Five Things Tech: Fiber, Quantum Software, Militarized e-Scooters, Israeli Startups in NYC, OnlyFans

Everything you should read about Tech right now.

Hello again, and welcome back to Five Things Tech!

I grew up in West Germany, just a few kilometers away from the border to East Germany. While we didn’t live in total abundance and couldn’t afford much, the idea that getting a landline for the phone or a new car could take decades, sounded totally strange to me. How could simple things like a phone in a household or a new car take so long?

Well. When I moved out of my dorm room in 1999 or so, I had 100 mbit/s coming straight into my room and the dorm was connected to the university backbone by fiber. And this week I finally got fiber into our apartment. Now I have 300 mbit/s downstream, which finally feels like living in a civilized world. It only took me a few decades. Crazy. And now I just have to figure out how to get great WIFI into my office (a.k.a. the bedroom) and simultaneously into our son’s room. It’s either my videocalls getting interrupted or his perfomance in online-games suffering. I assume that by the time I have figured out the ideal setup, he’s moving out…

For the last few months I have been looking at vibe-coding and I read lots of stuff about it and how it changes software development. I dabbled around with BOLT and Lovable and I could certainly see the possible impact. Then on Friday I finally tried Warp and boy was I blown away by it. It is amazing. Warp uses Claude Code and ChatGPT, has a really smart shell and let’s me code stuff by just using normal language instructions. It is so cool. Check it out and I guarantee you’ll be blown away, even with the free tier!

And just as I finally got fiber have researchers developed new "glass straw" hollow fiber optic cables that let light travel through air for much faster and longer-distance data transmission. Next up we learn that Quantum computing is advancing through software improvements, with new algorithms making powerful computations possible on smaller machines. Ukrainian forces are now using military-grade e-scooters for efficient supply and reconnaissance missions thanks to their speed and maneuverability. New York City has become home to 560 Israeli-founded tech startups, including 27 unicorns, reflecting its status as a major international tech hub for Israeli entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, automated efforts to combat OnlyFans content piracy are causing unrelated web content to be wrongly deindexed from Google, revealing weaknesses in current digital copyright enforcement systems.

That’s all for this week in Five Things Tech! Remember to check out Warp!

Enjoy!