Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
This week is a mixed bag and I like it that way. I strap an Oura ring to my finger and an AirTag to my dog, and I still want camera glasses, so I am clearly not the guy to lecture anyone about surveillance. Meanwhile coders are getting hammered while I happily build my whole stack in Rust with agents, which feels a bit unfair and I know it. Airbus walked away from AWS and I really hope more European companies grow a spine and do the same. And the Cybertruck turns out to be about as beloved as a tax audit.
Grab a coffee and dig in! đ§đ»âđ»
Surveillance Is Trendy Now
Around the turn of the millennium, fashion went through what designer and academic Eric Howeler called â Paranoid Chic â in 2002: Versace ads styled as grainy security camera footage or a Givenchy perfume line named RWD, PLAY, and FFWD or an EstĂ©e Lauder campaign starring Elizabeth Hurley looking startled and overexposed in the camera flash. The ads were selling the glamour of being watched. But they were selling the image of surveillance, rather than actual surveillance. The clothes werenât tracking your heart rate or telling you whether Amazon dropped off a package. The cameras then belonged to the state and the tabloid.
In the last decade, things have flipped. Consumers control the camera, but they continuously point it back at themselves. Ring doorbell camera footage has become its own style of video. Jack Harlow (a man present at many consumer surveillance events, it seems) shot a music video through one in 2024, and âfit checksâ filmed on doorbell cams are an entire genre on social media. The Oura ring and smartwatches turned biometric self-monitoring into jewelry. Parents track their teenagers by default through apps like FindMy or Life360 (I donât have kids yet, but my dog wears an AirTag collar.) Now, Meta sells glasses that track every move around you when activated (and play music) with a frame shape from Kylie Jenner, one of the most photographed people of all time.
A friend of mine, who grew up in East Germany, is staying away from social media for good, he says that he experienced surveillance before and doesnât want to experience again. I, on the other hand, have my oura ring, post photos wherever I eat food or go running. Iâd love to be able to take photos with my glasses. Even better: Iâd love to have glasses that record stuff for me and that show me who I am talking to and how I know that person. I think we are still a long time away from really useful glasses.
Chasing new skills, going back to basics and pushing for collective action: how software engineers are adapting to AI
Software engineering was one of the biggest and best-paying professions in the US in 2022, with 1.5 million practitioners earning twice the national median salary, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pay had risen amid escalating talent wars, during which companies offered bonuses of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to snag and retain top programmers. Last year, nearly 50 million people worldwide worked as developers, according to the market research firm SlashData.
But since the release of OpenAIâs ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs, according to the tech layoff tracker Layoff.fyi. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their underemployment rate was more than 19%, data from the New York Fed shows. US tech job postings on Indeed also dropped 36% from 2020 to 2025.
I was never really a developer, my code sucked. For me, Agentic Engineering is wonderful as I know what to build, but I know that agents can code much better than I ever will. So I welcome this change. For coders, this must feel completely different and I donât envy them right now.
âRust makes coding fun againâ: Why Linux is moving away from C, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman
So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier."
When Rust got started, I took a look at it and was intrigued. But I am not a developer, so I didnât really bother. Now, some 20 years later, I am building my Agentic AI stack in Rust and it is so amazing to see how well it works and how it just outperforms the typical Python-based stack.
Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical
Airbus has shown that the cloud service market can work with digital sovereignty, and it did it the old-fashioned way by announcing a tendering process, in itself a market-making event. It could do the same elsewhere, but while even a big migration is a tasty target for a competent cloud service, thereâs no such sector for productivity and desktop stuff.
Yes, yes, of course thereâs Linux and LibreOffice and all that, but thereâs no organization that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement. Nobodyâs done that before, which, for a risk-averse outfit like Airbus, is a big red flag. There are people who have the track record of managing large projects at that level, and there are people who understand building open source, but they donât live at the same address.
This is so huge. I hope other companies will follow suit and ditch AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other offerings. This will make competition from Europe possible.
Itâs Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History
For all of Tesla CEO Elon Muskâs grandiose claims that the pickup would be an âapocalypse-proofâ tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, itâs instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of âeasy on the eyesâ â probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.
Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasnât sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it hasnât even come close to that number in the nearly three years since it first started shipping, and at this point it probably wonât in its entire lifetime.
So the Cybertruck is about as successful as DOGE. I genuinely wish people to succeed, but I do make an exception with Elon Musk. I hope he fails big time.
Thatâs all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last weekâs Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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â Nico