crossing,” he said, “this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” AT&T made a TV ad, in which an earnest voice-over promised a “worldwide intelligent network” where people could send information in any format to anyone they want.

And I remember how expensive those trans-atlantic calls where in the late 80s, early 90s. Something my kids will never understand. To me, those cables are just a marvelous piece of technology.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Welcome back to Five Things Tech! Innovation needs risk, but Europe has made risk expensive. When firing costs four times more in France or Germany than in the U.S., experimentation slows, and so does ambition. Yet maybe the real problem isn’t labor law at all, but a deeper cultural complacency: too little appetite to back new ideas with big, sustained investments. Meanwhile, a global wave of digital regulation, from teen social media bans to surveillance debates, shows how much we struggle to balance progress and protection.

Oh, and in case you missed it: Meta’s AI glasses are already causing chaos in classrooms, nanoLEDs are literally bending light, and U.S. funding for internet freedom just fell off a cliff. So much going on in Tech - read up!

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Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla

What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.

This may sound like a great virtue of European life, and in a way it is. But it has costs. If you make it expensive to fire people, then companies may pay them less in order to balance out employment costs, or they may not employ people at all. To understand the innovation gap, however, there is a third effect that is even more important. If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.

This article has been discussed online the last few days, so I guess I need to chime in. I do not think it is the labour laws that is holding Europe back, it is a lack of appetite to invest into new ideas and then follow through with even larger investments. Complacency is slowing the contintent down more than its labour laws.

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From Paris to New Delhi, the Push to Ban Teens From Social Media Is Going Global

What started as an isolated regulatory gamble by Australia last fall has spread to more than a dozen capitals, where leaders are seizing on issues raised by childhood scrolling to appeal to parents across the political spectrum.

It adds to a growing backlash against teenage smartphone use, which is being blamed by some critics for deteriorating mental health and an epidemic of screen addiction.

From Paris to New Delhi, limits on children’s access to apps such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are now being debated or implemented, marking a tipping point in the conversation about regulating social media and a potential blockage in tech companies’ pipeline of users.

As a parent, I think it is better to educate than to take away - and I also think that we need to regulate better. TikTok, Meta and others should not be able to create algorithms that suck people in so much.

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Meta’s A.I. Smart Glasses Are Wreaking Havoc in Schools Across the Country. It’s Only Going to Get Worse.

After pushing billions of dollars into the metaverse, Meta has now found overwhelming demand for its Ray-Ban display glasses, which allow users to take photos, stream content, and talk to an A.I. assistant. Waitlists for the product have surged, and the company’s pivot away from the metaverse and toward smart glasses has become aggressive: Hundreds of Meta workers in the Reality Labs division and virtual games studios were laid off, product rollout was paused to address the supply shortage, and it was reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s owner, are discussing possibly doubling production capacity for the A.I.-powered glasses by the end of this year, all in a bid to capitalize on the growing demand as well as get ahead of competitors.

But its usages—specifically its ability to capture photo and video—have raised questions about how the devices will be applied in real life, especially in settings among children and young adults. Issues around academic dishonesty, classroom surveillance, and harassment have been growing in recent years but have been exacerbated as students gain access to the controversial wearable.

These kinds of glasses will be common place very soon and we will have to live with it. As always, not everyone is using new technology the right way. Again, we need better regulation.

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New Approaches to LED

But the tiniest nanoLEDs may have even more exotic applications, because they’re smaller than the wavelengths of their light. “From a process point of view, you are making a new component that was not possible in the past,” Shih says.

For example, Shih’s group showed their nano-OLEDs could form a metasurface—a structure that uses its pixels’ nano-sizes to control how each pixel interacts with its neighbors. One day, similar devices could focus nanoLED light into laser-like beams or create holographic 3D nanoLED displays.

Wow, that is truly stunning stuff.

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US funding for global internet freedom ‘effectively gutted’

Meanwhile, the Trump administration this January withdrew from the Freedom Online Coalition, a global alliance set up by the US to defend digital rights.

The cuts risk curtailing technologies that helped Iranians to coordinate during recent anti-government protests, and that allowed videos and images of massacres to reach the outside world. They could have a major impact in other nations too; the efforts of groups in Myanmar to get past the junta’s “digital iron curtain”, and the ability of users in China to avoid surveillance.

Despots everywhere are happy about Trump and his MAGA idiots.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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The AI acceleration is no longer a prediction but a lived reality for tech workers, and as Matt Shumer warns, the rest of the world is next after February 5th's double release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Opus 4.6 marked the moment when everything changed. While complexity grows like Coruscant's 5,127 layers stacking on top of each other, at least we're building new tools to master it, though I'm not sure everyone will keep up. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley's old taboo against cashing out early is crumbling as employees at Notion, OpenAI, and SpaceX take their money off the table, and honestly, who can blame them when valuations are so insanely high that waiting longer feels like unnecessary risk on this rollercoaster.

On the bright side, T-Mobile's network-level live translation for phone calls is freaking cool and suddenly you can talk to anyone anywhere without an app, which is genuinely amazing tech. And in a twist nobody saw coming, Wikipedia has become a storied institution that people feel nostalgic about, serving as the invisible foundation for social media creators and a last bastion of hope before AI slop takes over everything, which is remarkable considering we all thought it was the Wild West back in the day.

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Something Big Is Happening

Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn’t just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

People who are not paying attention now will soon have much more time on their hands. Sounds harsh, but that is the way it is. AI eats their breakfast, lunch and dinner.

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5,127 Layers

When I think about the future of tech, I sometimes think about Coruscant in Star Wars.

Casual fans know Coruscant as the city planet that’s the capital of the Galactic Empire. It houses the Jedi Temple and the Senate chambers of the Republic.

Less casual fans (read: nerds like me) know that Coruscant is actually comprised of thousands of layers. As Coruscant grew in size, the planet expanded outward, building new layers on top of old layers. The planet has 5,127 distinct urban layers and the total depth of the planet, from the outermost skyscrapers down to the original surface, is 22 kilometers. This means the average layer is ~4.3 meters or ~14 feet.

Oh yes, the complexity is growing, but so are the tools we need to master the complexity.

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The AI Gold Rush Is Breaking a Silicon Valley Taboo: Cashing Out Before the IPO

Notion is among a host of startups and tech companies, including Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks and SpaceX, that are giving employees eager to access wealth tied up in private shares a way to cash out some of it.

It marks a shift in Silicon Valley culture as companies stay private longer. Selling startup shares early was long viewed as taboo and a sign of lacking long-term commitment.

Of course this happens when valuations are so high that people have reached a point where they cannot afford to wait longer, they simply want to be on the safe side for once on the rollercoaster ride of startup life.

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T-Mobile will live translate regular phone calls without an app

Enabling it at the network level means users don’t need specific apps or devices to use the service. The only requirement is that translation must be initiated by a T-Mobile network user. The feature will be available on the carrier’s 5G Advanced network, but T-Mobile President of Technology and CTO John Saw told The Verge that Live Translation works over both 4G LTE and 5G:

“The key requirement is a Voice over LTE (VoLTE) connection, which allows the service to operate reliably across a wide range of devices and network conditions,” said Saw. “That flexibility is important because it ensures Live Translation works for customers wherever they are, not just when they’re on the latest network technology. Live Translation works over VoLTE, VoNR, and VoWiFi.”

This is so freaking cool. Just imagine you can talk to anyone on the phone suddenly. Not that I want to call random strangers, but this is really amazing tech.

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Wikipedia is having a renaissance in the age of AI

These AI deals show that Wikipedia is still an extremely critical knowledge base. But it will inevitably be up to the humans who love it to keep the site going. Clover acknowledges that a lot of young people struggling to pay their bills may not have the time or energy to become Wikipedians who edit the site, but that’s “not for a lack of interest.” Harrison, meanwhile, sees independent creators, like Depths of Wikipedia, as crucial in keeping Wikipedia’s brand alive. “Social media influencers rely on Wikipedia as a sort of invisible foundation for their knowledge,” he said. For now, all the “old internet” nostalgia on TikTok gives him some hope for a revival.

“I grew up when Wikipedia was considered the Wild West of the internet,” he said. “It’s really remarkable how Wikipedia has, in a lot of ways, become this storied institution that people have all these feelings of nostalgia and affection toward.”

I remember when Wikipedia was still new and lots of people were very sceptic. And now it is one of the last bastions of hope before the AI slop takes over.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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This week’s reads reveal an industry being reshaped by sheer capital force: Big Tech will spend $650 billion this year building data centers, a shift so dramatic that Meta now spends more on construction than engineer salaries for the first time ever. They’re competing for cement trucks and electricians, not just Nvidia chips, transforming from digital-first companies into massive infrastructure players practically overnight. Meanwhile Google has emerged as the surprise winner of the AI race, with Gemini 3 on top and 750 million monthly active users giving them unmatched distribution advantage while Microsoft, Amazon, and even Nvidia lose ground. The innovation isn’t just in models though: silicon photonics promises to replace electrical interconnects with light-speed connections, potentially solving AI’s energy crisis before it consumes more electricity than entire nations.

But while Big Tech builds data center empires and captures generational wealth for top AI researchers (Meta reportedly offering packages worth hundreds of millions), the rest of the tech economy shows cracks. Loyalty is dead in Silicon Valley as employees bounce between companies chasing money rather than mission, and consumers are abandoning expensive streaming subscriptions for illegal rogue boxes from Chinese manufacturers because nobody wants to pay for seven services just to watch their team play. Europe’s focus on digital sovereignty means we’re building less, spending less, and falling further behind in the infrastructure race that actually matters. The question isn’t whether AI will transform computing - it’s whether European companies will have the physical infrastructure to compete when the transformation arrives.

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Big Tech to Spend $650 Billion This Year as AI Race Intensifies

The outlays are transforming companies that just a few years ago had a relatively small physical footprint, even as their digital services found their way to billions of people. For much of their existence, Meta and Google parent Alphabet counted their plush corporate campuses and office space as a significant portion of their real-world assets. Most of their spending went toward salaries and stock grants for the engineers and salespeople who worked there.

No longer. Last year, Meta spent more on capital projects than research and development — mostly engineers’ salaries — for the first time in six years. The Facebook and Instagram parent at the end of last year owned $176 billion in property and equipment, about five times the tally at the end of 2019.

As the numbers push higher, what is still unclear is whether the companies will all be able to execute on their lofty ambitions. Since the data center build-out has escalated, they’re already competing for finite crews of electricians, cement trucks and Nvidia Corp. chips rolling out of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. factories. “There are and will be bottlenecks,” Luria said.

Big Tech is now Big Construction, building data centers all across the US. Europe will fall behind as we focus more on digital sovereignty and also spend a lot less.

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Google Leans Hard Into Its AI-Winner Status

Google has both the political and financial capital to lay such a bet. The company’s Gemini 3 model has put it on top of the heap of performance for AI models, while the unmatched distribution of its search engine and products like Gmail have quickly driven adoption. Google said Wednesday it has more than 750 million monthly active users just on its Gemini App, which only represents a portion of Gemini’s actual users.

The strong reception of Gemini, along with Google’s victory over the federal government’s efforts to break up the company, have cheered investors when sentiment on technology and AI is faltering. Alphabet’s stock price has jumped around 20% in the past three months. Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Broadcom have all lost ground during that time.

It’s really impressive how Google rebounded after the ChatGPT threat and is now pacing away from the pack.

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Silicon Photonics: The Lightspeed Revolution That Will Transform AI Computing

The artificial intelligence boom has created an energy crisis that threatens to consume more electricity than entire nations. As data centres race to keep pace with AI’s insatiable appetite for computational power, technology leaders like Lam are shaping a fundamental shift that could redefine how we think about high-performance computing. One solution lies in replacing the electrical interconnects that have powered computing for decades with something far more efficient: light.

It’s insane how innovation in chip design tech works.

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Fed up with increasing subscription prices, viewers embrace rogue streaming boxes.

SuperBox and its main competitor, vSeeBox, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up with what TV has become: Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive, streaming services are costlier every year, and you need to sign up for multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time they play. The hardware itself is generic and legal, but you won’t find these devices at mainstream stores like Walmart and Best Buy because everyone knows the point is accessing illegal streaming services that offer every single channel, show, and movie you can think of. But there are hundreds of resellers like Jason all across the United States who aren’t bothered by the legal technicalities of these devices. They’re all part of a massive, informal economy that connects hard-to-pin-down Chinese device makers and rogue streaming service operators with American consumers looking to take cord-cutting to the next level.

Maybe we should all watch less TV? I’m happy with German public broadcast tv and whatever my wife selects on Netflix, AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime Video…

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Loyalty Is Dead in Silicon Valley

Early founders and researchers at the buzziest AI startups are bouncing around to different companies for a range of reasons. A big incentive for many, of course, is money. Last year Meta was reportedly offering top AI researchers compensation packages in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, offering them not just access to cutting-edge computing resources but also … generational wealth.

But it’s not all about getting rich. Broader cultural shifts that rocked the tech industry in recent years have made some workers worried about committing to one company or institution for too long, says Sayash Kapoor, a computer science researcher at Princeton University and a senior fellow at Mozilla. Employers used to safely assume that workers would stay at least until the four-year mark when their stock options were typically scheduled to vest. In the high-minded era of the 2000s and 2010s, plenty of early cofounders and employees also sincerely believed in the stated missions of their companies and wanted to be there to help achieve them.

I never ever thought that money would be a motivator in Silicon Valley…

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— Nico

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Silicon Valley’s quantification fetish is not just annoying, it is quietly hollowing out the everyday messiness that makes life bearable, from chatting in a shop to getting lost in your neighborhood . The Guardian piece argues that outsourcing thinking, contact and even love letters to AI leaves us more isolated and less resilient, while I keep thinking that, yes, we should absolutely seek more human interaction, but I still enjoy when tech just removes friction and lets me skip some stupid chores . At the same time, China is industrializing the energy transition at a speed that makes Western debates look ridiculous: solar and wind are being built so fast that the grid cannot really cope, prices go negative, companies struggle, but the net effect is that fossil incumbents finally feel real pressure and energy poverty might actually shrink . It is messy, it breaks things and it shows how far behind we are while we are still nostalgically talking about new nukes instead of fixing permitting and building more cables .

On the industrial side, you see the same pattern: Chinese EV makers like BYD and their peers are pushing cheap, decent cars into every market they can reach, while policymakers in the US and Europe try to hide behind tariffs and national security arguments . I genuinely do not get why this is such a surprise to anyone: the Western auto industry ignored electrification for too long and will now need taxpayer support to soften the landing, otherwise we will see a lot of factories going dark . Europe is at least waking up on defense and trying to rebuild its own capabilities, from drones to artillery, because relying on Washington while Trump openly questions NATO solidarity is obviously not a sustainable strategy . And then, in a nice little twist of internet history, Yahoo pops up again with Scout, an AI answer engine that actually tries to be friendly to the open web, which is kind of refreshing in a world where everyone else seems busy walling content into proprietary bots .

Read these Five Things Tech to stay ahead of the curve - and to have great conversation starter pieces for tonight’s dinner parties or receptions!

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back

Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.

This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes. Many things have become harder to do in person. Of course, there are well-recognised upsides, but the downsides are no less real: public spaces and public life have withered, including some of the places in which we once acquired our goods. All those errands – buying milk or socks (in the past, I would have said the newspaper) – meant moments of human contact, moving among strangers and making acquaintances, maybe observing the weather and the natural world. These activities meant becoming more familiar with your surroundings, feeling at home beyond the confines of what you rent or own.

I sometimes feel the same and think that we really should look for interaction with other people. But then again, oftentimes the tech just removes friction, which I also like.

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The Firewall Against Chinese Cars Is Cracking

The secret to BYD’s success is simple: The company makes high-tech electric and hybrid cars and sells them at incredible prices. The tiny BYD Seagull costs as little as $8,000 in China, and it’s a megahit in several countries. The Chinese car industry—not just BYD but also its many competitors that also make affordable cars—is quickly taking over the world. In Europe, Chinese models make up nearly 10 percent of new-car sales, in large part because they’re typically thousands of dollars cheaper than options from homegrown Volkswagen and Renault. And in Mexico, about 20 percent of new cars are made in China.

I still don’t understand why this is such a rude awaking for so many people. It is blatantly obvious that the auto industry refused to change and will now pay a hefty price, which means we as taxpayers will need to step in to avoid mass unemployment.

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Europe’s $1 Trillion Race to Build Back Its Defense Industry

The continent’s once-sclerotic defense industry is churning out drones, tanks, ammunition and other weaponry at its fastest pace in decades as the region looks to rearm in the face of Russian aggression and divides with Washington. But there is still some way to go. The cost of replacing current U.S. military equipment and personnel in Europe would be around $1 trillion, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. Some holes remain in the region’s manufacturing capability, including stealth fighters, long-range missiles and satellite intelligence.

While Europe has increased its defense production in recent years, its fragmented industry currently lacks the capacity of its U.S. peers, which are financed by the world’s largest military budget.

Still, sharp increases in military spending across Europe and renewed efforts in research and development are bringing operational independence closer—and in some cases it is happening surprisingly quickly.

I certainly don’t like rearmament, but I do understand that it is necessary now. Also, it is good that Europe finally develops a sense of agency when it comes to defending the content itself.

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China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World

The reason for this brain-warping mad dash of solar development? At the start of 2025—in an attempt to rein in the renewables sector—Beijing announced that it would discontinue a long-standing policy that had effectively propped up renewable energy prices, pegging them to that of the “baseline” coal power in each province. Any solar capacity that went in after May 2025, Beijing declared, would no longer get this deal. So the all-out solar installation frenzy was simply a mass attempt to get in under the old terms.

After May, sure enough, new solar deployments plummeted. The ensuing four months each added just 10 gigawatts of new solar on average, half of the prior year’s pace—but that’s still considerably faster than America at its peak.

In China, one problem with all this burgeoning, majestic new solar is that it’s completely overwhelming the national electrical grid, technically and economically. For electricity markets to work, grid managers must constantly balance supply and demand—but the former can’t always be throttled back when it exceeds the latter. Nuclear power plants can’t just be switched on and off whenever solar power floods the grid. And some Chinese coal plants provide heat to communities through steam—so they need to run even if the electricity they generate is superfluous.

This is what happens if you build like crazy: not every part of the infrastructure gets developed at the same time. Still, China is moving forward very quickly with wind and solar while we are still debating the revival of old technologies.

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Yahoo Scout looks like a more web-friendly take on AI search

In a funny twist, Yahoo may be perfectly positioned to do this well. Because Yahoo runs huge content verticals like Sports and Finance, with a big newsroom of its own and partnerships with many other publishers, it has a huge amount of high-quality reference material for Scout. It also has Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Horoscopes and Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo So Many Other Things Besides. Yahoo is a full-fledged content machine, and it can just point an LLM at all that content. “We’re the only ones who can take our user data, our usage data, our content, our relationships and information, and combine that with everything we know about search into an AI answer engine,” Lanzone says.

I didn’t know Yahoo! still existed. This looks kind of cool!

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— Nico

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Europe waking up to its unhealthy dependence on US internet infrastructure pairs nicely with the slow, steady march of robots into the real world, where there is no single magical breakthrough but a long climb through messy edge cases, much like shaping software as clay with swarms of autonomous agents that only work when you define success very precisely up front. The pattern emerging across all these pieces is that transformative tech doesn’t arrive in one dramatic moment but through countless small steps, whether that’s building European digital sovereignty, teaching robots to handle variability, or getting AI agents to reliably do what you actually want.

Add to that a take by Cory Doctorow predicting an AI bubble that will eventually burst and leave us with cheap GPUs, better tools and lots of scrappy open source, and you get a tech landscape that feels both overheated and strangely robust at the same time. Meanwhile, quantum computing promises radically more efficient computation just as data centers start eating cities worth of power, but it still reads like science fiction you need to go through twice before you nod as if you really got it. And qubit just sounds like a frog sound.

Read these Five Things Tech to stay ahead of the curve - and to have great conversation starter pieces for tonight’s dinner parties or receptions!

Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology

You reach out for information but struggle to communicate with family and friends, or to get the latest updates on what is happening, as social media platforms are all down. Just as someone can pull the plug on your computer, it’s possible to shut down the system it connects to.

This isn’t an outlandish scenario. Technical failures, cyber-attacks and natural disasters can all bring down key parts of the internet. And as the US government makes increasing demands of European leaders, it is possible to imagine Europe losing access to the digital infrastructure provided by US firms as part of the geopolitical bargaining process.

It is so important that lawmakers finally realize that we need to do more to build clever hard- and software in Europe, as our current suppliers are just not that reliable anymore. Also, it doesn’t make sense that we spend billions on software each year that makes big tech more powerful.

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Many Small Steps for Robots, One Giant Leap for Mankind

It’s only once you start deploying robots outside of the lab that something else becomes obvious: robotics progress is not gated by a single breakthrough. There is no single fundamental innovation that will suddenly automate the world.

We will eventually automate the world. But my thesis is that progress will happen by climbing the gradient of variability.

The recent developments in robotics are just breathtaking, but I won’t be impressed until I have a companion robot that folds the laundry, does the dishes, picks up all the stuff from the floor and then vacuums it.

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Software as clay on the wheel

That doesn’t mean it’s secure, fast, or something you’d ship. It just means it met the criteria they gave it. If you decide to check for security or performance, it will work toward that as well. But the pattern is what matters: clear tests, constant verification, and agents that know when they’re done.

From solo loops to hundreds of agents running in parallel, the same pattern keeps emerging. It feels like something fundamental is crystallizing: autonomous AI is starting to work well when you can accurately define success upfront.

I think working with clay is a bit more therapeutic than working with coding agents, but still, the image is pretty accurate.

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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?

We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.

While I am still not so sure about a bursting bubble anytime soon, I do see a ton of impressive advancements in tech right now that we will all benefit from.

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How can we scale quantum computing in the most energy-efficient way?

Today, a single cutting-edge AI chip can draw as much electricity as an entire household and large training runs can consume as much energy as an entire city. The International Energy Agency, therefore, expects global electricity consumption by data centres to roughly double by 2030.

This raises the question: how can we expand computing without expanding energy use?

Quantum computing is often cited as a partial answer, promising far greater computational power at a dramatically lower energy cost. But we rarely explain why, in which cases or compare what quantum platforms deliver the most computation per kilowatt-hour, despite significant differences.

I just love reading about Quantum computing. Then I scratch my head and read it again. I don’t think anyone really understands this stuff.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

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— Nico

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Quantum moving from lab curiosity to neutral-atom machines that almost look useful feels a lot like mobile right before the iPhone moment, when everyone was still joking about dropped calls and then suddenly it all worked.

Craigslist, on the other hand, just keeps chugging along as the scruffy, non-optimized bazaar of the old web, stubbornly resisting profiles, ratings and the whole influencer circus and thereby feeling more real than most of what came after it.

In parallel, a new wave of “anti-iPhone” gadgets, upgraded smart speakers and voice-first assistants is trying once again to make talking to computers feel natural, with Alexa+, Gemini, Siri and a whole zoo of AI pendants and pins betting that this time voice will finally stick.

Down in the very physical world, vision models are staring at conveyor belts full of trash, spotting plastics, metals and food-grade material with superhuman consistency so that robots can grab the good stuff and turn waste streams into proper data products.

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All of this lands in a tech industry that is paradoxically booming on balance sheets while laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, shipping half-baked products and replacing parts of “real” engineering work with tools like Google Antigravity that quietly take over more and more of the coding.

Put together, this week’s selection is very much about the tension between shiny disruption and messy reality: quantum that might finally deliver, a stubbornly simple marketplace that still works, disembodied voices in your gadgets, robots sifting through garbage and a tech career path that looks a lot less straightforward than the hype around AI would have you believe.

Next-Level Quantum Computers Will Almost Be Useful

It may be no coincidence that both of the level-two quantum computers will be built out of the same types of qubits: neutral atoms. While the classical computing world has long since settled on the transistor as the fundamental device of choice, the quantum-computing world has yet to pick the perfect qubit, be it a superconductor (pursued at IBM, Google, and others), a photon (used by the likes of PsiQuantum and Xanadu), an ion (developed by IonQ and Quantinuum, to name a few), or other.

All of these options have their advantages and disadvantages, but there is a reason some of the earliest error-corrected machines are built with neutral atoms. The physical qubits that make up a logical qubit need to be close to each other, or connected in some way, in order to share information. Unlike, say, superconducting qubits printed on a chip, any two atomic qubits can be brought right next to each other (an advantage shared by trapped ions).

Quantum is a bit like mobile 20 years ago. Everybody talked about it, it didn’t really work and all of a sudden it was there and everyone was surprised it could work.

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Is Craigslist the Last Real Place on the Internet?

Unlike flashier online marketplaces such as DePop and its parent company, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users’ moves and predict what they want to see next. It doesn’t offer public profiles, rating systems, or “likes” and “shares” to dole out like social currency; as a result, Craigslist effectively disincentivizes clout-chasing and virality-seeking—behaviors that are often rewarded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. It’s a utopian vision of a much earlier, far more earnest internet.

Craigslist is amazing and also feels a bit outdated, which is the whole point of it. I used it 30 years ago while I lived in the Bay Area and it hasn’t changed much since then…

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“Hello, Computer.”

The past 18 months have seen a lot of reports about projects trying to break outside of that textbox. While the early attempts quickly – and in some cases spectacularly – failed, undoubtedly because they were trying to be too ambitious, and do too much, a new wave is now coming to tackle the problem. This is led by none other than OpenAI itself, which acquired the hardware startup co-founded by one Jony Ive to clearly go after this space. To make an “anti-iPhone” as it were. A deceptively simple companion device powered by AI and driven by voice.

That’s just a guess, of course. But it’s undoubtedly a good one. And you can see all of the other startups coalescing around all of this as well. Hardware startups too! Pendants, and clips, and bracelets, and note-taking rings – not one, but two separate, similar projects – oh my. All of them clearly believe that voice is on the cusp of taking off, for real this time.

And right on cue, Alexa is back, after some fits and starts, resurrected as Alexa+ powered by LLMs. Google Home is on the verge of being reborn, powered by Gemini. Siri too! Maybe, hopefully, really for real this time!

Even I am using voice these days in a way I would have never guessed myself: I talk to ChatGPT while working my dog sometimes.

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AI Is Being Used to Find Valuable Commodities in Our Trash

At Murphy Road Recycling’s material recovery facility near Hartford, the machines are taking over the dirtiest jobs. A few workers remain on the line, mostly near the front to watch for hazardous items. Otherwise, the system of conveyors, magnets, optical sorters and pneumatic blocks runs largely unmanned.

Watching over it all are computers that analyze material as it passes by at about 7 miles an hour. The devices, made by London-based Greyparrot, use artificial intelligence to identify recyclables, flag food-grade material, gauge items’ mass, assess market value and calculate points at which a robotic claw might best clasp each piece.

Just imagine what cool tech can be build with sensors and AI - this is so cool!

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How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?

If you’re outside the industry, you may be confused — isn’t there an AI boom that’s getting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments? Doesn’t that mean the tech bros are doing great? What you may have missed is that half a million tech workers have been laid off in the years since ChatGPT was released; the same attacks on marginalized workers and DEI and “woke” that the tech robber barons launched against the rest of society were aimed at their own companies first.

So the good people who actually make the technology we use every day, the real innovators and creators and designers, are reacting to the unprecedented disconnect between the contemporary tech industry and the fundamentals that drew so many people toward it in the first place. Many of the biggest companies have abandoned the basic principle of making technology that actually_ works._ So many new products fail to deliver on even the basic capabilities that the companies are promising that they will provide.

While I really enjoy my coding sessions on Google Antigravity, where I do not code, but let the computer do it, I do understand that this fundamentally changes the good old tech industry.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

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This week had a bit of everything - from platform chaos to quiet revolutions in tech. Wired takes a hard look at X and its Grok AI, which has been generating massive amounts of explicit images and yet somehow still sits comfortably in Apple and Google’s app stores. It’s a painful reminder that content moderation is still more aspiration than reality. Then there’s AWS, which isn’t exactly in trouble, but the halo of invincibility is slipping. As it juggles AI bets and restructuring, we’re watching a giant try to stay agile while still printing billions in revenue.

I also really enjoyed the story about why TVs have become so ridiculously cheap — turns out scaling up batch sizes is sometimes the real innovation. On the mobility side, the race between Waymo, Cybercab, and Uber shows how autonomy is no longer just about cost but comfort - no chatty drivers, no awkward small talk, just silence. And while everyone seems to be rediscovering LinkedIn these days, it’s less because of the algorithm and more because people still crave the sense of a professional community that feels, well, real. Even if it sometimes reads like a motivational speaking contest.

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Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?

The amount of nonconsensual explicit images on X generated by Grok has exploded over the past two weeks. One researcher told Bloomberg that over a 24-hour period between January 5 and 6, Grok was producing roughly 6,700 images every hour that they identified as “sexually suggestive or nudifying.” Another analyst collected more than 15,000 URLs of images that Grok created on X during a two-hour period on December 31. WIRED reviewed approximately one-third of the images, and found that many of them featured women dressed in revealing clothing. Over 2,500 were marked as no longer available within a week, while almost 500 were labeled as “age-restricted adult content.”

This is unacceptable. Apple and Google have to kick X and Grok off the App Stores immediately.

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AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate

AWS isn’t dying. Heck, AWS isn’t even struggling in any conventional sense. But the era of unchallenged dominance is over, and the company is navigating a transition that would challenge any organization: maintaining operational excellence while pivoting to AI, retaining institutional knowledge while restructuring, and growing a $132 billion business at rates that satisfy Wall Street.

They’ve made the right strategic moves. re:Invent 2025 demonstrated a company finally willing to accept market reality rather than insist the market was wrong. The AI investments are substantial and increasingly credible.

It’s interesting how AWS is providing so much infrastructure, but really has not been in the spotlight much lately.

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How Did TVs Get So Cheap?

LCDs are thus an interesting example of costs falling due to the use of larger and larger batch sizes. Several decades of lean manufacturing and business schools assigning “The Goal” have convinced many folks that you should always aim to reduce batch size, and that the ideal manufacturing process is “one piece flow” where you’re processing a single unit at a time. But as we see in several processes — semiconductor manufacturing, LCD production, container shipping — increasing your batch size can, depending on the nature of your process, result in substantial cost savings.

Growing up in the 70s, we didn’t even have a color tv before the mid-80s. And now we have this huge screen in our living room that has an amazing resolution and it wasn’t really all that expensive.

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The Race between Waymo, Cybercab, and Uber

This is crazy. The founder and previous CEO of Uber once said robotaxis would destroy human cabs and ride-hailing cars because they would be cheaper. But Waymo is not cheaper! It turns out people prefer to ride without a driver! In retrospect, you can imagine why. Nobody to judge you, to talk to you if you’re not in the mood, to smell bad, to drive recklessly, to disregard app payments and request cash… Imagine when prices drop way below current levels.

Public Transport still makes so much more sense then sending more and more self-driving cars onto the streets, but I do understand the sentiment of not having to talk to some stranger in a car.

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Three Reasons We Can’t Get Enough of LinkedIn

Design plays a part. The site emulated Facebook and TikTok by adding a news feed and videos. However, some new fans argue that the real attraction lies in the features LinkedIn hasn’t changed—in particular, the requirement that users provide their real names.

Research shows real names curb toxicity. While not immune to misinformation and scams, LinkedIn lured people leaving X and Facebook as content moderation and fact-checking there declined. Many concluded it was worth trading rage bait on other platforms for earnest monologues about why getting laid off was a blessing in disguise.

LinkedIn has certainly become the center stage of business networking, but it shows that not everyone knows how to write a compelling text without a gazillion buzzwords or hashtags. Still, it is the best way to connect to people in the business world.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:

🤖

— Nico

Subscribe now