Business

2026 223 posts

October 2026 39 posts

Intel, Oracle, IBM join growing list of firms objecting to OKX–ICE tokenized stock plans coindesk.com · “Under the framework, venues must notify issuers and give them 30 days to object before offering tokenized versions of their shares.”
Oct 27
Nvidia discusses $2,000-per-GPU annual fee for software that 'runs agents on AI factories' tomshardware.com · “At $2,000 per GPU each year, Nvidia would bring in $10 billion annually if five million GPUs were covered by paid licenses.”
Oct 27
Roblox downloaded 145 GB of models from our sites (including adult content) without asking open3dlab.com · “Within the sample it retrieved, it took adult projects at the same rate as everything else.”
Oct 27
How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices thebignewsletter.com · “The commission is baked into every distribution channel.”
Oct 27
Nintendo Loves You: No Plans To Abandon Physical Media Because 'Fans Enjoy It' techdirt.com · “There is a big enough percentage of the gaming public that likes to buy something physical, for all kinds of reasons. Ownership rights are far more robust that way (for now).”
Oct 27
CSS-Tricks has a new owner! css-tricks.com · “CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again!”
Oct 27
Tesco replacing VMware with Proxmox in its stores and on the edge theregister.com · “Tesco says that during negotiations, VMware made an offer that represented a 175 percent price increase.”
Oct 26
AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo economist says techcrunch.com · “AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment.”
Oct 25
Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear techcrunch.com · “If we make the dog safer, make it healthier, make it perform better, it’s going to perform better in the line of duty.”
Oct 24
Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology steveblank.com · “The U.S. is an unreliable security and technology partner willing to throw any partner under the bus.”
Oct 24
BYD expands EV shipping fleet as wars upend freight costs and key trade routes restofworld.org · “Renting a car carrier with capacity of about 6,500 cars now costs $95,000 a day, up from $50,000 in February”
Oct 23
SpaceX in Talks to Access 80,000 Cell Sites for Wireless Network finance.yahoo.com · “SpaceX aims to secure a minimum of 80,000 cell sites across the US, and it’s in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure company to reach that goal, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Oct 23
A farewell to Arc arc.net · “Arc is sunsetting on December 22, 2026.”
Oct 22
Amazon to fund 12 small nuclear reactors at former Indiana coal plant techcrunch.com · “The most recent nuclear power plants built in the U.S. suffered from egregious budget overruns and slipped timelines.”
Oct 20
A benchmark map of the US economy mercor.com · “This makes it very hard to know how good AI models are at the work Americans actually do.”
Oct 20
Sling TV Drops Innovative Streaming 'Day Passes' After Disney, Warner Bros Sued techdirt.com · “It’s an unfortunate end to a rare bit of actual industry creativity.”
Oct 19
Is CoreWeave's Tapestry of Debt Unraveling? thedailyupside.com · “CoreWeave’s credit swaps were priced at a nerve-rattling 60% chance of default on Thursday, according to ICE Data Services.”
Oct 18
Palantir's record breakout unravels as software stocks shed $260 billion finance.yahoo.com · “The victory lasted three trading sessions.”
Oct 17
HPE's networking boss says AI will handle all trouble tickets without humans in two years theregister.com · “Within two to three years, we’ll have no issues that require humans.”
Oct 11
Published Version Update in App Stores community.bitwarden.com · “Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build.”
Oct 10
New York Plans Stronger Sports Betting Regulation to Curb Gambling Addiction propublica.org · “The industry is on notice by me and this commission that they need to solve this problem,”
Oct 10
Microsoft and Anthropic play invoice tennis with startup's $17,600 Claude bill theregister.com · “Marketplace transactions are processed through a separate billing pipeline associated with the third-party publisher.”
Oct 10
US bars Microsoft, Adobe, and major IT firms from green card program for skilled foreign workers techcrunch.com · “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,”
Oct 10
SpaceX to buy key spectrum that could help Starlink Mobile become major US cell carrier theregister.com · “Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.”
Oct 10
Microsoft 365 subscribers set to lose up to 4TB of OneDrive storage theregister.com · “Shared storage helps ensure that one person doesn’t run out of space while other members have unused storage available.”
Oct 9
Pirate App MovieBox Passes 300 Million Downloads as Rightsholders Alert EU torrentfreak.com · “MovieBox has been closely linked to the Transsion / Transsnet ecosystem.”
Oct 9
Abstract Warfare: How TSMC Made Its Own Market kwokchain.com · “They do it by attacking the abstractions their industry is built on, not their competitors’ products.”
Oct 9
Disloyalty pluralistic.net · “These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs.”
Oct 9
As U.S. blocks DJI, Insta360 races to win American creators restofworld.org · “In the first half of 2026, Insta360’s net profit dropped by 94% compared with a year ago.”
Oct 9
Global PC shipments crater 20% as rising prices hammer demand theregister.com · “For an industry hoping AI would help sell more PCs, that’s quite the result.”
Oct 9
The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear restofworld.org · “The world’s cheapest smartphones are disappearing because AI infrastructure is absorbing the components.”
Oct 9
Deno is joining Cloudflare deno.com · “Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.”
Oct 9
The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear restofworld.org · “The 173 million sub-$100 smartphones shipped globally last year are disappearing, with shipments falling almost 60% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to IDC.”
Oct 5
Huawei and Qualcomm Announce Broad Patent License Agreement huawei.com · “This agreement not only demonstrates the value of Huawei’s innovations, but also recognizes Qualcomm’s foundational contributions.”
Oct 5
BT buys TalkTalk out of administration to keep 2.5M customers connected theregister.com · “This is a genuinely unprecedented situation, where millions of citizens and businesses were at risk if TalkTalk had collapsed.”
Oct 5
With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. bloodinthemachine.com · “Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers.”
Oct 2
RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates 'much higher' prices theregister.com · “We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”
Oct 1
Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots techcrunch.com · “Public API access will also end by March 2027, which will impact any tools that used it for programmatic access to Reddit conversations.”
Oct 1
Awkward: Saudi Arabia's new EV brand takes on the U.S. rival it already controls restofworld.org · “Combined, their full-capacity targets are roughly 10 times what the domestic market can plausibly absorb near-term.”
Oct 1

September 2026 36 posts

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP. propublica.org · “Take a loss? Now take a beat.”
Sep 29
Google ending ChromeOS support two years early theregister.com · “For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS.”
Sep 29
Soaring U.S. diesel prices slam local communities as fuel costs surge cbsnews.com · “One Georgia food bank said it will spend an extra $100,000 this year on diesel, money that otherwise would have gone to feed families.”
Sep 29
Meta launches enterprise AI platform, hires MongoDB CEO to lead new initiative techcrunch.com · “Meta has a unique role to play because it is bringing together advanced models and leading agents with a proven track record of helping millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses scale.”
Sep 29
Gouged pluralistic.net · “Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less.”
Sep 29
Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back theregister.com · Microsoft is “currently unable to provide a list showing which data may have been deleted or whether any data was deleted at all.”
Sep 28
South Korea's AI chip giants are fighting for a bigger role in America's AI boom restofworld.org · “Nvidia’s allocation decisions are still the predominant factor determining high-bandwidth memory market share.”
Sep 28
Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free gultsch.de · “When Google fucks up, there is absolutely nothing I can do.”
Sep 25
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising eff.org · “DraftKings is using its customers’ betting records to train a machine learning model to find losing gamblers.”
Sep 25
Waymo is scaling fast: Here's what the fleet data shows techcrunch.com · “The Ojai is supposed to drive down costs and ultimately help Waymo reach profitability.”
Sep 25
No grades, no tests, no degree: Andreessen Horowitz launching SF academy for 'builders' sfstandard.com · “The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era.”
Sep 24
The plunging price of thought epoch.ai · “Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter, faster than for any other transformative technology in history.”
Sep 24
California AG Rob Bonta Caves, Paramount Merger To Proceed With Flimsy Conditions techdirt.com · “These minor concessions are largely unenforceable behavioral remedies that Bonta had previously denounced, and in some cases promise less than the two companies are already doing.”
Sep 22
Gartner predicts 55 percent of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029 theregister.com · “The transition to per-core subscriptions has resulted in significant cost increases. Many have also reported minimal flexibility during negotiations.”
Sep 22
What Sun got wrong bcantrill.dtrace.org · “Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.”
Sep 22
The AI talent war is coming for Big Tech's Asia executives restofworld.org · “Once a company decides [a region] is a strategic growth market, you start looking for executives who can essentially operate as mini-CEOs.”
Sep 18
Economists Concerned the AI Bubble Is About to Blow futurism.com · “On balance, we think the data look consistent with a late-stage bubble.”
Sep 16
Everybody pees pluralistic.net · “The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users – turns the majority of the world’s other humans into phantasms”
Sep 15
Where in the world is the iPhone cheapest? restofworld.org · “After the September 9 launch event, prices of older models were increased by 21% in the U.S. and up to 41% in India.”
Sep 15
The Dominican Baseball Factory propublica.org · “Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here, but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”
Sep 10
Diesel prices are nearing $6 a gallon for the first time ever cbsnews.com · “There’s just not enough diesel right now in Russia to export any volume of it, and that’s unfortunately a big problem for a global economy that sees almost every piece of heavy machinery needing diesel.”
Sep 10
Cracks in the AI Thesis Part 2 econlab.substack.com · “Unfortunately, that volume may not be large enough to counteract the effective decline in prices.”
Sep 10
Shopify extends lifeline to Tailwind as vibe coding erodes web dev platform's bottom line theregister.com · “We’re joining Shopify to give Tailwind a stable long-term home where it will be actively maintained for the millions of people who depend on it.”
Sep 10
Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence techcrunch.com · “I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.”
Sep 10
Blizzard employees have ratified their first union contracts engadget.com · “the right to be ‘recalled’ into open positions at any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months”
Sep 10
Global stocks slide as Brent crude surpasses $100 a barrel aljazeera.com · “The benchmark crude contract rose to $100.19 on Wednesday, its highest level since July 24, when a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was in place, and its price was on the downswing.”
Sep 10
Fake Consumer Group Using AI To Generate Fake Support For Paramount Merger techdirt.com · “The AI system simply changed her writing to not only express support for the merger, but make up an entire fake backstory about her.”
Sep 9
Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group To Drum Up Fake Support For Merger techdirt.com · “The sender organization’s website is less than three months old. It discloses no founders, board members, staff, or funders, and the organization does not appear in ProPublica’s nonprofit database.”
Sep 8
Think your EV holds its value? China has some bad news for you restofworld.org · “Exporting the car is the easy part. Building the ecosystem that supports its second and third owner is much harder.”
Sep 8
American companies expect their customers to stay much longer. That may be making the economy less competitive promarket.org · “With the suspension of the federal regulation on click to cancel, we should see a slightly better outcome.”
Sep 7
Chinese businesses are giving away AI tokens with coffee, credit cards, and dumplings restofworld.org · “Most ordinary users still encounter AI through an app or feature, without seeing a token balance.”
Sep 7
iPhone Ultra Production Hitting Just 'a Few Hundred' a Day, Says Nikkei macrumors.com · “Production is ramping up slowly, with output currently at only a few hundred units a day in late August.”
Sep 7
Google defeats US bid to force ad tech sale engadget.com · “We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”
Sep 6
TiVo Ending Free Commercial Skipping Feature zatznotfunny.com · “Beginning November 2, 2026, the current version of SkipMode, using the Skip Button on your TiVo remote, will no longer be available.”
Sep 6
A note on subscription prices from LWN lwn.net · “We have only increased prices twice in the 24 years since adopting this model; the last increase was in early 2022, nearly five years ago.”
Sep 2
Fervo and Google sign world's largest deal for next-gen geothermal power canarymedia.com · “Even though right now we don’t have clarity yet on how this will service a data center … we know that it will be a foundational building block”
Sep 2

August 2026 23 posts

India's data center boom is leaving the people it displaces with nothing restofworld.org · “Developing countries should not become data waste centers, serving the elite of the world.”
Aug 29
SpaceX Announces $100 Billion Plan for New Spaceport in Louisiana cbsnews.com · “Today is nothing short of a transformational moment,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry told lawmakers.
Aug 26
Tesla Confirms Cybercab Launch Coming Next Week electrek.co · “I’ve been trying to get excited about the Cybercab launch, and I keep landing in the same place: this is a car swap, dressed up as a milestone.”
Aug 26
Where's the Beef? The Lab-Grown-Meat Revolution That Wasn't harpers.org · “On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post.”
Aug 26
Amazon hikes hardware prices by 60%, blaming memory shortage techcrunch.com · “After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.”
Aug 24
Thomson Reuters leverages its world-class data assets to launch its own frontier model thomsonreuters.com · “Start with a strong foundation, specialize it deeply for the work that matters, and you can build intelligence that is highly capable, far more efficient and entirely under your control.”
Aug 24
Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results kagi.com · “We’ve added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results automatically.”
Aug 21
Salesforce partners not seeing meaningful revenue from Agentforce AI platform, report says theregister.com · “A third of partners said there was strong interest in Agentforce as they were starting to see buying and trial activity. However, none were seeing Agentforce become a driver of bookings activity.”
Aug 21
OpenRouter is joining Stripe openrouter.ai · “OpenRouter will continue to operate as it is: same mission, same name, same product, same roadmap.”
Aug 19
Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit theregister.com · “Google bid for and won for just $10 million - pending judicial approval… 100 million emails and 500 million items from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million items from SharePoint.”
Aug 18
Arizona wants Taiwan's investors to think beyond chips restofworld.org · “Arizona’s increasing focus on Taiwan comes as trade between the two jumped from $4.9 billion in 2024 to $21.2 billion in 2025.”
Aug 11
Elon Musk Wants To Get Into Wireless Phones And He's Probably Not Going To Have A Good Time techdirt.com · “SpaceX’s IPO promised that Starlink would quickly jump from 10 million current subscribers to 300 million or more in very short order.”
Aug 11
How one VC burns through hundreds of millions of tokens a day to find the next unicorn restofworld.org · “I consume between 300 and 500 million tokens a day just to get my work done.”
Aug 11
SpaceX's Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds Of Twitter's Ad Business techdirt.com · “In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million.”
Aug 11
Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm en.wikipedia.org · “Insisting that our right to organize be adjudicated by the National Labor Relations Board is not a neutral choice; it has everything to do with delaying the process.”
Aug 2
The man who wrote the AI-boom bible just got margin-called out of it web.archive.org · “An eight-person fund used heavy leverage, the market turned, and a bigger firm picked up the pieces.”
Aug 2
Return to Office Mandates Don't Improve Employee or Company Performance business.pitt.edu · “RTO mandates hurt employee satisfaction but do not improve firm performance.”
Aug 2
OpenAI Cuts Prices on Select Models to Make High-Volume Work Economical pymnts.com · “At the lower-cost end, the new Luna and Terra prices make high-volume work economical at much greater scale.”
Aug 2
Over 100 Games Are Available For $10 To Support Devs Hit By Industry Layoffs kotaku.com · “They are human beings whose livelihoods have been taken from them, often in spite of stellar, critically and financially successful work.”
Aug 2
Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer theregister.com · “A terminal multiplexer may sound like a narrow place to start a company, but the lowly terminal is the common denominator across today’s developers, agents, tools, and infrastructure.”
Aug 2
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds openrss.org · “while the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined”
Aug 1
Why businesses lie about AI pluralistic.net · “Every single one. We have seen 0% success in a year and a half.”
Aug 1
Game Industry Hardship Fund itch.io · “Reports say 33% of the industry lost their jobs in the last two years, and the jobs they could fill are disappearing as CEOs try to replace them with AI.”
Aug 1

July 2026 38 posts

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester theregister.com · “The organisations that succeed will treat sovereignty as an architectural principle from the start.”
Jul 31
Charities remain locked out of CAF Bank online accounts theregister.com · “People are concerned that wages won’t get paid because of this, and that’s just stressful when they have bills to pay.”
Jul 31
Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner theregister.com · “A full buyout by Vodafone was always on the cards but the agreement has come sooner than expected, with the joint venture only just into its second year.”
Jul 31
Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney theregister.com · “Kiro is ‘available’ in the same way as I am available to play in the NBA.”
Jul 31
SpaceX looks to compete with the carriers semafor.com · “The reality is that they’re coming to the game very late after this industry has been established.”
Jul 30
Big Tech demanding deals that smooth out memory prices, says SK Hynix theregister.com · “Relationships are evolving beyond transactional relations into more strategic long-term partnerships.”
Jul 29
A Blackout Protest Over Sony Ditching Disks Is Brewing techdirt.com · “Sony’s strategy for dealing with online and customer backlash in the past has been to simply wait it out.”
Jul 29
Back of the NetApp: Latest exec signing scores $34M compensation package theregister.com · “NetApp says 95 percent of his target direct compensation is ‘at risk,’ taking the form of cash incentives and equity awards rather than guaranteed salary.”
Jul 29
Amazon Files Application for Direct-to-Device Satellite Constellation spacenews.com · “Amazon has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of more than 5,100 satellites that would provide direct-to-device (D2D) services using Globalstar spectrum.”
Jul 28
Elon Musk Just Claimed That "SpaceX Will Be Worth More Than Earth," but the Bond Market Strongly Disagrees fool.com · “I said SpaceX will be worth more than Earth if we achieve our goals.”
Jul 27
Waymo reportedly mulling a breakup with Uber techcrunch.com · “Waymo already told Uber that it intends to offer robotaxis on its own app in those markets starting in January 2028”
Jul 27
X and Music Publishers Settle Three-Year Copyright Clash After SpaceX IPO torrentfreak.com · “The coordinated timing and matching language leave little doubt that these cases were resolved as part of a package deal.”
Jul 26
iOS 27 code suggests Apple could restrict leased devices after missed payments 9to5mac.com · “If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in ‘Restricted Mode,’ which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved.”
Jul 26
The Robots Cometh time.com · “Once the technology surpasses this inflection point, robots can gradually be rolled out for large-scale commercial use.”
Jul 26
Stripe in Talks to Buy OpenRouter for Roughly $10 Billion pymnts.com · “OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have found a lucrative niche between AI developers.”
Jul 24
OpenAI's AI spending spree has ballooned to $750B techcrunch.com · “OpenAI announced Wednesday that it will spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030, some 25% more than it estimated earlier this year.”
Jul 23
Commission fines Google €890 million for breaches of the Digital Markets Act digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu · “Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search.”
Jul 23
Travis Kalanick's robotics company raises $1.7B, led by a16z techcrunch.com · “Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens.”
Jul 23
American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing. werd.io · “Open almost always wins when it comes to infrastructure adoption. Open technologies can be used permissionlessly and therefore can be at the center of more innovation.”
Jul 20
How proprietary formats have become Microsoft's main tool for lock-in blog.documentfoundation.org · “A standard that only one implementation fully supports is, from a functional point of view, a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate.”
Jul 20
Did SpaceX puncture the AI bubble? unherd.com · “The AI bubble-burst watch has begun.”
Jul 14
Microsoft overhauls Windows 11 search to prioritize local results and remove ads windowscentral.com · “Because the Windows Search Box is where many people start, we focused first on making results more dependable, easier to scan, and clearer before you click.”
Jul 14
Winners and losers in the coming AI margin collapse (part 2) martinalderson.com · “The margin in pure model inference is heading towards zero.”
Jul 14
Former GitHub CEO Launches Competitor Designed for the Age of Vibe Coding theregister.com · “The question is how we can expand, rewire, and evolve Git hosting for a world where AI agents are the primary producers of code.”
Jul 11
America's Greatest Hot Dog longreads.com · “It is America’s greatest hot dog. And the country’s last great deal.”
Jul 11
Meta Will Build Its First Canadian Data Center in Alberta finance.yahoo.com · “This is the first of its kind, the first of its size, the first of its scale, but it won’t be the last.”
Jul 9
Apple to Increase Spend with Broadcom to Produce Billions More U.S. Chips apple.com · “Apple and Broadcom have a long history together, and this new phase of our partnership further accelerates our commitment to American manufacturing and innovation.”
Jul 8
Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff engadget.com · “Microsoft ‘slow-walked union members at the bargaining table’ preventing them from accessing the protections of a union contract.”
Jul 8
Nvidia's Kyber Rack Delayed to 2028 Over Manufacturing Snags datacenterdynamics.com · “Kyber NVL144 rack architecture has been delayed to 2028 as the PCB midplane remains challenging from a manufacturability standpoint.”
Jul 7
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk techcrunch.com · “On July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal.”
Jul 7
Apple reportedly orders 10M foldable iPhone Ultra models, which could sell for around $2500 9to5mac.com · “Apple has told suppliers to prepare to produce about 10 million foldable iPhones this year with an expected price tag of around $2,500.”
Jul 7
Tech CEOs Walk Back Dire AI Job Loss Predictions pymnts.com · “We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications.” - Sam Altman
Jul 7
GLM 5.2 and the Coming AI Margin Collapse martinalderson.com · “The going rate for GLM5.2 seems to be around the $4.40/MTok mark. This is less than 20% of the retail price of Opus.”
Jul 7
Microsoft Lays Off Nearly 5,000 Employees Across Xbox, Commercial Sales techcrunch.com · “The roles being eliminated today are not being replaced by AI.”
Jul 6
Google Told to Pay Klarna Nearly $2 Billion in Shopping Spat msn.com · “Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping service.”
Jul 6
Meta Is Reportedly Building Its Own Cloud Business engadget.com · “The cloud business could offer multiple services, according to the report, like selling access to AI models run on Meta’s infrastructure, or leasing the computing power of its data centers.”
Jul 1
Searchable Directory of 22k+ Products From Worker-Owned Co-ops workerowned.info · “Find Worker-Owned Coffee Shops & Restaurants Near You”
Jul 1
Uruky - The Paid European Search Engine: My First Impressions After Using Uruky for a Month robheghan.prose.sh · “Their service is very affordable at 5 euro a month, and their interface is great. Unfortunately they fail where it matters most: search results.”
Jul 1

June 2026 7 posts

In San Francisco, Even $180,000 Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough nytimes.com · “I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all.”
Jun 30
Zuckerberg Urges Meta to Explore Working With Polymarket and Kalshi cryptobriefing.com · “Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to build a prediction markets app.”
Jun 29
Ford rehires 'gray beard' engineers after AI falls short techcrunch.com · “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”
Jun 28
Debt, AI boom and economic fragilities raise global risks, BIS says cnbc.com · “The interconnectedness of the financial system and interplay of vulnerabilities could mean the speed of a correction could be much faster than previous banking crisis episodes.”
Jun 28
We're making Bunny DNS free bunny.net · “If we truly believe in our mission to help make the internet hop faster, then the fundamental system that sits between your users and your services shouldn’t be a premium add-on.”
Jun 24
The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent theatlantic.com · “Whether it was strain, arrows, airspeed, whatever, we had to measure all that data onto a tape machine.”
Jun 12
Prediction Markets Let You Bet on Anything. I Bet Against My Own Husband. gq.com · “Someone at the Dolby Theatre, or someone getting texts from inside, was profiting off the seconds between their reality and mine.”
Jun 9

May 2026 9 posts

Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion consumerrights.wiki · “Apps that are older versions enter reduced functionality mode after the certificate expires.”
May 30
Uber, Lyft Drivers In Massachusetts Form First US Ride-Share Union usnews.com · “It changes the game for ride-share workers across this country.”
May 26
Is Software Losing Its Head? x.com · “Salesforce’s strategic pivot toward headless APIs, suggesting that user interfaces no longer provide competitive advantages in an agentic future.”
May 17
Building, and Whatnot x.com · “Lean teams of experienced PMs who remain connected to users, iterate rapidly, and leverage AI to strengthen decision-making.”
May 17
GM Cutting Hundreds of Salaried IT Workers As It Trims Costs, Evaluates Needs cnbc.com · “GM is transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.”
May 11
Meta's embrace of A.I. is making its employees miserable nytimes.com · “Engineers describe a culture where shipping anything that looks like AI is rewarded and quality is an afterthought.”
May 9
Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users reclaimthenet.org · “Users running GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, and LineageOS are now blocked from sites using reCAPTCHA unless they sign in to a Google account.”
May 8
Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons drive.com.au · “Customer feedback was clear. Touchscreens for everything is a worse driving experience.”
May 4
Ask.com has closed ask.com · “After 30 years of operation, Ask.com is no longer accepting queries.”
May 2

April 2026 14 posts

OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO wsj.com · “OpenAI has missed internal revenue and user growth targets ahead of its planned IPO.”
Apr 27
Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft ft.com · “Google is betting that AI capabilities will help GCP catch up to AWS and Azure.”
Apr 26
AI run store in SF can't stop ordering candies and paying women less. sfist.com · “An AI-managed store in San Francisco is over-ordering candy inventory and underpaying women employees.”
Apr 23
San Diego rents declined following surge in supply kpbs.org · “San Diego rents fell after a sustained increase in housing supply.”
Apr 21
FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account daedal.io · “The FSF says a spammer is sending 10,000+ emails per day from a Gmail address and Google won’t respond.”
Apr 15
OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports reuters.com · “OpenAI’s $852B valuation is drawing increasing scrutiny from investors amid revenue concerns.”
Apr 14
A new spam policy for “back button hijacking” developers.google.com · “Google will start penalizing sites that hijack the back button to keep users trapped.”
Apr 13
Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning adlrocha.substack.com · “Apple’s failure to ship a state of the art LLM may end up being a strategic advantage.”
Apr 12
AI Job Loss Tracker jobloss.ai · “A live tracker of layoffs and job cuts attributed to AI automation.”
Apr 11
We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit andonlabs.com · “We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in San Francisco and asked it to run the store.”
Apr 10
Intel Joins Musk's Terafab AI Chip Project interestingengineering.com · “By establishing a massive, dedicated semiconductor pipeline for AI-centric hardware, Intel and Musk are insulating themselves from geopolitical and supply chain volatilities.”
Apr 7
France pulls last gold held in US mining.com · “France has repatriated the last of its gold reserves held at the Federal Reserve in New York.”
Apr 6
Oracle Slashes 30,000 Jobs With a 6 AM Email rollingout.com · “No heads-up from human resources, no conversation with a direct manager, and no advance notice of any kind.”
Apr 2
OpenAI Closes $122 Billion Funding Round at $852 Billion Valuation openai.com · “OpenAI now generates $2 billion in monthly revenue and serves 900 million weekly ChatGPT users.”
Apr 1

March 2026 14 posts

Apple Pulls Vibe Coding App 'Anything' From the App Store 9to5mac.com · “Apple rejected that submission and removed the app entirely from the App Store.”
Mar 30
Mistral Secures $830 Million in Debt to Build a Paris Data Center With 13,800 Nvidia Chips techcrunch.com · “Seven banks backed the transaction: Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis.”
Mar 29
Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies sytse.com · “I started a new company every six months as a way to keep going during treatment.”
Mar 28
SoftBank Secures $40 Billion Loan to Fund OpenAI Investment techcrunch.com · “The 12-month term aligns almost perfectly with market speculation about an OpenAI IPO window in late 2026 or early 2027.”
Mar 27
Meta Cuts 700 Jobs Across Reality Labs, Facebook, and Recruiting cnbc.com · “Streamlining the business to work more effectively with AI.”
Mar 25
Musk Announces Terafab, a $20 Billion Chip Factory for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI electrek.co · “We’re very grateful to our existing supply chain, to Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others, but there’s a maximum rate at which they’re comfortable expanding.”
Mar 22
Apple Quietly Blocks Updates for Popular Vibe Coding Apps macrumors.com · “Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area.”
Mar 17
Nvidia GTC 2026: Jensen Huang Sees $1 Trillion in Orders Through 2027 asiliconvalleyinsider.com · “Jensen Huang took the stage to a packed house and said he expects purchase orders between Blackwell and Vera Rubin to reach $1 trillion through 2027.”
Mar 16
Honda is killing its EVs techcrunch.com · “Honda is canceling its 2027 EV platform and pulling back to hybrids only.”
Mar 15
Nvidia Invests $2 Billion in Neocloud Nebius Amid AI Data Center Push finance.yahoo.com · “Nebius is building an AI cloud designed for the agentic era.”
Mar 13
OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle cnbc.com · “OpenAI is shifting future capacity to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, leaving Oracle holding the construction tab.”
Mar 9
Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage arstechnica.com · “The 512GB Mac Studio configuration disappeared from Apple’s online store with no announcement.”
Mar 8
Tim Sweeney Signed Away His Right To Criticize Google Until 2032 theverge.com · “Sweeney agreed in a binding terms sheet to not only stop attacking Google’s app store policies, but to actively support the changes the company is rolling out.”
Mar 5
Charter Gets FCC Permission To Buy Cox, Become Largest ISP In the US arstechnica.com · “Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination.”
Mar 2

February 2026 12 posts

Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran nytimes.com · “Employees who raised concerns about transactions routed to Iran were let go before the company reached a settlement with US regulators.”
Feb 22
AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says gizmodo.com · “AI investment spending has had ‘basically zero’ contribution to the U.S. GDP growth in 2025.” — Jan Hatzius, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist
Feb 22
Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel chrisbrunet.com · “The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data.”
Feb 21
America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks governance.fyi · “People aren’t failing to save because they’re weak. They’re failing to save because the world is rough, and their institutions don’t do enough to help them weather it.”
Feb 15
IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption fortune.com · “After two years of replacing junior roles with AI tooling, IBM concluded the strategy hollowed out its talent pipeline.”
Feb 13
Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation anthropic.com · “The Series G brings Anthropic’s valuation to $380 billion, one of the largest private rounds in history.”
Feb 12
Why This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever bloomberg.com · “Bitcoin has tumbled 44% from its October peak, falling below $70,000 for the first time in 15 months, losing more than $1.2 trillion worth of value.”
Feb 6
Patient Capital Will Eat the World x.com · “Growth-stage software no longer requires or generates capital like early SaaS.”
Feb 4
Adobe Reverses Animate Shutdown After Backlash techcrunch.com · “Adobe’s announcement about discontinuing Animate was met with incredulity, disappointment, and anger.”
Feb 4
Light Beer Was a Flop Until Advertising Saved It yahoo.com · “Everything you always wanted in a beer. And less.”
Feb 4
xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com · “The most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet.”
Feb 2
Walmart Begins Building Out Nationwide EV Charging Network Across America finance.yahoo.com · “With a store or club located within 10 miles of approximately 90% of Americans, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a convenient charging option.”
Feb 1

January 2026 31 posts

The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice wsj.com · “Negotiations have stalled over chip allocation, financing structure, and the question of whether OpenAI can actually pay.”
Jan 31
Tesla's autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers electrek.co · “Tesla’s own robotaxi data, finally released under court order, shows a crash rate three times higher than human drivers, even with a safety monitor in the seat.”
Jan 30
Hundreds of Gatik Robot Delivery Trucks Headed For US Roads forbes.com · “Gatik became the first company in North America to deploy fully driverless trucks in commercial operations at scale, with $600 million in contracted revenue and daily deliveries for Fortune 50 retailers.”
Jan 29
Please Don't Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In mcsweeneys.net · “I want to continue living my immoral technofascist life without any criticism.”
Jan 28
Apple Sued by App Developer Over its Continuity Camera petapixel.com · “Rather than competing with us, Apple deployed a series of obstacles to tilt the playing field, infringed our IP.”
Jan 28
Amazon to Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores aboutamazon.com · “We haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.”
Jan 28
Tether Launches USA₮: Federally Regulated US Dollar Stablecoin tether.io · “USA₮ offers institutions an additional option: a dollar-backed token made in America.”
Jan 28
How Do You Compete in Agentic Commerce? growth-memo.com · “The last decade rewarded marketing arbitrage. Agentic commerce rewards product truth.”
Jan 28
Entire Industries Are Now Decided in Less Than Two Years x.com · “Industry dominance timelines have compressed dramatically.”
Jan 28
California Tech CEO and EV Pioneer Arrested, Accused of Murder sfgate.com · “Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody without bail and faces a murder charge.”
Jan 26
The Behavioral Cost of Personalized Pricing digitalseams.com · “Technology gives us not only quantity, but ubiquity—every piece of behavioral context can contribute to your prices.”
Jan 25
Tesla Launches Public Robotaxi Rides in Austin with No Safety Monitor teslarati.com · “Robotaxi rides without any safety monitors are now publicly available in Austin. Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet.”
Jan 24
Sequoia Joins Anthropic's $25B Funding Round Despite Backing OpenAI techcrunch.com · “One anonymous source told the Financial Times that Sequoia ultimately thinks OpenAI and Anthropic will head in different directions, catering to different aspects of the AI market.”
Jan 24
AI's Chicken Sandwich Problem vinvashishta.substack.com · “AI in the enterprise has over 250 chicken sandwiches, and it only needs 3.”
Jan 24
Netflix to Redesign App to Compete with Social Platforms for Daily Engagement techcrunch.com · “At the center of the redesign is deeper integration of vertical video feeds, which the streaming giant has been experimenting with since May.”
Jan 24
Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com · “We’re simplifying and modernizing our offerings so you can choose the best tool for your goals.”
Jan 23
My Time at Amazon, Part I beccaselah.substack.com · “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”
Jan 23
TikTok Finalizes Deal To Form New American Entity npr.org · “TikTok’s recommendation algorithm will be retrained and tested using American user data.”
Jan 23
Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B reuters.com · “Capital One has agreed to acquire fintech corporate card provider Brex for $5.15 billion in a cash and stock deal.”
Jan 22
Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo news.ycombinator.com · “The acquisition closed in November. The layoffs were finalized in the second week of January.”
Jan 21
EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity eu-inc.org · “A single corporate registration valid in all 27 member states, with English-language filings and a unified equity structure.”
Jan 21
Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android androidauthority.com · “The new sideloading flow will require multi-step warnings, identity verification, and developer attestation for every install outside the Play Store.”
Jan 20
Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries reuters.com · “AkademikerPension will sell its full holdings of US Treasury bonds, citing political risk and currency considerations.”
Jan 20
Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results 9to5mac.com · “The new layout removes the visual distinction between paid placements and organic search results.”
Jan 19
American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis kielinstitut.de · “The empirical pass-through of 2025 tariff increases to US consumer prices is approximately 90 percent.”
Jan 19
Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy web.archive.org · “OpenAI cannot pay for the compute it needs from subscriptions alone. Ads are the only model with the headroom to cover the bill.”
Jan 18
Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales electrek.co · “Ford has discontinued the F-150 Lightning despite outselling the Cybertruck for two consecutive quarters.”
Jan 14
SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation sparkfun.com · “SparkFun has terminated its longstanding partnership with Adafruit citing a Code of Conduct violation by senior leadership.”
Jan 14
AI is a business model stress test dri.es · “Every existing business model in tech is being tested by AI. The ones that pass will look very different. The ones that fail will not be replaced.”
Jan 11
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team github.com · “Tailwind Labs has reduced its engineering headcount by 75 percent, citing a strategic shift to AI-augmented development.”
Jan 7
Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet neowin.net · “Microsoft removed the documented offline activation method, leaving only online activation paths.”
Jan 3

2025 181 posts

December 2025 2 posts

The Airport Lounge Wars newyorker.com · “In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days.”
Dec 3
Kicking Robots: Humanoids and the tech-industry hype machine harpers.org · “The future that scares me is not a robot uprising led by robots, but one led by billionaires.”
Dec 1

November 2025 1 posts

6,000 Airbus A320s Grounded for Emergency Software Fix Over Thanksgiving npr.org · “Thousands of travelers worldwide were stranded after Airbus ordered immediate software fixes for 6,000 A320-series aircraft.”
Nov 28

October 2025 2 posts

China Expands Rare Earth Export Controls, Adds Five More Elements aljazeera.com · “China hasn’t yet pulled the trigger on export restrictions, but it’s reminding Washington that it could.”
Oct 9
Gulf Air Returns to New York After Nearly 30 Years aviationweek.com · “Gulf Air was among the first movers of the month, returning to the U.S. for the first time since the 1990s.”
Oct 1

September 2025 6 posts

OpenAI and Oracle Ink Historic $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal techcrunch.com · “OpenAI will purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from Oracle over five years.”
Sep 15
Chrome Increases Its Overwhelming Market Share, Now Over 70% neowin.net · “Chrome has crossed 70% browser market share while Firefox continues to decline.”
Sep 14
Amazon Fire TV Devices Expected to Ditch Android for Linux arstechnica.com · “Amazon Fire TV will transition to proprietary Linux-based Vega OS, moving away from Android.”
Sep 14
Interlune Signs $300M Deal to Harvest Helium-3 from the Moon msn.com · “Finnish quantum computing company Bluefors has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon through Interlune.”
Sep 9
The Profitable Startup linear.app · “Challenging the binary between VC-backed money-burners and bootstrapped profitability.”
Sep 9
Top Researchers Leave Intel to Build Startup with 'The Biggest, Baddest CPU' oregonlive.com · “Former Intel researchers founding a startup with plans for high-bandwidth memory on-package with 352 AMD Zen 4 cores.”
Sep 5

August 2025 5 posts

Meta Signs $10 Billion Cloud Deal With Google meta.slashdot.org · “Meta will rely on Google Cloud’s infrastructure to support its massive AI data center buildout, as the company ramps up capital spending into the tens of billions.”
Aug 22
Two Years After Wildfire, Maui Homeowners Face Foreclosure longreads.com · “That scared the crap out of me because I didn’t know if after 12 months I was going to have to pay that 12 months back in full…”
Aug 18
Amazon's Starlink Competitor Tops 100 Satellites tech.slashdot.org · “SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low-earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide.”
Aug 12
Sony Says Its Xperia Smartphones Are Still 'Very Important' mobile.slashdot.org · “Communication technology is a very important technology that Sony has cultivated for a long time.”
Aug 7
Google Backpedals On Goo.gl Shutdown To Preserve Active Links tech.slashdot.org · “Google is changing its mind about killing off all goo.gl short links…only going to disable goo.gl links that haven’t seen any activity since late 2024.”
Aug 1

July 2025 18 posts

Oxide Computer: Our $100M Series B oxide.computer · “We’re going to kick butt, have fun, not cheat—and change computing forever.”
Jul 30
The Surprise Winner in the U.S.-China Tech War? Vietnam's Chip Industry restofworld.org · “This is a huge opportunity for us to break into the supply chain.”
Jul 28
CISPE Challenges Broadcom's VMware Buy in Court theregister.com · “Licensing costs have increased drastically, sometimes exceeding tenfold, with mandatory multi-year commitments required for accessing VMware software.”
Jul 24
Nickel Workers Powered the EV Battery Boom. Now, Layoffs Have Hit. restofworld.org · “As people now rely on wages from nickel, layoffs will cause poverty.”
Jul 23
AI and Immigration Uncertainty Threaten Nigeria's Outsourcing Dreams restofworld.org · “Unfortunately, the reality of talent in Nigeria now is that you have to leave to reach your full potential.”
Jul 18
Two Guys Hated Using Comcast, So They Built Their Own Fiber ISP arstechnica.com · “We are 100 percent fiber optic. Everything that we’re doing is all underground. We’re not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we’re having a reliable connection.”
Jul 14
TikTok's Messy Merger in Indonesia restofworld.org · “Tokopedia has ’lost its soul’ and been ‘reduced to just another generic Chinese marketplace.’”
Jul 14
Bootstrapping a Side Project into a Profitable Seven-Figure Business projectionlab.com · “Success indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really surprising and amazing places.”
Jul 13
Payment Processors Push AI Porn Off Platforms 404media.co · “Creators of AI-generated pornography and celebrity deepfakes are running out of easy hosting options.”
Jul 12
Firefox Is Fine. The People Running It Are Not. news.slashdot.org · “Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else besides relying on Google funding.”
Jul 12
Belkin Shows Tech Firms Getting Too Comfortable with Bricking Customers' Stuff arstechnica.com · “For any Wemo devices you have that are out of warranty, will not work with HomeKit, or if you are unable to use HomeKit, we recommend disposing of these devices at an authorized e-waste recycling center.”
Jul 11
Dangerous Mines: Zimbabwe's Lithium Mining Boom restofworld.org · “Local people are the losers.”
Jul 8
The Clones Are Here theatlantic.com · “Really and truly, a horse can be alive forever. Forever and ever.”
Jul 8
America Has Two Labor Markets Now news.slashdot.org · “We’re in a complex jobs market – it’s not falling apart but the lack of dynamism” characterizes the current environment.
Jul 7
Young Americans Spending Less on Video Games games.slashdot.org · “Video game spending among 18-to-24-year-olds fell nearly 25% in a four-week April period.”
Jul 5
Valve Conquered PC Gaming. What Comes Next? games.slashdot.org · “Steam controls an estimated 70% of PC game sales with annual revenues expected to exceed $10 billion.”
Jul 4
Big Tech's Mixed Response to U.S. Treasury Sanctions krebsonsecurity.com · “It’s crazy that the vast majority of big tech companies haven’t done anything to cut ties with this guy.”
Jul 3
Microsoft Kicks Off New Fiscal Year with More Layoffs theregister.com · “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace.”
Jul 2

June 2025 17 posts

Commodore acquired for a ‘low seven figure’ price — new (acting) CEO comes from the retro community tomshardware.com · “It has been agreed that a price “in the low seven figures” will be paid to seal the deal. That should mean the deal is worth somewhere between $1m and $5m.”
Jun 29
Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC techcrunch.com · “Since then, Better Auth has clocked 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars, and a community of over 6,000 Discord members, the startup claims.”
Jun 25
iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing 'F1' movie techcrunch.com · “Instead, users not on the new beta build only have the option to disable notifications or to turn off seeing card benefits within Wallet during checkout. They can’t opt out of offers.”
Jun 24
Discord is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost: The Enshittification of Discord. update.botghost.com · “If Discord does not reverse or clarify this decision, BotGhost will be forced to shut down by July 14, 2025. This will happen with certainty.”
Jun 23
The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end digitalseams.com · “LLMs are wrong all the time already - if you get a recommendation that’s factually inaccurate, how can you distinguish hallucination from payola?”
Jun 23
The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge theregister.com · “Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of websites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.”
Jun 22
Open Letter to Samsung: End Forced Israeli-Founded Bloatware Installations in the WANA Region smex.org · “Even disabling the bloatware is not effective as it can reappear after system updates.”
Jun 21
YouTube’s new anti-adblock measures iter.ca · “This backoff always happen if you’re in the A/B test, regardless of if YouTube thinks you’re using an adblocker.”
Jun 20
6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash techcrunch.com · “They will collectively receive $25 million of the $80 million as a “retention” bonus.”
Jun 19
Helping You Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp about.fb.com · “For people that have chosen to add WhatsApp to Accounts Center, we’ll also use your ad preferences and info from across your Meta accounts.”
Jun 16
UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs theregister.com · “UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a “waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023.””
Jun 14
Meta finalizes investment in Scale AI, CEO Alexandr Wang to join company cnbc.com · “Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.”
Jun 13
Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft -- and people are paying anyway techcrunch.com · “At peak hours, Obi found Waymo’s average price to be about $11 more expensive than a Lyft and nearly $9.50 pricier than an Uber.”
Jun 12
X changes its terms to bar training of AI models using its content techcrunch.com · “Social network X has changed its developer agreement to prevent third parties from using the platform’s content to train large language models.”
Jun 5
Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom puri.sm · “Sideloading, a longstanding pillar of Android’s openness, is now being marginalized, placing the Android platform closer to the walled-garden approach of Apple’s iOS.”
Jun 5
VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech restofworld.org · “Many tools are first deployed in Latin America, where labor laws are less strictly enforced, according to Ayden Férdeline, a tech policy researcher in Berlin and a co-author of the report.”
Jun 4
Snowflake to acquire database startup Crunchy Data techcrunch.com · “We’re tackling a massive $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.”
Jun 2

May 2025 28 posts

Exclusive: US Airlines Are Quietly Hitting Solo & Biz Travelers with Higher Fares thriftytraveler.com · “No one from American, Delta, or United responded to requests for comment from Thrifty Traveler on this pricing strategy.”
May 29
Google is Using AI to Censor Thousands of Independent Websites Like Mine (And to Control the Flow of Information Online) travellemming.com · “Travel Lemming lost more than 95% of our Google organic search referral traffic in these updates.”
May 29
xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app techcrunch.com · “xAI will pay $300 million in cash and equity to the chat app as part of the deal, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov said on Tuesday.”
May 28
AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers pluralistic.net · “As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn’t just about increasing productivity, it’s about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality.”
May 27
Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails htxt.co.za · “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity.”
May 26
Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt theregister.com · “The fact that it wasn’t able to convince enough customers to pay it enough money to stay solvent should give pause to those who see generative AI as a replacement for junior developers.”
May 24
Investing in what moves the internet forward blog.mozilla.org · “Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”
May 22
Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out sfstandard.com · “Before the pandemic, new grads accounted for 15% of hires at Big Tech companies; now, the figure is 7%.”
May 22
Jony Ive to lead OpenAI's design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company techcrunch.com · “Io has a staff of around 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists, and product development specialists, per The Wall Street Journal, all of whom will join OpenAI.”
May 21
Pharma giant Regeneron to buy 23andMe and its customers' data for $256M techcrunch.com · “Regeneron said it will acquire 23andMe’s genomics service and its bank of 15 million customers’ personal and genetic data as part of the deal.”
May 19
Ground control to Major Trial virtualize.sh · “They just kept going — now using personal Outlook addresses and incrementing the email handles like they were running a script.”
May 16
Don't use Wise hey.paris · “On 6 May 2025, with no notice, and with no out of the ordinary or large transactions happening, Wise started declining our card on all transactions, and blocking any ACH/wire transfers out of the account.”
May 14
Databricks + Neon databricks.com · “As Neon became GA last year, they noticed an interesting stat: 30% of the databases were created by AI agents, not humans. When they looked at their stats again recently, the number went from 30% to over 80%.”
May 14
Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection theregister.com · “The issue is that small companies – like ours – have pretty much no recourse,” it added.
May 13
Microsoft is laying off more than 6,000 employees theverge.com · “These are the biggest job cuts at Microsoft since it laid off 10,000 employees in 2023, and will impact employees across Microsoft’s businesses.”
May 13
US: Major Companies Violate Gig Workers' Rights hrw.org · “Digital labor platforms have created a business model that evades employer responsibilities while keeping workers under tight algorithmic control, driven by opaque and unpredictable decisions…”
May 12
Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service customerexperiencedive.com · “As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg.
May 11
Why Everyone Is Struggling To Create 'Software Defined Vehicles' insideevs.com · “None of the legacy automakers has solved this problem yet. All of them have thrown billions at it.”
May 11
US vs. Google: Brief of Y Combinator, LLC as Amicus Curiae in Support of Plaintiffs storage.courtlistener.com · “Unfortunately, after gaining sufficient scale for itself, Google pulled the ladder up behind it.”
May 10
Even Tesla's Insurance Arm Is Getting Wrecked Right Now insideevs.com · “The data comes from S&P Global and shows that the automaker’s insurance subsidiary took a loss ratio of 103.3 in 2024.”
May 10
The Price of Remission propublica.org · “But Revlimid is also, I soon learned, extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each daily pill. (Although, I later discovered, a capsule costs just 25 cents to make.)”
May 8
Google to Back Three New Advanced Nuclear Projects esgtoday.com · “Our collaboration with Elementl Power enhances our ability to move at the speed required to meet this moment of AI and American innovation.”
May 8
Samsung is paying $350 million for audio brands Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz and Polk engadget.com · “By combining the audio business of Masimo, which is being acquired this time, with Harman’s lifestyle business division, the company plans to solidify its global No. 1 position in the consumer audio market…”
May 7
UK's Deliveroo to be bought by US firm DoorDash in £2.9bn deal bbc.com · “However, it is well below the 390p share price that Deliveroo first floated at when it launched on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021.”
May 6
Kindle's iOS app just made buying books easier than ever on iPhone and iPad 9to5mac.com · “Under the old App Store rules, buying Kindle books was a major pain on iPhone.”
May 6
Anysphere, which makes Cursor, has reportedly raised $900M at $9B valuation techcrunch.com · “Anysphere, the maker of AI-powered coding tool Cursor, has attracted $900 million in a fresh round of funding led by Thrive Capital, The Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal.”
May 5
When Flat Rate Movers Won't Answer Your Calls aphyr.com · “I began to realize that Flat Rate’s strategy was simply to never answer the phone.”
May 3
Oxide's Compensation Model: How is it Going? oxide.computer · “When some outsiders hear about our compensation model, they insist that it can’t possibly work because “everyone will slack off.””
May 1

April 2025 27 posts

Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year techcrunch.com · “From the start of 2024 to the present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures.”
Apr 30
All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding danfabulich.medium.com · “Google pays Apple about $18 billion each year, and pays Mozilla about $450 million each year.”
Apr 28
Oracle engineers caused dayslong software outage at U.S. hospitals cnbc.com · “The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement.”
Apr 28
Amazon Just Happens to Hold Book Sale During Independent Bookstore Day gizmodo.com · “Local book shops have managed to have a moment, thriving despite the increasing dominance of Amazon online by creating bonds with their local community and offering a shopping experience that Amazon can’t replicate.”
Apr 27
Backblaze: A Loss-Making Data Storage Business Mired in Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, and Brazen Insider Dumping morpheus-research.com · “All told, we believe Backblaze has resorted to aggressive accounting to inflate the results of an already loss-making business.”
Apr 26
Google will stop supporting early Nest thermostats on October 25 techcrunch.com · “That means owners of the Nest thermostats released in 2011 and 2012 (as well as the version released in Europe in 2014) won’t receive updates, and their devices will no longer be supported in the Nest and Home apps.”
Apr 26
Bezos-backed Slate Auto debuts analog EV pickup truck that is decidedly anti-Tesla techcrunch.com · “The company is saying it will start under $20,000 after the federal tax credit (providing that still exists next year).”
Apr 25
Commission finds Apple and Meta in breach of the Digital Markets Act ec.europa.eu · “Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers.”
Apr 23
Exclusive: Supabase raises $200 million Series D at $2 billion valuation finance.yahoo.com · “Supabase is currently used by two million developers who manage more than 3.5 million databases.”
Apr 22
How Big Tech hides its outsourced African workforce restofworld.org · “When poor labor practices come to light — whether it’s wage theft, unsafe working conditions, or psychological harm, the intermediaries are the ones held responsible, not the tech giants who ultimately benefit from the labor…”
Apr 21
Tech things: OpenAI buys Windsurf, Google retains its lead, and where the hell is Apple? 12gramsofcarbon.com · “Compared to Cursor, Windsurf has fewer users, has been around for less time, has less brand recognition, and has diminishing prospects for future growth.”
Apr 20
Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move servethehome.com · “Let us just call this what it is. It is a grab for extra margin dollars.”
Apr 19
Walled Gardens Can Kill aneesiqbal.ai · “Normally this would be a simple problem to fix, just go to your Apple account settings and switch the region, but this too was denied, as I had the yearly Apple Music subscription.”
Apr 18
Judge rules Google illegally monopolized adtech, opening door to potential breakup techcrunch.com · “The judge did agree that Google violated the Sherman Act by monopolizing and unlawfully tying two parts of the adtech stack together, specifically DFP and AdX, and that Google is guilty of abuse of monopoly power in the publisher-side adtech.”
Apr 17
Elon Musk shut down internal Tesla analysis that showed Robotaxi would lose money electrek.co · “We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around FSD [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow. It was going to be choppy.”
Apr 17
A Postmortem Of A Startup buildwithtract.com · “After nearly two years without revenue or committed paying customers, we realised we lacked a clear path to the necessary scale and returns.”
Apr 16
Intel to sell 51% stake in Altera to Silver Lake at $8.75B valuation siliconangle.com · “The transaction values Altera at $8.75 billion, just under half what Intel paid to acquire the company in 2015.”
Apr 14
Tesla Releases Stripped-Out RWD Cybertruck That Is So Much Worse For Not Much Less Money jalopnik.com · “While the RWD Cybertruck was said to have a starting price of under $40,000 back then (and then around $61,000 last year when it was available to order but never actually entered production), you’ll now have to pony up $71,985 for it, including $1,995 destination.”
Apr 13
G̶o̶o̶g̶l̶e̶r̶… ex-Googler. nerdy.dev · “I’m told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I’m told it’s not based on merit.”
Apr 11
Adobe Deletes Bluesky Posts After Furious Backlash petapixel.com · “Frustrated by the company’s business practices, users on the platform flooded its posts with backlash, ultimately prompting Adobe to delete all of its content.”
Apr 11
Arroyo is joining Cloudflare arroyo.dev · “The Arroyo Engine will remain open-source and self-hostable.”
Apr 10
Facebook's former global policy director criticises company in Congress hearing thenationalnews.com · “Throughout my seven years at Meta I saw executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values.”
Apr 9
Tesla Solar Sales Declined for 4 Straight Quarters, Then Tesla Stopped Publishing the Numbers cleantechnica.com · “The company published the numbers for those 4 quarters, but then, in the next quarter, Q1 2024, Tesla simply lamented that its solar installations had declined year over year but stopped publishing those figures.”
Apr 9
AT&T to Discontinue Email-to-Text Service on June 17th wirefly.com · “AT&T has announced that it will discontinue its email-to-text service on June 17, 2025.”
Apr 8
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke confirms leaked internal memo on social media about "hiring AI before humans" techstartups.com · “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.”
Apr 7
What was Quartz? zachseward.com · “The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list.”
Apr 7
Restructuring Announcement automattic.com · “While our revenue continues to grow, Automattic operates in a highly competitive market, and technology is evolving at unprecedented levels.”
Apr 2

March 2025 29 posts

Oracle Cloud security SNAFU latest: IT giant accused of pedantry as evidence scrubbed theregister.com · “Oracle are attempting to wordsmith statements around Oracle Cloud and use very specific words to avoid responsibility,” wrote Beaumont.
Mar 31
Javice found guilty of defrauding JPMorgan in $175M startup purchase techcrunch.com · “When JPMorgan bought Frank in 2021, the bank thought the startup had 4 million customers. The bank found out that the actual customer count was only 300,000 when it later sent test marketing emails to alleged Frank users and approximately 70% of those messages bounced back.”
Mar 28
Elon Musk's xAI acquires X at $33B valuation siliconangle.com · “The company’s AI business currently generates only limited revenue: xAI reportedly told investors last November that it was “on pace” to reach $100 million in annual sales.”
Mar 28
It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit world.hey.com · “We’re spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else.”
Mar 27
Tesla's Cybertruck recall began with a routine review of field repairs wardsauto.com · “The recall covers 2024-2025 Cybertrucks manufactured from November 2023 through February 2025.”
Mar 25
Digital Deception: Kubient CEO Sentenced for $1.3 Million Fraud Scheme securityonline.info · “Paul Roberts cooked the books. He lied to investors and auditors about his company’s revenue and about his company’s premier product: an AI-powered tool that, ironically, was supposed to detect fraud in the digital advertising industry.”
Mar 25
I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud jeffgeerling.com · “To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.”
Mar 24
DNA testing company 23andMe files for bankruptcy protection, CEO resigns techcrunch.com · “Then in 2023, it suffered a massive cyberattack in which the data of its nearly 7 million customers, including users’ genetic predisposition and ancestry reports, was stolen by hackers.”
Mar 24
FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future theregister.com · “In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently…”
Mar 24
Apple Shuffles AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri finance.yahoo.com · “Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell.”
Mar 21
Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities nber.org · “However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity.”
Mar 19
Google announces agreement to acquire Wiz blog.google · “Wiz’s products will continue to work and be available across all major clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud platforms.”
Mar 18
Roku is forcing users to watch ads before they can use their TV in 'test' 9to5google.com · “Roku already places ads on the homescreen and in its screensaver, but autoplaying ads as soon as the TV is turned on is new, and rather aggressive behavior.”
Mar 18
Cloudflare's infinite loop problem: developers claim they were forced to sign excessive non-disclosure agreements; Cloudflare responds gigazine.net · “Instead of continuing the discussions, Cloudflare sent Moonchild a form for what it called an ‘overly broad and general non-disclosure agreement (NDA).’”
Mar 18
Rippling sues Deel, Deel denies 'all legal wrongdoing,' and Slack is the main witness techcrunch.com · “According to the lawsuit, Rippling set up a “honeypot” to prove out its suspicions.”
Mar 17
Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino daringfireball.net · “You can stretch the truth and maintain credibility, but you can’t maintain credibility with bullshit.”
Mar 12
Honey finally discloses that it uses affiliate codes now that Google Chrome requires it 9to5google.com · “When you use PayPal Honey, merchants may pay us affiliate commissions. We share those commissions with our users in the form of rewards.”
Mar 12
Google Just Removed uBlock Origin from the Chrome Store Today! supernetworks.org · “uBlock Origin is the best browser-based content blocker available on the web today. Sadly today Google just pulled the plug on it by enforcing their new v3 manifest.”
Mar 10
Why layoffs don't work thehustle.co · “Even during bad economies, when layoffs are rampant and often more justified, the results are similar — and that’s according to Bain & Company, which, ironically, consults for firms that make cuts.”
Mar 9
Tesla Sales Fall Off A Cliff Globally, Including Germany, Australia, And China carscoops.com · “Tesla was proudly proclaiming less than a year ago that it would be selling 20 million electric vehicles annually by 2030.”
Mar 9
We're teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index blog.ecosia.org · “Currently, we rely on a mix of both Google and Bing libraries to provide you with answers to your searches.”
Mar 9
Microsoft is reportedly plotting a future without OpenAI techstartups.com · “OpenAI’s technology is embedded in Microsoft products, from Copilot to Bing’s AI-powered search features and Microsoft 365’s productivity tools.”
Mar 7
As Bangladesh's factories turn to surveillance and automation, garment workers feel the pressure restofworld.org · “Each machine could replace between one and six workers, and the largest factories surveyed anticipated cutting 22% of their workforce.”
Mar 6
The Evolution of IT Operations and Opsgenie atlassian.com · “On this date, access to Opsgenie will be shut off, and the product will no longer accessible.”
Mar 6
Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals tomshardware.com · “This means users can’t roll back when they discover the unwanted new ‘features’ post-update.”
Mar 5
This Linux laptop maker called me a Zombie thelibre.news · “Reddit is full of this kind of support replies after the slightest pushback from the clients.”
Mar 3
The Top 10% awealthofcommonsense.com · “Wealth inequality is only getting worse in this country and frankly I’m not sure what stops this train.”
Mar 3
Intel delays finish date again on in-progress Ohio semiconductor plants wosu.org · “The state has already disbursed $600 million in onshoring grants to the tech giant for its central Ohio venture.”
Mar 1
Efabless shuts down - Tiny Tapeout will continue tinytapeout.com · “Right now we have TT08 awaiting packaging and TT09 still in the SkyWater Technology fab. These chips represent a huge investment of time and energy from hundreds of people, and we currently don’t know if we’ll receive them.”
Mar 1

February 2025 23 posts

An update on our terms of use blog.mozilla.org · “The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that ‘We never sell your data’ is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of ‘sale of data’ is broad and evolving.”
Feb 28
Microsoft hangs up on Skype: Service to shut down May 5, 2025 techcrunch.com · “After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down.”
Feb 28
Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud restofworld.org · “The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024.”
Feb 27
Amazon unveils revamped Alexa with AI features for $19.99 per month, free for Prime members nbcnewyork.com · “Alexa also remains unprofitable. Amazon has never charged for access to Alexa, instead infusing it into its lineup of smart speakers, tablets and other devices.”
Feb 26
Microsoft Scraps Multiple Data Center Leases: TD Cowen broadbandbreakfast.com · “Microsoft has reportedly canceled several data center leases with U.S. operators, indicating potentially overbuilt infrastructure and unclear demand for AI services.”
Feb 24
Florida Insurers Sent Billions to Affiliates While Claiming Losses: Report newsweek.com · “The report also showed between 2017 and 2019, the insurers in the study showed a net loss of $432 million and their affiliate companies showed a net income of $1.8 billion.”
Feb 23
Binned off staff, slashed stock options. What's next? Ah yes, bigger C-suite bonuses theregister.com · “The Facebook giant revealed in a government filing that its Compensation, Nominating and Governance Committee (CNGC) approved a target annual bonus increase for its top executive officers bar CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”
Feb 22
Twitch caps streamers' storage at 100 hours of highlights and uploads techcrunch.com · “Some streamers have taken to social media to share their discontent with the decision, with many pointing out that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a market leader in cloud services through its AWS platform.”
Feb 20
Humane Bricks Its AI Pin as It Gets Acquired by HP for $116 Million gizmodo.com · “HP bought up Humane’s CosmOS operating system and IP, including the tech for the AI Pin, for $116 million. The sale means the end for Humane.”
Feb 19
The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at · “Putting aside the hype, bluster and ungodly amounts of money, I can find no evidence that any of these apps are making anyone any real money.”
Feb 18
Download and Transfer for Kindle books discontinued on Feb 26 goodereader.com · “Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available.”
Feb 13
How Musk's $97.4B bid could gum up OpenAI's for-profit conversion techcrunch.com · “With his bid, Musk has signaled there’s at least one group of investors willing to pay a sizable premium for OpenAI’s nonprofit wing. That puts the board of directors in a tight spot.”
Feb 11
Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop tech.slashdot.org · “In a move that has left drivers both frustrated and bewildered, Stellantis has introduced full-screen pop-up ads on its infotainment systems.”
Feb 11
Bank CEO: Retract your debanking piece? Me: No. kalzumeus.com · “McCauley has failed to identify a single fact alleged in Debanking which is incorrect, or any other malfeasance.”
Feb 10
How Intel ruined an Israeli startup it bought for $2B—and lost the AI race calcalistech.com · “At Habana, we could make a decision in a five-minute hallway conversation. At Intel, that same decision required three meetings with dozens of participants, and nothing moved forward…”
Feb 9
February 2025: Starlink in the Falkland Islands – a National Emergency situation? openfalklands.com · “Because Sure International holds an exclusive monopoly telecommunications licence, Starlink’s use in the islands is currently illegal.”
Feb 8
Introducing Fair Pricing kagi.com · “In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month.”
Feb 5
Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube? tedium.co · “Over the last month, across five different YouTube channels, the studio has released more than 30 full movies. On YouTube. For free. Without any sort of gating.”
Feb 5
How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop gamechops.substack.com · “By flooding its once converted editorial playlists with hastily-assembled royalty-free music and AI generated slop, Spotify was able to quietly displace real artists to make more money for itself.”
Feb 4
Vanguard Announces Largest Ever Expense Ratio Reduction corporate.vanguard.com · “The reductions will save Vanguard’s investors more than $350 million in 2025 alone, the largest annual expense ratio reduction in Vanguard’s nearly 50-year history.”
Feb 4
What really happens inside a dating app blog.luap.info · “Likes received have a positive impact, but it is very light, which is a good thing from a monetization standpoint (you can make guys pay and not show them to anyone; they will keep paying, just a bit less than if they received likes.”
Feb 3
This is a public service announcement to never ever use Oracle mastodon.de · “I wasn’t told that my account was disabled. I didn’t receive an E-Mail or anything.”
Feb 1
Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge theregister.com · “Dell justified the policy change by asserting a thirty-second in-person conversation can replace an email discussion that goes on for hours or days and by noting that specific groups within the company – sales, manufacturing, and engineering – have already adjusted to being in the office five days per week.”
Feb 1

January 2025 23 posts

Apple Files Emergency Motion in Google Search Antitrust Case adweek.com · “If Apple’s appeal is not resolved until during or after the remedies trial, Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade.”
Jan 31
Google offering 'voluntary exit' for employees working on Pixel, Android 9to5google.com · “The Platforms & Devices team is offering a voluntary exit program that provides US-based Googlers working on this team the ability to voluntarily leave the company with a severance package.”
Jan 30
German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours tomshardware.com · “It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.”
Jan 29
Nvidia loses $589 billion in market cap — broad stock plunge triggered by DeepSeek AI release tomshardware.com · “Aside from using fewer GPU hours to train, the H800 chips that DeepSeek used to train its LLM have less performance than the H100 due to U.S. export restrictions.”
Jan 28
No one is disrupting banks popularfintech.com · “despite almost 30 years of trying, Fintech companies have not disrupted banks. At least, not the big ones.”
Jan 26
A very Chicago gamble bitsaboutmoney.com · “And so I feel some sense of civic duty, as a Chicagoan, taxpayer, and reasonably financially sophisticated person, to say the following publicly: What the hell, Chicago.”
Jan 24
Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft 972mag.com · “Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli Defense Ministry spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.”
Jan 23
How shutdown Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear fast sfgate.com · “Startups burn through cash as they skyrocket in size and ambition, accumulating outrageous perks and office equipment along the way. Then they crash to Earth, with nothing but their private planes or massive 3D printers to pad the impact.”
Jan 22
Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber face calls for app transparency personneltoday.com · “Instead, you are automating exploitation – leveraging black-box algorithms to make decisions about de-activation, work allocation and pay without sufficient explanation, stripping workers of the ability to understand and challenge those decisions.”
Jan 21
UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted josef.cn · “This isn’t just wage disparity. It’s misallocation of human capital on a national scale.”
Jan 19
Scaling to millions of users requires Synapse Pro element.io · “However it is not remotely designed or intended for use by commercial Matrix hosting providers to serve huge nation-scale deployments such as public healthcare insurance companies, and it will fail when used at this scale.”
Jan 18
No, you can't use your $6,299.00 Camera as a Webcam. That will be $5 romanzipp.com · “Canon will happily take your credit card for you to pay a small monthly price of $4.99 per month or even a discounted $49.99 per year!”
Jan 17
No calls keygen.sh · “One day, I woke up and out of frustration, I nuked the ‘book a call’ button from my pricing page.”
Jan 16
A Personal Note From Our Founder hindenburgresearch.com · “Nearly 100 individuals have been charged civilly or criminally by regulators at least in part through our work, including billionaires and oligarchs. We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking.”
Jan 15
Google Workspace business users getting full Gemini experience, price increasing 9to5google.com · “Previously, Google charged an additional $20+ per user/month for Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and other Workspace apps. The full Gemini experience is now coming to Google Workspace business users as part of a price increase.”
Jan 15
1 in 5 Online Job Postings Are Either Fake or Never Filled, Study Finds gizmodo.com · “The Wall Street Journal cites internal data from the hiring platform Greenhouse that shows one in five online job postings—or between 18% and 22% of jobs advertised—are either fake or never filled.”
Jan 14
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch theverge.com · “And when that end date rolls around, he’ll be granted a severance of $1,875,000.”
Jan 13
Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform theregister.com · “The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent.”
Jan 13
Starlink is now cheaper than leading internet provider in some African countries restofworld.org · “In at least five of the 16 African countries where the service is available, a monthly Starlink subscription is cheaper than the leading fixed internet service provider.”
Jan 10
You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase consumer.org.nz · “Customers are presented with three subscription options – their current plan, the cheaper “Classic” plan and a “Basic” OneDrive-only plan. Customers aren’t told about this option anywhere else.”
Jan 9
Quickwit joins Datadog quickwit.io · “We will be heads down building a new product with Datadog, so to ensure our open-source community can continue on, we will soon release a new version of Quickwit under the Apache License 2.0.”
Jan 9
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes about.fb.com · “We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program.”
Jan 7
Microsoft disguises Bing as Google to fool inattentive searchers pcworld.com · “If you can’t beat Google, trick your users into thinking that they’re using Google.”
Jan 7

2024 308 posts

December 2024 22 posts

Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts wbur.org · “He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin.”
Dec 31
OpenAI's Board, Paraphrased: 'To Succeed, All We Need Is Unimaginable Sums of Money' daringfireball.net · “There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.”
Dec 29
Billionaire Daniel Ek Shuts Down Spotify Unwrapped Calculator digitalmusicnews.com · “removed at the request of Spotify’s legal team”
Dec 28
OpenAI is Visa sherwood.news · “As Visa’s technological moat dried up, it built a legal moat, and there are already signs OpenAI is doing the same.”
Dec 26
Intel shareholders look to yank back ex-CEO, CFO compensation cfodive.com · “As a result of the individual defendants’ breaches of fiduciary duty and other misconduct, Intel has sustained substantial damages and irreparable injury to its reputation”
Dec 24
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search giant has slashed manager roles by 10% in efficiency drive nypost.com · “In total, Google has reduced the number of managers, directors, and vice presidents within its workforce by 10%, Pichai said during an all-hands meeting on Wednesday.”
Dec 23
The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed honest-broker.com · “According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.”
Dec 21
Klarna's CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions techcrunch.com · “Klarna is currently hiring for more than 50 roles around the globe, according to the job postings page on its website.”
Dec 18
Partnering with Nihon Kotsu and GO on our first international road trip waymo.com · “Initially, Nihon Kotsu drivers will operate the vehicles manually to map key areas of the Japanese capital, including Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Chūō, Shinagawa, and Kōtō.”
Dec 17
Temu is the most downloaded app on the US App Store in 2024 techcrunch.com · “Chinese shopping app Temu was once again the most downloaded free app in the U.S., according to a list of top apps and games across the App Store released by Apple on Monday.”
Dec 17
Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups irrationalanalysis.substack.com · “I ate one cookie and drank a bottle of water.”
Dec 15
McKinsey & Company to pay $650 million for role in opioid crisis npr.org · “This resolution marks the first time a management consulting firm has been criminally responsible for advice it has given resulting in the commission of a crime by a client”
Dec 13
Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say techcrunch.com · “A calendar pops up after you check a box to cancel. The next available date is 26 of December. Our renewal date is [December] 17,” Ryan told TechCrunch.
Dec 12
GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house cnbc.com · “After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service.”
Dec 10
Why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel bcantrill.dtrace.org · “With regard to these cultural issues (and his other strengths aside), Pat Gelsinger was indisputably wrong for Intel.”
Dec 9
"Eat What You Kill" propublica.org · “Then you’re going to pay me more, because I’m doing more work.”
Dec 7
McKinsey unit will pay $123 million to settle claims it bribed South African officials cnbc.com · “The bribery scheme helped McKinsey and McKinsey Africa net approximately $85 million in profits, the DOJ said.”
Dec 5
Next stop: Miami waymo.com · “In early 2025, we’ll begin reacquainting Waymo’s all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs to Miami’s streets.”
Dec 5
Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley commoncog.com · “He stated it was going to be problematic if Adchemy was embroiled in litigation while discussing the Microsoft deal.”
Dec 3
Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger intel.com · “On behalf of the board, I want to thank Pat for his many years of service and dedication to Intel”
Dec 2
Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say techcrunch.com · “Critically, Meta will be the sole owner and user of this subsea cable”
Dec 2
Beekeepers halt honey awards over 'huge fraud' in global supply chain theguardian.com · “This change to remove honey as a category was necessitated by the inability to have honey fully tested for adulteration.”
Dec 1

November 2024 24 posts

The deterioration of Google baldurbjarnason.com · “They are a monopoly and monopolies are extremely effective at capturing whatever value happens in their vicinity, even if the utility of their products declines.”
Nov 29
Hetzner raises prices while significantly lowering bandwidth (US) adriano.fyi · “Bandwidth allotments are decreasing on average, across all products, 88.19% from previous allotments.”
Nov 28
Introducing some changes to our Web API developer.spotify.com · “Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.”
Nov 27
Tesla appears to be building a teleoperations team for its robotaxi service techcrunch.com · “In 2019, the billionaire executive predicted that Tesla would have over a million robotaxis on the road by 2020.”
Nov 26
Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows: it's not just AI code editors techcrunch.com · “YC commonly accepts startups that are building similar or nearly identical products to previous YC grads.”
Nov 26
Google is inserting search links into webpages in the Google App now theverge.com · “The difference, though, is that site owners have to opt into the ad intents, instead of opting out.”
Nov 26
'I have no money': Thousands of Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis cnbc.com · “That’s mostly because the estate of Andreessen Horowitz-backed Synapse doesn’t have the money to hire an outside firm to perform a full reconciliation of its ledgers, according to Jelena McWilliams, the bankruptcy trustee.”
Nov 23
Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival cnbc.com · “From now on, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.”
Nov 22
Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures cnbc.com · “Menlo is an investor in Anthropic.”
Nov 21
Strava closes the gates to sharing fitness data with other apps theverge.com · “The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava’s own post about the change is dated November 15th.”
Nov 20
We are shutting down Ondsel ondsel.com · “While we found support among independent and hobbyist users who genuinely wanted us to succeed, we failed to find commercial adoption to justify a venture-capitalized startup.”
Nov 18
Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands: Study roadandtrack.com · “Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study”
Nov 15
Just Eat is selling Grubhub to Marc Lore’s Wonder for $650M theverge.com · “Just Eat is selling off Grubhub to fancy food hall delivery startup Wonder in a deal worth $650 million.”
Nov 14
Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs arxiv.org · “The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents.”
Nov 14
Amazon shuts down secret project to develop fertility tracker cnbc.com · “On the morning of Oct. 28, employees working on the fertility tracker were told to join a videoconference where a director of the team informed them that the project was ending. The call lasted about two minutes, one of the people said.”
Nov 14
Genetic testing firm 23andMe cuts 40% of its workforce amid financial struggles theguardian.com · “The company has been left with few options as its value has plummeted in the aftermath of a massive data breach.”
Nov 13
This $8,000 Suzuki From India Received A 5-Star Crash Test Rating jalopnik.com · “Even the standard Dzire has six airbags, ESP, hill hold assist, and pedestrian protection.”
Nov 12
Inside the $20 million business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies sfgate.com · “According to Jose Mendoza, the company’s affable warehouse manager of two decades, about 65% of the inventory comes from shuttered tech companies.”
Nov 11
Google Banned Me From Google Voice dannyguo.com · “We have reviewed your request and cannot reinstate your Google Voice service.”
Nov 7
Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division techcrunch.com · “The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.””
Nov 5
Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe bbc.co.uk · “Last year, French media outlet La Lettre reported that until 2021, Netflix in France minimised its tax payments by declaring its turnover generated in France to the Netherlands.”
Nov 5
For the first time ever, AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space tomshardware.com · “Indeed, AMD’s datacenter segment revenue reached $3.549 billion in the third quarter, whereas Intel’s datacenter and AI group’s earnings were $3.3 billion in Q3 2024.”
Nov 5
How Albertsons Kills Rural Grocers with Land Use Restrictions thebignewsletter.com · “They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand.”
Nov 4
Nvidia to join Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing rival chipmaker Intel cnbc.com · “Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in artificial intelligence and a major shift in the semiconductor industry.”
Nov 1

October 2024 29 posts

Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is 'very short-staffed' amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama techcrunch.com · “This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.”
Oct 31
An update from Drew blog.dropbox.com · “We continue to see softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business.”
Oct 30
China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets theregister.com · “The two ticket holders will pay an initial ¥50,000 ($7,000) deposit.”
Oct 29
buy payphones and retire computer.rip · “Edwards sold nearly 50,000 payphones on this basis, many of them in deals of over $100,000.”
Oct 28
Apple analyst Kuo says company cut iPhone 16 orders 10 million units cnbc.com · “However, significant growth in iPhone shipments will likely require further hardware innovation to accompany this AI development.”
Oct 24
Tesla has been testing a robotaxi service in the Bay Area for most of the year theverge.com · “The vehicles arrive with safety drivers behind the wheel, ready to intervene in case anything goes wrong.”
Oct 24
Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers: CFPB finance.yahoo.com · “As part of the agreement, Apple had the right to impose a $25 million penalty for each 90-day delay caused by Goldman.”
Oct 23
Here's What TurboTax's Boss Doesn't Want You to Hear gizmodo.com · “Following the interview, however, Intuit’s head of communications contacted The Verge to ask that the testy exchange be cut from the interview, or otherwise heavily edited to make it seem less confrontational, such as by removing portions where they are talking over one another.”
Oct 22
TikTok owner sacks intern for sabotaging AI project bbc.com · “The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab”
Oct 21
The AI Investment Boom apricitas.io · “The US has added only 32k tech jobs over the last year, lower than at any point in 2021, 2022, or the 9 years preceding the pandemic.”
Oct 20
Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years world.hey.com · “For 2024, we’ve brought the cloud bill down from the original $3.2 million/year run rate to $1.3 million.”
Oct 18
Meta fires staff for ‘using free meal vouchers to buy household goods’ theguardian.com · “That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.”
Oct 18
Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors cnbc.com · “Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers.”
Oct 17
Internal blog post reveals Automattic's plan to enforce the WordPress trademark using 'nice and not nice lawyers' techcrunch.com · ““We will be using a multi-pronged strategy that will involve some additional trademark registrations … legal cease-and-desist letters, and a formal paid licensing program for the partners,” Sieminski noted.”
Oct 16
TikTok Lays Off Hundreds of Staff: to Replace Them With AI pcmag.com · “One moderator explained that they have to review 900 videos a day, and only watching 700 videos a day is considered "work avoidance."”
Oct 15
Cargo airships are happening elidourado.com · “And he raised a large pre-seed round, in which I’m delighted to say that my syndicate (which you should possibly join) is the largest investor.”
Oct 14
$2 H100s: How the GPU Rental Bubble Burst latent.space · “Last year, H100s were $8/hr if you could get them.”
Oct 11
Why we're helping more wikis move away from Fandom weirdgloop.org · “Fandom keeps their copy of the wiki up, even though it no longer has a community.”
Oct 10
Amazon's new warehouses will employ 10x as many robots techcrunch.com · “We do know, however, that the company already has nearly a million robotic systems deployed in centers across the U.S.”
Oct 10
H-1B visa: Company supplying tech workers to Silicon Valley discriminated against non-Indians: jury siliconvalley.com · “The lawsuit claimed Cognizant ousted many non-Indian workers by first taking them off projects and “benching” them without work, then keeping them benched until firing them in accordance with a company policy.”
Oct 9
End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit blog.panic.com · “They promised a discounted minimum price, but no maximum price.”
Oct 8
Do U.S. Ports Need More Automation? construction-physics.com · “On average, per this index the U.S. has the worst-performing ports of any country in the world.”
Oct 8
Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge theverge.com · “Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.”
Oct 7
So thieves broke into your storage unit - again oldvcr.blogspot.com · “If this smells like a kickback deal, you’re right, and virtually every self-storage company engages in it.”
Oct 6
The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms vox.com · “In the case of emergency care, “private equity doesn’t pay the hospital rent, they don’t hire the nurses, they don’t pay the electric bills, they don’t provide any of the equipment,” says Robert McNamara, chair of the emergency medicine department at Temple University in Philadelphia.”
Oct 5
Tesla cancels its cheapest electric car electrek.co · “Tesla often changes its vehicle trims without making any announcement or giving any explanation for the changes.”
Oct 3
Automattic: WP Engine Term Sheet automattic.com · “Given WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence since September 20th these terms are no longer sufficient.”
Oct 2
Bots, so many Bots wakatime.com · “In the end, I detected over 60% of user signups to be automated bot accounts.”
Oct 1
Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup techcrunch.com · “But PearAI made a major misstep: PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on its project, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.”
Oct 1

September 2024 22 posts

AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO to take on Nvidia cnbc.com · “The company said that Group 42, a UAE-based AI firm that counts Microsoft as an investor, accounted for 83% of Cerebras’s revenue last year.”
Sep 30
Do AI companies work? benn.substack.com · “Every LLM vendor is eighteen months from dead.”
Sep 29
Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning bleepingcomputer.com · “Starting Thursday, Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky deleted its anti-malware software from customers’ computers across the United States and automatically replaced it with UltraAV’s antivirus solution.”
Sep 27
CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them larslofgren.com · “I believe Marketplace has since been running CNN Underscored Money with little, if any, oversight from the main CNN team.”
Sep 27
WordPress.org bans WP Engine, blocks it from accessing its resources techcrunch.com · “As a result of this block, sites using WP Engine’s solutions cannot install plug-ins or update their themes.”
Sep 26
Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’ cnbc.com · “More than 60% of debit transactions in the U.S. run over Visa rails, helping it charge more than $7 billion annually in processing fees, according to the DOJ complaint.”
Sep 24
Google Cache Is Now Fully Dead seroundtable.com · “Now, the direct link to see the Google Cache has been fully disabled.”
Sep 24
Cloudflare's new marketplace will let websites charge AI bots for scraping techcrunch.com · “While it’s a bold idea, Cloudflare is not sharing a fully fleshed-out idea of what its marketplace will look like.”
Sep 23
WP Engine is not WordPress wordpress.org · “WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.”
Sep 22
Uber Caught Overcharging? How Having Credits in Your Account Might Be Costing You viewfromthewing.com · “He went a step farther and did something I didn’t: he checked Uber prices “with someone else’s phone” who did not have a balance in their Uber account – and Uber was pricing the route at the usual $20 for them.”
Sep 22
Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire theverge.com · “LaSala responded, instructing the employee to “start a ping with history turned off.””
Sep 20
How Google got away with charging publishers more than anyone else theverge.com · “holds today not because there is 20% of value in comparing 2 bids to one another, but because it comes with unique demand via AdWords that is not available any other way.”
Sep 17
Chipotle's testing an avocado-peeling robot and an automated bowl assembly line theverge.com · “The company says the robot being tested in a store at 20972 Magnolia St. in Huntington Beach, California, will help free employees up for other tasks.”
Sep 17
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week cnbc.com · “Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said.”
Sep 16
CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process' semafor.com · “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.”
Sep 13
Google will now link to The Internet Archive to add more context to Search results 9to5google.com · “That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.”
Sep 12
Apple must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules cnbc.com · “Apple said in a filing on Tuesday that it will incur a one-time income tax charge of about $10 billion in its fourth fiscal quarter ending Sept. 28, 2024.”
Sep 10
Lab-grown diamonds worksinprogress.co · “A survey by The Knot of nearly 10,000 couples married in 2023 revealed that lab diamonds accounted for 46 percent of engagement rings (compared with 39 percent who opted for a mined diamond), up from 12 percent in 2019.”
Sep 9
Breaking Down OnlyFans’ Stunning Economics matthewball.co · “Over the past five years, OnlyFans creators have collected over $15 billion – with $5.3 billion paid in 2023, a 19% increase year-over-year.”
Sep 9
A Post-Google World thebignewsletter.com · “One consequences was that Google charged high prices, keeping between 30-50% of every advertising dollar that went through its system.”
Sep 7
2M users but no money in the bank. Tough times exercism.org · “Right now, we have about 800 monthly donors and about $7,500 in monthly donations.”
Sep 6
Amazon to Launch New AI-Powered Alexa Using Anthropic's Claude macrumors.com · “In other words, it won’t be included in existing Prime memberships.”
Sep 2

August 2024 32 posts

Nearly half of Nvidia's Q2 revenue came from four customers buying over $3 billion in AI chips each fortune.com · “Four customers, whose identities were kept anonymous for competitive reasons, directly purchased goods and services collectively worth 46% of Nvidia’s $30 billion in turnover.”
Aug 31
Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch blog.hopefullyuseful.com · “Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea…”
Aug 29
Elasticsearch Is Open Source. Again! elastic.co · “3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.”
Aug 29
Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair 404media.co · “General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin consider much of the data on the ship to be proprietary, so the Navy had to delay missions and spend millions of dollars on travel costs just so that contractor-affiliated repairmen could fly in, rather than doing this ourselves.”
Aug 28
Finding a therapist who takes your insurance can be nearly impossible. Here's why npr.org · “The way to look at mental health care from an insurance perspective is: I don’t want to attract those people. I am never going to make money on them.”
Aug 25
Meta Cancels High-End Mixed Reality Headset After Apple Vision Pro Struggles macrumors.com · “Meta was aiming to sell the device for under $1,000, but that was not going to be possible with the high cost of the displays.”
Aug 23
Apple is shaking up how it manages the App Store theverge.com · “Apple decided to break up the division after European regulators started requiring Apple to allow third-party payment methods and alternative app stores”
Aug 22
Accident Forgiveness fly.io · “The saving grace here, which you’ll learn if you ever become that $200,000 story, is that nobody pays those bills.”
Aug 21
Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries sparcopen.org · “Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year.”
Aug 20
Tesla is hiring people to do the robot theverge.com · “The position, advertised as a “ Data Collection Operator ” on Tesla’s career site, pays up to $48 per hour and requires walking for over seven hours a day while carrying up to 30 pounds”
Aug 20
Sourcegraph went dark eric-fritz.com · “Today, the sourcegraph/sourcegraph repository went private. This is the final cleaving blow, following many other smaller chops, on the culture that made Sourcegraph an attractive place to work.”
Aug 20
Roblox is Already the Biggest Game In The World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)? matthewball.co · “Over the last twelve months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.”
Aug 19
X ordered to pay €550,000 to Irish employee fired for not replying to Elon Musk's yes-or-resign 'extremely hardcore' ultimatum fortune.com · “The commission rejected X’s argument that Rooney quit voluntarily and ruled that not clicking “yes” in response to the email did not constitute an act of resignation.”
Aug 17
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google tinystruggles.com · “Promised HC not landing - e.g. I was promised further expansion twice, which later was scratched and then promised again in a bit different form…”
Aug 17
Epic judge says he’ll ‘tear the barriers down’ on Google’s app store monopoly theverge.com · “We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen”
Aug 15
Apple says Patreon must switch to its billing system or risk removal from App Store techcrunch.com · “In a blog post and email to Patreon creators about upcoming changes to membership in the iOS app, the company says it’s begun a 16-month-long migration process to move all creators to Apple’s iOS in-app purchase system by November 2025.”
Aug 13
Brands should avoid this popular term. It’s turning off customers cnn.com · “In every single case, the intention to buy or use the product or service was significantly lower whenever we mentioned AI in the product description.”
Aug 13
DEFCON 32 Statement entropicengineering.com · “We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets.”
Aug 10
X officially kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate workers to South Bay sfstandard.com · “Thirteen years after the city carved out a special tax break to attract tech companies to its beleaguered downtown corridor, X has confirmed plans to shut its San Francisco headquarters.”
Aug 8
Intel reportedly gave up a chance to buy a stake in OpenAI in 2017 tomshardware.com · “Former Intel CEO Bob Swan reportedly scuttled the deal because had didn’t see AI models hitting the broad market anytime soon”
Aug 8
Inside the company that gathers 'human data' for every major AI firm semafor.com · “The $1 billion startup has also moved beyond coding and is providing specialized data from a wide array of industries.”
Aug 8
Every Microsoft employee is now being judged on their security work theverge.com · “A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses.”
Aug 6
Downcycled: The story of Samsung's failed deal with iFixit, as told by iFixit's CEO androidauthority.com · “One of the big reasons for this is the unit limit Samsung put on orders, which was a paltry seven parts per repair shop per quarter.”
Aug 6
Google loses antitrust case over search cnbc.com · “The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.”
Aug 5
Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw theverge.com · “The delay is the result of a design flaw discovered “unusually late in the production process,” according to two unnamed sources, including a Microsoft employee, cited by the outlet.”
Aug 5
Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don't Know What To Do About It viewfromthewing.com · “It is immensely difficult to find ways to add another digit to this field, and it’s really only a problem for three airlines in the world.”
Aug 4
Boeing takes another $125M hit thanks to Starliner theregister.com · “The losses incurred by Boeing thanks to Starliner have comfortably breezed past $1 billion, and will likely surpass $1.6 billion before long.”
Aug 3
Game Informer is shutting down theverge.com · “The magazine’s entire staff is being laid off, Kotaku reports.”
Aug 3
Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop ‘non-essential work’ theverge.com · “The company just reported a loss of $1.6 billion for Q2 2024, substantially more than the $437 million it lost last quarter.”
Aug 2
Twilio kills off Authy for desktop, forcibly logs out all users bleepingcomputer.com · “Those who have continued to use Authy for Desktop, even after all the warnings, have found that their 2FA accounts are gone unless they had previously synced them with a mobile device.”
Aug 2
Reddit CEO says Microsoft needs to pay to search the site theverge.com · “At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn’t have agreements with.”
Aug 1
TikTok is throwing $20 million a month at OpenAI via Microsoft qz.com · “TikTok’s big buys have made up about 25% of Microsoft’s AI revenue.”
Aug 1

July 2024 20 posts

Amazon must recall dangerous products properly: even ones sold by third parties theverge.com · “The CPSC says Amazon failed to adequately notify the public about more than 400,000 recalled products.”
Jul 31
After 10 Years, Yelp Gave My App 4 Days observationalhazard.com · “They sent the email on a Friday and wanted a response by Monday.”
Jul 29
Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service? jpetazzo.github.io · “2.2m images should cost $110/mo.”
Jul 29
Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In blog.healthchecks.io · “Healthchecks.io currently has 652 paying customers, and the monthly recurring revenue is 14043 USD.”
Jul 29
Reddit now blocks all search engines other than Google 9to5google.com · “Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to block all bots from scraping any part of the site.”
Jul 25
Google Chrome is no longer 'deprecating third-party cookies' 9to5google.com · ““Instead of deprecating third-party cookies,” Google revealed today that it will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.””
Jul 23
Wiz walks away from $23 billion deal with Google, will pursue IPO cnbc.com · “A person familiar with Wiz’s thinking, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters freely, said the company weighed antitrust and investor concerns as reasons for abandoning the potential deal.”
Jul 23
Ryanair wins case against Booking.com in US court rte.ie · “A jury in the District Court of Delaware unanimously found that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair’s website without authorisation “with an intent to defraud,” the verdict said.”
Jul 22
Why Discover is no American Express popularfintech.com · “In the case of Discover, Net Interest Income contributes over 80% of the company’s net revenue, suggesting that it is, first and foremost, a lender (see the chart below).”
Jul 21
Bringing cloud and AI capabilities to the tactical edge: Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance is generally available cloud.google.com · “Weighing approximately 100lbs, it’s human-portable, making it easy to transport and deploy in various locations.”
Jul 20
Google's goo.gl links will stop working in August 2025 9to5google.com · “On August 25, 2025, “these URLs will no longer return a response” (404).”
Jul 19
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content vincentschmalbach.com · “Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content.”
Jul 16
Mangled fingers, no time off: Why the women who make Samsung's semiconductors are striking english.hani.co.kr · “If too many people want to use their vacation days, we have to play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets to”
Jul 15
Building the Bell System construction-physics.com · “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the company was scaling back needed infrastructure investments in an attempt to maintain profits without raising telephone rates.”
Jul 14
ICPEN Sweep finds majority of websites and mobile apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscription services icpen.org · “A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns.”
Jul 11
Tesla insiders say Elon optimized Full Self-Driving routes for himself and influencers electrek.co · “It seemed like we were purposely making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it was. It felt dishonest.”
Jul 10
Meta's Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch theverge.com · “It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet.”
Jul 4
AI's $600B Question sequoiacap.com · “If you run this analysis again today, here are the results you get: AI’s $200B question is now AI’s $600B question.”
Jul 3
This is Big Tech's playbook for swallowing the AI industry theverge.com · “Microsoft and Amazon have done what are essentially reverse acquihires, where the hiring of people and a corresponding licensing deal is designed to disguise what is actually an acquisition.”
Jul 2
Shipt's Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought Back spectrum.ieee.org · “We found that 40 percent of workers were earning less under the new algorithm, with half of those workers receiving a pay cut of 10 percent or greater.”
Jul 1

June 2024 23 posts

The Economics of Writing Technical Books architectelevator.com · “I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one.”
Jun 29
Stability AI stabilized by cash from Silicon Valley VCs theregister.com · “In 2023, Stability AI reportedly expected revenue of just $11 million, but expected a $99 million bill for computing alone, plus $54 million for wages and other operating expenses.”
Jun 26
Apple wants to replace 50% of iPhone final assembly line workers with automation 9to5mac.com · “The machinery necessary to automate iPhone production can sometimes cost hundreds of millions of dollars each year.”
Jun 25
Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco waymo.com · “Our track record for safe operations is unparalleled.”
Jun 25
Apple found in breach of EU competition rules theguardian.com · “If the commission’s preliminary views were to be ultimately confirmed, none of Apple’s three sets of business terms would comply with article 5(4) of the DMA, which requires gatekeepers to allow app developers to steer consumers to offers outside the gatekeepers’ app stores, free of charge.”
Jun 24
Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off restofworld.org · “The industry raised just $226 million last year, a steep fall from $922 million in 2022.”
Jun 23
My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore howtogeek.com · “More and more, I feel like Windows is just becoming a loss-leading front-end for Microsoft to sell its many software-as-a-service products.”
Jun 22
How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline engadget.com · “At the heart of these cases is the fact that Meta lacks the necessary volume of human customer service workers to assist those who lose their accounts.”
Jun 20
FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions ftc.gov · “Adobe trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles”
Jun 17
Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack, Whistleblower Says propublica.org · “Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing.”
Jun 13
Ikea's boss solved the Swedish retailer's global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare fortune.com · “Globally, across the parent company’s more than 600 stores and warehouses, the quit rate fell to 17.5% in April from 22.4% in August 2022.”
Jun 13
Tesla claims it has 2 Optimus humanoid robots working autonomously in factory electrek.co · “Tesla has been releasing a lot of information and video about Optimus lately, but the last report showed that the company was still training the bots using virtual reality and remote control.”
Jun 13
Silicon Valley's Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity stefantheard.com · “The part about these stories that feels unfair is not that the founders are getting liquidity - it’s that they are the only ones getting liquidity.”
Jun 12
Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time theregister.com · “Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.”
Jun 12
OpenAI ex-employees worry about company's control over their millions of dollars in shares cnbc.com · “OpenAI recently circulated a document indicating that ex-employees who work at competitors are not included in the tender offers.”
Jun 12
Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit theregister.com · “More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found.”
Jun 11
Why Triplebyte failed otherbranch.com · “In short: if you needed venture capital to produce a viable small-scale business, you didn’t really have a viable small-scale business to begin with.”
Jun 11
Google's $2.3 million check helped the company get a trial by judge instead of jury theverge.com · “The antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department and eight states seeking to break up Google’s alleged adtech monopoly will be heard by a judge this fall, as the company preferred.”
Jun 10
Apple blocks PC emulator from being available in iOS App Store and third-party app stores 9to5mac.com · “App Review rejected UTM, deciding that a “PC is not a console”.”
Jun 10
Nvidia is now more valuable than Apple at $3.01 trillion theverge.com · “Nvidia became a $1 trillion company in May 2023, then skyrocketed past $2 trillion in February of this year, making it more valuable than both Amazon and Alphabet.”
Jun 6
Is One Company to Blame for Soaring Rental Prices in the U.S.? entrepreneur.com · “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually”
Jun 5
Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts pcworld.com · “Instead of skipping the account link, you’re led into a kind of continuous loop that doesn’t end until you have entered the correct email address.”
Jun 4
Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads techcrunch.com · “We’re always testing formats that can drive value for advertisers”
Jun 4

May 2024 30 posts

Google will roll out Chrome's new extension spec on June 3rd theverge.com · “The extensions will still work, but Google says it will disable them on your browser in the “coming months” before removing the ability to use them completely.”
May 31
Fitbit Ace LTE: Hands On With Google's First Smartwatch for Kids pcmag.com · “Without the subscription, the Ace LTE is limited to basic movement and step tracking.”
May 30
Starlink's disruption of the space industry thespacereview.com · “That would be a big step, to have more than zero in the ‘not bankrupt’ category”
May 30
PayPal is building an ad network based on your Venmo data theverge.com · “If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data”
May 29
YouTube has now begun skipping videos altogether for users with ad blockers androidpolice.com · “YouTube users with ad blockers installed are reporting videos skipping straight to the end upon playback.”
May 29
An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them sparktoro.com · “Many of their claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular the company’s repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed”
May 28
Elon Musk's xAI raises $6 billion to fund its race against ChatGPT and all the rest theverge.com · “Musk denied that report at the time.”
May 28
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h robindev.substack.com · “It felt like extortion. Pay us $120k until tomorrow or we destroy your business.”
May 26
Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same bbc.com · “But Google controls the roads. If tomorrow they decide the roads won’t go to an entire town, that town dies.”
May 25
Microsoft outage affects Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT internet search bleepingcomputer.com · “Copilot is completely offline whether you use the website, app, or Copilot in Windows.”
May 23
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe propublica.org · “Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic.”
May 20
Hertz Charging a Tesla Renter for Gas Was Not an Isolated Incident thedrive.com · “Le was then apparently billed $690.32, some of which was redundant billing for the rental they say they’d already paid for.”
May 19
Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead" eff.org · “Apple charges app vendors a whopping 30 percent commission on most transactions”
May 19
The Maker of Stable Diffusion Is Collapsing, Considering Sale futurism.com · “According to The Information, the company generated less than $5 million in revenue in the first quarter of this year, while losing more than $30 million.”
May 17
Raspberry Pi is going public to expand its range of tiny computers theverge.com · “Raspberry Pi is hoping to use that cash to pay more engineers, bring aspects of its semiconductor design process in-house, and introduce new, more expensive product variants”
May 16
Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes aws.amazon.com · “Amazon S3 will make a change so unauthorized requests that customers did not initiate are free of charge.”
May 13
Nearly Half of All Masters Degrees Aren't Worth Getting reason.com · “Because ROI is negative for these programs, it’s unlikely that most of those loan dollars will be repaid.”
May 12
iOS 18: Apple finalizing deal to bring ChatGPT to iPhone 9to5mac.com · “An OpenAI accord would let Apple offer a popular chatbot as part of a flurry of new AI features that it’s planning to announce next month”
May 11
Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ theguardian.com · “While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.”
May 9
Google employees question execs over 'decline in morale' after blowout earnings cnbc.com · “Despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases”
May 9
Tesla is being investigated for securities and wire fraud for self-driving claims theverge.com · “To our knowledge no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred.”
May 8
Boeing faces new US investigation into 'missed' 787 inspections theguardian.com · “The memo said the company concluded that “several people had been violating company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed”.”
May 7
Your 14-Day Free Trial Ain't Gonna Cut It keygen.sh · “I gave them 14 days to get to that fork. But my p50 TTC is 41 days.”
May 6
Helldivers 2 Removed From Purchase On Steam In Over 150 Countries thegamer.com · “Sony backed this up by claiming it was for player protection, but the Helldivers 2 community wasn’t having any of that and took to orbital striking the Steam page with over 180,000 negative reviews over the past few days.”
May 5
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab construction-physics.com · “US fabs are also more expensive to build than in other parts of the world, with estimates ranging from 30% more expensive (per Intel) to up to four times as expensive (per TSMC).”
May 4
An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation Increases in 2021 thebignewsletter.com · “Even if oil gets to $200/barrel, the independent producers are going to be disciplined.”
May 3
Apple adds more carve-outs to its EU core tech fee after criticism from devs techcrunch.com · “Developers will need to certify their non-commercial status annually to Apple to keep qualifying for the fee exemption.”
May 3
Google Paid Apple $20 Billion in 2022 to Be Default Safari Search Engine macrumors.com · “In November, lawsuit documents indicated that Google was paying 36 percent of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on Safari, and now it turns out that equates to $20 billion.”
May 2
They thought they were joining an accelerator: instead they lost their startups techcrunch.com · “The court has since ordered the company to auction off the warrants it held in more than 1,000 of the startups that went through the accelerator program.”
May 2
At Microsoft, years of security debt come crashing down cybersecuritydive.com · “Currently, Microsoft directs the vast majority of their security investments in revenue generating roles instead of internal security roles.”
May 1

April 2024 37 posts

Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team electrek.co · “6-year veteran Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s Senior Director of EV charging, would be leaving the company on Tuesday, along with nearly all of her 500-person charging team”
Apr 30
Google workers fired for protesting Israeli contract file NLRB complaint theverge.com · “That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.”
Apr 30
Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference techcrunch.com · “Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team”
Apr 30
Williams-Sonoma fined $3.18 million for falsely labeling products as 'Made in USA' scrippsnews.com · “The federal body said in numerous instances, those products were actually ‘wholly imported’ from China.”
Apr 28
The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down theverge.com · “But its fortunes still rest disproportionately on iPhone sales: in Apple’s 2024 Q1 financials, it reports net sales of $119.6 billion in the three months prior to December 30th, 2023, with $69.7 billion attributed to the iPhone.”
Apr 27
Cost of developing new drugs may be far lower than industry claims, trial reveals theguardian.com · “The extortionate cost of trials is used to justify high prices of new medicines, but companies do not publish either the topline or a breakdown of their spending.”
Apr 25
Meta loses $200 billion in value as Zuckerberg focuses earnings call on all the ways company bleeds cash cnbc.com · “Reality Labs reported sales of $440 million for the first quarter and $3.85 billion in losses.”
Apr 25
IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc. Creating a Comprehensive End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Platform newsroom.ibm.com · “The two companies also anticipate an acceleration of HashiCorp’s growth initiatives by leveraging IBM’s world-class go-to-market strategy, scale, and reach.”
Apr 24
The Man Who Killed Google Search wheresyoured.at · “On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.””
Apr 23
Apple's Risky Bet on CarPlay theturnsignalblog.com · “If you look at the CarPlay concept for Porsche and remove the steering wheel, there is no way you can tell it’s a Porsche.”
Apr 23
Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’ theverge.com · “We are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis.”
Apr 22
Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’ to save $2.15 billion fortune.com · “We don’t have to be that good to beat the current system.”
Apr 21
Amazon Grows To Over 750,000 Robots As World's Second-Largest Private Employer Replaces Over 100,000 Humans finance.yahoo.com · “While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers.”
Apr 21
Volkswagen workers vote overwhelmingly to join the UAW, giving the union a groundbreaking win cnn.com · “There are roughly 150,000 workers at nonunion auto plants in the United States today, roughly the same number as at the American plants of the three unionized automakers.”
Apr 20
Tesla recalls the Cybertruck for faulty accelerator pedals that can get stuck techcrunch.com · “An unapproved change introduced lubricant (soap) to aid in the component assembly of the pad onto the accelerator pedal.”
Apr 19
Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds theguardian.com · “Biscuit-flavoured cereals for babies aged six months and older contained 6g of added sugar for every serving in Senegal and South Africa, researchers found. The same product sold in Switzerland has none.”
Apr 19
I spoke with a Google worker fired for protesting a $1.2 billion contract with Israel thehandbasket.co · “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
Apr 19
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat theverge.com · “We’d all like to have maintenance cheaper, but the cost of running a ship doesn’t actually change much from year to year. It goes up, actually.”
Apr 18
Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. vox.com · “It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook.”
Apr 16
Redis is forked vickiboykis.com · “The old Redis was for developers. The new Redis is for enterprise sales, and for generative AI.”
Apr 16
California is Losing Tech Jobs apricitas.io · “Since the beginning of COVID, California has added a sum total of only 6k jobs in the tech industry, compared to roughly 570k across the rest of the United States.”
Apr 16
Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes statnews.com · “According to public tax records, Cedars Sinai in Beverly Hills had an income surplus of $750 million in 2022 and paid no federal taxes.”
Apr 14
The Guide to Stock Options conversations manager.dev · “In some companies, the initial job contracts are misleading, and mention a nominal price of $0.01.”
Apr 14
Ubisoft is stripping people's licences for The Crew weeks after its shutdown, nearly squandering hopes of fan servers and acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is pcgamer.com · “You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?”
Apr 13
Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu theverge.com · “This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the US and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations)”
Apr 13
Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets theverge.com · “The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.”
Apr 12
AI boom is boosting demand even for HDDs, raising prices by up to 20% since Q3 theregister.com · “Manufacturers cut production by 20 percent in 2023, according to the TechNews report, to keep hard drive prices from falling in the face of lowered demand in a weakening global economy.”
Apr 12
Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27bn fraud case theguardian.com · “Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through third parties and shell companies.”
Apr 11
Alternative browsers report uplift after EU's DMA choice screen mandate techcrunch.com · “Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, told us it estimates that less than a fifth of iOS users have been shown a choice screen so far.”
Apr 11
Big Tech passkey implementations are a trap proton.me · “And both Apple and Google prevent you from exporting your passkeys, meaning you’ll need to create them all over again if you want to switch to another password manager.”
Apr 9
Beeper is joining Automattic blog.beeper.com · “Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future.”
Apr 9
Groq CEO: 'We No Longer Sell Hardware' eetimes.com · “The U.S. government and its allies are the only ones we’d be willing to sell hardware to.”
Apr 7
Apple Updates App Store Guidelines to Permit Game Emulators, Website Links in EU Music Apps macrumors.com · “In all other storefronts, streaming music apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.”
Apr 5
Anatomy of a credit card rewards program bitsaboutmoney.com · “Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.”
Apr 4
Amazon gives up on no-checkout shopping in its large grocery stores theverge.com · “Instead, it’s switching fully to ‘Dash Carts,’ where customers scan products as they toss them in their cart.”
Apr 3
Canoo spent double its annual revenue on the CEO's private jet in 2023 techcrunch.com · “Under a deal reached in November 2020, Canoo reimburses Aquila Family Ventures, an entity owned by the CEO, for use of an aircraft.”
Apr 2
Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism techcrunch.com · “The price reduction in the Enterprise Suites without Teams is only $2.25, yet the Standalone cost is $5.25.”
Apr 2

March 2024 26 posts

Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included news.ycombinator.com · “I’m unable to access reddit via browser when using VPN.”
Mar 31
Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for FTX fraud theverge.com · “A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on the sentence by using his Las Vegas winnings to pay back all or part of which he stole when he finally gets caught.”
Mar 28
Suicide Mission prospect.org · “Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were "phenomenally talented assholes," and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company.”
Mar 28
Amazon fined in Poland for dark pattern design tricks techcrunch.com · “For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment.”
Mar 28
After Appalachian Hospitals Merged Into a Monopoly, Their ERs Slowed to a Crawl kffhealthnews.org · “In total, the council member was in the ER for about 30 hours, he said.”
Mar 26
Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act ec.europa.eu · “In case of an infringement, the Commission can impose fines up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide turnover.”
Mar 25
Here's how Microsoft is providing a 'good outcome' for Inflection AI VCs, as Reid Hoffman promised techcrunch.com · “$620 million for non-exclusive licensing fees for the technology (meaning Inflection is free to license it elsewhere) and $30 million for Inflection to agree not to sue over Microsoft’s poaching”
Mar 22
U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction sixcolors.com · “Things that are legal for regular companies to do become illegal when monopolies do them.”
Mar 21
Redis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing redis.com · “Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.”
Mar 20
Section 174 and its Impact on Tech Startups tanayj.com · “They now have to somehow find $57K in cash to pay the govt, despite not making a real profit.”
Mar 20
Tech support firms Restoro, Reimage fined $26 million for scare tactics bleepingcomputer.com · “While the devices used to test the purchased software and services had no performance or security issues and were also running antivirus software, scanning them “revealed” hundreds of issues requiring repair, including “PC Privacy issues,” “Junk files,” “Crashed Programs,” and “Broken Registry issues.””
Mar 15
After AWS and Google, Microsoft says it's removing Azure 'egress' data transfer fees: but with caveats techcrunch.com · “There is no flexibility here to support the multi-cloud needs of modern businesses.”
Mar 15
TikTok shareholders who make any 'disparaging statement' about the company risk having their entire holdings seized finance.yahoo.com · “If shareholders are caught doing so, ‘all of the participant’s restricted share units will be immediately forfeited.’”
Mar 12
Apple Announces Ability to Download iPhone Apps From Websites in EU macrumors.com · “having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year”
Mar 12
Boeing whistleblower John Barnett found dead in US bbc.com · “It established that the location of at least 53 ’non-conforming’ parts in the factory was unknown, and that they were considered lost.”
Mar 11
Activision QA Workers Vote to Form Largest US Video Game Worker Union to Date ign.com · “By recognizing our union, Microsoft is making good on its promise to respect our ability to decide for ourselves about union representation.”
Mar 10
Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, as internal dissent mounts cnbc.com · “This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”
Mar 8
Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account, clearing path for Epic Games Store on iPhone 9to5mac.com · “Apple has told us and committed to the European Commission that they will reinstate our developer account.”
Mar 8
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol techcrunch.com · “Meta says that third-party providers will need to sign an agreement with Meta or WhatsApp before it will enable interoperability.”
Mar 7
Boeing is withholding key details about door plug on Alaska 737 Max 9 jet, NTSB says npr.org · “The NTSB has asked Boeing to provide documentation of when it was performed and by whom, Homendy said. But Boeing has told investigators that “they can’t find it,” she said.”
Mar 6
Apple terminates Epic Games developer account calling it a 'threat' to the iOS ecosystem techcrunch.com · “More recently, you have described our DMA compliance as ‘hot garbage,’ a ‘horror show,’ and a ‘devious new instance of Malicious Compliance.’”
Mar 6
Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS aws.amazon.com · “If you are moving off AWS, you can contact AWS Support to ask for free DTO rates under this program for the additional data.”
Mar 6
Kagi + Wolfram blog.kagi.com · “To ensure result quality, we automatically downrank pages with advertising and tracking, which are often associated with low-quality or machine-generated content.”
Mar 5
Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software: previously the prohibition was only listed in the online EULA, now included in installed files [Updated] tomshardware.com · “You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using SDK elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-NVIDIA platform.”
Mar 4
K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due matduggan.com · “However, it’s 2024 and stuff that used to be free isn’t anymore. The free money train from VCs has ended and the bill has come due.”
Mar 2
A most wanted man: Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy theins.press · “For nearly four years, Austrian national Jan Marsalek has been living in Russia under the assumed identity of Konstantin Baiazov, the real-life Orthodox priest.”
Mar 1

February 2024 24 posts

Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project macrumors.com · “Some employees within Apple are said to have suspected that the endeavor was likely to fail from the beginning, and they referred to the car as “the Titanic disaster” instead of its “Project Titan” codename.”
Feb 29
Financial systems take a holiday bitsaboutmoney.com · “Nonetheless, many financial systems do have availability which is far closer to five twos.”
Feb 29
Money Bubble tbray.org · “I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two.”
Feb 29
Bitcoin's so high, it crashed Coinbase today techcrunch.com · “Users of the Coinbase app grew concerned on Wednesday as they logged in to find their accounts showing a zero balance, despite owning crypto assets.”
Feb 29
How I turned my open-source project into a business blog.emailengine.app · “It turned out that smaller companies did not care about the license at all, and larger companies were not using it.”
Feb 27
Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018 cnbc.com · “The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years.”
Feb 26
AT&T cellular service restored after daylong outage: cause still unknown cnbc.com · “AT&T, which put up a website for system updates, did not say how many customers were affected by Thursday’s outage.”
Feb 22
Nvidia posts revenue up 265% on booming AI business cnbc.com · “Over half the company’s data center sales went to large cloud providers.”
Feb 22
ASML dethrones Applied Materials, becomes world's largest fab tool maker: analyst tomshardware.com · “Secondly, ASML could sell sophisticated tools to Chinese customers for most of calendar 2023 as sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor sector kicked in only in September and only for one tool.”
Feb 20
How Google is killing independent sites like ours housefresh.com · “Better Homes & Gardens never mentioned conducting tests prior to the Google Product Review Update in July 2022.”
Feb 19
German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation noyb.eu · “The company appears to be making millions of euros by selling people in Germany their own data.”
Feb 16
Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose techcrunch.com · “And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU”
Feb 15
Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments theregister.com · “Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features – small payments and no user interaction – that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web.”
Feb 15
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo techcrunch.com · “Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox."”
Feb 14
Nokia Made Too Many Phones textquery.app · “Just in the year ‘05 alone, it launched more than fifty models, more than the number of iPhone models Apple has shipped in sixteen years of its existence.”
Feb 13
What it was like working for GitLab yorickpeterse.com · “But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would’ve earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more.”
Feb 11
A rent-stabilized 1 bedroom apartment for $1,100? In NYC? The broker's fee is $15K. gothamist.com · “The rules are murky, and no laws explicitly cap broker’s fees or define the difference between reasonable costs and extortion”
Feb 10
Exclusive: Mozilla names new CEO as it doubles down on data privacy fortune.com · “Mozilla generates revenue through search partnerships, a majority of which come from Google.”
Feb 8
Morale plummets at Google as workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'boring' sfgate.com · “If we lose our jobs and equity grants, it’s cold comfort that Google is succeeding off our hard work, and we don’t get rewarded for it, but you do.”
Feb 7
"Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto Real Estate Bubble: HSBC Bank Leaks thebureau.news · “In one example, an Ontario casino worker that owned three homes also claimed to earn $345,000 in 2020 analyzing data remotely for a Beijing company.”
Feb 6
TSMC to build second Japan chip factory, raising investment to $20 billion finance.yahoo.com · “The decision to build a second fab is a vote of confidence by TSMC in Japan where construction of the first fab has run smoothly and which, Reuters has reported, it sees as a source of diligent workers with a government that is easy to deal with.”
Feb 6
Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups, leaving developers and customers in disarray techcrunch.com · “I will lose seven years of work and over 10,000 customers,”
Feb 6
Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly torrentfreak.com · “Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,”
Feb 4
Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice research.mozilla.org · “Similarly, Microsoft recently pledged to stop some of the actions it takes to force Edge on users who have selected other browsers. Unfortunately, these changes only address a small number of the tactics outlined in this report. And, to make matters worse, they will only be deployed to users in the EEA.”
Feb 3

January 2024 19 posts

Google Search Drops Cache Link From Search Results (How To See The Cache) seroundtable.com · “After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page.”
Jan 31
Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union apple.com · “Inevitably, the new options for developers’ EU apps create new risks to Apple users and their devices.”
Jan 25
Celebrating our first 20,000 members blog.kagi.com · “Now, you may ask, why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts?”
Jan 25
FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls it deceptive cnn.com · “Intuit cannot advertise or market any goods or services as free unless it’s free for all customers, the FTC ordered.”
Jan 23
Boeing Whistleblower: Production Line Has "Enormous Volume Of Defects" Bolts On MAX 9 Weren't Installed viewfromthewing.com · “That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.”
Jan 23
Mourning Google tbray.org · “And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search.”
Jan 19
The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams waxy.org · “Ello exists for the benefit of the creative community, and we will never serve ads or sell personal data.”
Jan 18
FAQ on leaving Google social.clawhammer.net · “Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall.”
Jan 17
U.S. Developers Can Now Offer Non-App Store Purchasing Option, But Apple Will Still Collect Commissions macrumors.com · “Developers are permitted to have a single plain link on one screen of an app.”
Jan 16
We're building a better PostHog community by closing our public Slack posthog.com · “However, with over 5,000 members in the community, it’s become clear we’ve outgrown Slack as a platform.”
Jan 14
Cloud switching just got easier: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud cloud.google.com · “This applies to all customers globally.”
Jan 11
Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC cointelegraph.com · “The SEC had consistently denied all spot Bitcoin ETF requests, citing concerns over potential market manipulation and fraud.”
Jan 10
United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections theaircurrent.com · “United is the only other U.S. airline to fly the 737 Max 9 and is the largest operator with 79 in its fleet.”
Jan 8
Twilio CEO Lawson steps down after bruising activist battles cnbc.com · “The move comes as Twilio grapples with two activist investors who have been pushing for significant changes.”
Jan 8
FAA grounds more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s after section of Alaska Airlines plane blows out cnbc.com · “The section of the fuselage missing appeared to correspond to an exit not used by Alaska Airlines, or other carriers that don’t have high-density seating configurations, and was plugged.”
Jan 6
Boeing wants FAA to exempt MAX 7 from safety rules to get it in the air seattletimes.com · “However, without an exemption from current safety regulations, the FAA cannot approve the final two MAX models, the MAX 7 and MAX 10, to fly passengers.”
Jan 5
Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? infrequently.org · “It has gone largely unreported that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been held back by Apple and Google denying competing browsers access to essential APIs.”
Jan 4
The 3 budgets swizec.com · “Maintenance is always on the chopping block.”
Jan 3
Amazon's Silent Sacking justingarrison.com · “Amazon has a stock problem.”
Jan 2

2023 343 posts

December 2023 25 posts

Update: Maersk Ship Hit by Missile, Avoids Boarding in the Red Sea gcaptain.com · “U.S. Navy helicopters responded to the distress call and engaged with the small boats, sinking three of them and killing the crews.”
Dec 31
Tether Reveals Partnerships With Secret Service, FBI in Letter to U.S. Senate finance.yahoo.com · “Tether seeks to be a world class partner to the U.S. as we continue to assist law enforcement and expand dollar hegemony globally.”
Dec 30
Amazon.com, Inc. - 662503 - 12/20/2023 fda.gov · “FDA purchased on your website, www.amazon.com, products that are labeled as energy enhancing supplements or food, but laboratory analyses confirmed that they contained undeclared and potentially harmful active pharmaceutical ingredients.”
Dec 28
Amazon Prime Video starts showing ads in January unless you pay $2.99/month extra 9to5google.com · “No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership.”
Dec 26
Wayfair CEO: Employees need to work longer hours cnn.com · “There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success.”
Dec 26
Post-apocalyptic life in American health care metarationality.com · “The short version is that at least seven experts spent roughly ten full-time days trying to find out a basic fact about my mother’s insurance, and finally failed.”
Dec 25
Costs of running a macOS app studio business notes.alinpanaitiu.com · “In the end, I get the equivalent of a $5800/month net salary.”
Dec 24
The hyperloop is dead for real this time theverge.com · “The pod only reached a top speed of 100mph, far short of the original promise of seven times that amount.”
Dec 22
Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack searchenginejournal.com · “Many of the domains have only been registered within the past 24-48 hours.”
Dec 22
Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons In New Cars insideevs.com · “This move, according to VW, "frustrated customers who shouldn’t be frustrated."”
Dec 19
Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger figma.com · “despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.”
Dec 18
Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here's why 9to5mac.com · “In its initial filing with the ITC, Masimo accused Apple of 103 instances of patent infringement across five different patents.”
Dec 18
Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber For Negative Review onemileatatime.com · “I was pressured to write a statement that I didn’t give you permission to be filmed,”
Dec 17
“Yes” Actually Means “No”: The Curious Language of VCs blog.jacobstechtavern.com · “Please note however that this is neither a term sheet or a wire transfer.”
Dec 17
Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs techcrunch.com · “GM, which acquired Cruise in 2016, was rewarded by shareholders for the cutbacks. GM shares rose 4.8% to $35.64 following the news.”
Dec 15
Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight theverge.com · “After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them”
Dec 12
Paris-based Startup and OpenAI Competitor Mistral AI Valued at $2 Billion unite.ai · “Joining the fray are tech giants Nvidia ( NVDA ) Corp and Salesforce ( CRM ) , contributing an additional €120 million in convertible debt.”
Dec 10
Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android techcrunch.com · “These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.”
Dec 8
Klarna freezes hiring because AI can do the job instead mashable.com · “We’re not currently hiring at all, apart from engineers.”
Dec 6
Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops social.hackerspace.pl · “One version of the controller actually contained GPS coordinates to contain the behaviour to third party workshops.”
Dec 5
An Update on December 2023 Organizational Changes newsroom.spotify.com · “I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance.”
Dec 4
An Update On The DoorDash Experience in NYC about.doordash.com · “In order to better balance the impact of these new costs, we’re moving the option to tip in the DoorDash app to after checkout.”
Dec 4
OpenAI Agreed to Buy $51 Million of AI Chips From a Startup Backed by CEO Sam Altman wired.com · “Rain told investors that Altman had personally invested more than $1 million in the company.”
Dec 3
Not Everything Is Google's Fault (Just Most Things) blog.railway.com · “As it turns out, a Google engineer was able to arbitrarily change the quota on GCP.”
Dec 2
Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says. Here's why cnbc.com · “We are three and a half years in, and we’re totally stuck,” Bloom said of remote work. “It would take something as extreme as the pandemic to unstick it.”
Dec 1

November 2023 24 posts

Report: Stability AI Positioning Itself for Acquisition pymnts.com · “Stability AI was spending about $8 million a month on bills and payroll in October.”
Nov 30
Inside Foxconn's struggle to make iPhones in India restofworld.org · “The Sunguvarchatram plant still assembled fewer than 10% of all iPhone 15s, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Nov 29
Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files theregister.com · “The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.”
Nov 27
Making it clear when we're on a call with you to protect you from fraud monzo.com · “Since we launched this feature, we’ve seen approximately 700 fraud reports each month directly within Call Status.”
Nov 26
The Bond villain compliance strategy bitsaboutmoney.com · “The crime was the product.”
Nov 25
Reflecting on 18 years at Google ln.hixie.ch · “Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.”
Nov 22
Cruise co-founder resigns following CEO exit engadget.com · “Kan is said to have announced his resignation over Slack.”
Nov 21
A secret Google deal let Spotify completely bypass Android's app store fees theverge.com · “If we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones.”
Nov 20
Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive signal.org · “We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate.”
Nov 16
Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion theregister.com · “If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required.”
Nov 16
Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year 9to5mac.com · “This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms.”
Nov 16
The Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner just paid a record $4 million to skip to the front of the line fortune.com · “You are getting close to $4.5 million to use the canal, so that is pricing out a lot of ships.”
Nov 13
Placemark is going open source and shutting down macwright.com · “I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a sustainable bootstrapped startup.”
Nov 13
Apple's MacBook Pro memory problem is worse than ever macworld.com · “Apple’s charging you $200 for RAM it buys for $30.”
Nov 10
It’s Your Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim propublica.org · “Cigna and Anthem told members that they would need to obtain a court order or subpoena to access their claim file records.”
Nov 9
Google offered Epic $147 million to launch Fortnite on the Play Store theverge.com · “It was meant to stem a potential “contagion” of popular apps bypassing Android’s official store”
Nov 9
Removal of MyQ integration home-assistant.io · “In their partner program, the partner companies pay Chamberlain Group for the privilege of letting MyQ owners control their own garage doors.”
Nov 8
Cruise confirms robotaxis rely on human assistance every four to five miles cnbc.com · “During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs.”
Nov 8
Seeing like a bank bitsaboutmoney.com · “The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise.”
Nov 7
Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant lapcatsoftware.com · “Apple utilizes developers for vast amounts of unpaid QA labor.”
Nov 6
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers androidauthority.com · “AdGuard, told the outlet they normally see about 6,000 uninstallations per day on Chrome, but that shot up to 11,000 per day between October 9 and the end of the month, peaking at 52,000 on October 18.”
Nov 4
Mint is shutting down, and it’s pushing users toward Credit Karma theverge.com · “the new experience in Credit Karma does not offer the ability to set monthly and category budgets”
Nov 3
Here’s a rare look at Google’s most lucrative search queries theverge.com · “Google has long encouraged brands to buy ad space for queries with their own name, lest they have their search results space stolen by a competitor.”
Nov 2
Raspberry Pi Receives Strategic Investment from Arm, Further Extending Long-Term Partnership newsroom.arm.com · “Arm has acquired a minority stake in Raspberry Pi, further extending a successful long-term partnership between the two companies as they collaborate to deliver critical solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) developer community.”
Nov 2

October 2023 23 posts

X is officially worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it theverge.com · “That price is a 55 percent discount to Musk’s original purchase price, per the documents, which note that “the fair market value per share is determined by the Board of Directors based on a number of factors in a manner that complies with applicable tax rules.” (Musk is X’s chair and has yet to create a formal board.)”
Oct 31
I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars ludic.mataroa.blog · “The computers are set to idle for 10 minutes after every query.”
Oct 30
X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit world.hey.com · “Optimized our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%.”
Oct 30
Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin andadinosaur.com · “Since May, uBO has been in a cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. And they’ve shown incredible resilience, especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team dealing with YouTube.”
Oct 29
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google theverge.com · “Reddit isn’t denying that it might block crawlers. “In terms of crawlers, we don’t have anything to share on that topic at the moment,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge, clarifying that the company’s earlier “nothing is changing” comment only applied to logins.”
Oct 23
Amazon Managers Can Now Fire Employees Who Refuse to Work From the Office 3 Days a Week entrepreneur.com · “In July, the company added that remote employees must relocate near office “hubs” where most of their team members work. Those unwilling to relocate or find a compatible team were offered a “voluntary resignation” package. By September, Amazon began sharing individual attendance records with employees, a change from its previous practice of tracking anonymized data.”
Oct 23
Reddit mods dumped tokens hours before blockchain program termination cointelegraph.com · “In another incident, just 17 minutes before Reddit’s statement, moderator u/Rider_of_the_storm allegedly shifted 345,422 MOON, worth over $69,000 at the time, to an exchange address. The Reddit account in question has since been deactivated.”
Oct 21
I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. lerner.co.il · “Meta’s AI system noticed that I was talking about Python and Pandas, assumed that I was talking about the animals (not the technology), and banned me. The appeal that I asked for wasn’t reviewed by a human, but was reviewed by another bot, which (not surprisingly) made a similar assessment.”
Oct 19
Bandcamp’s Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off 404media.co · “Bandcamp’s entire union bargaining team, the eight union members democratically elected by their peers to negotiate their first union contract, were laid off when Epic Games sold Bandcamp to music licensing company Songtradr on Monday.”
Oct 19
AT&T Moves to Disrupt Test of SpaceX's Starlink Cellular Service pcmag.com · “AT&T now argues that SpaceX is trying to conduct the Starlink cellular test under the wrong regulatory process.”
Oct 17
About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off theverge.com · “Songtradr’s statement also confirmed that its purchase of Bandcamp had been completed, but it did not confirm if it would voluntarily recognize Bandcamp’s union that employees won earlier this year”
Oct 16
LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees npr.org · “In its most recent quarterly report released in July, LinkedIn said its revenue increased 5% year over year and surpassed $15 billion for the first time.”
Oct 16
Microsoft consumes Activision: and a plea blog.zarfhome.com · “Depending on how you count, that’s three-to-five companies which have died and passed the Infocom IP on to a successor.”
Oct 15
Microsoft reveals IRS notice asking for $28.9 billion in back taxes engadget.com · “Microsoft owes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) $28.9 billion in back taxes, not including penalties and interest, at least according to the tax authority.”
Oct 12
The fraud was in the code citationneeded.news · “Code snippets shown to the jury demonstrated how Nishad Singh wrote some code that would update the insurance fund amount by adding to it the daily trading volume, multiplied by a randomish number around 7,500, and dividing it by a billion, thus making it appear as though the website was referencing a real account balance that was fluctuating as the exchange added funds or withdrew from it to cover losses.”
Oct 11
Report: GitHub Copilot Loses an Average of $20 Per User Per Month thurrott.com · “As the WSJ notes, individuals pay $10 per month for GitHub Copilot, but multiple sources told it that the service loses an average of $20 per user per month, with some users costing Microsoft as much as $80 per month.”
Oct 10
Unity CEO John Riccitiello stepping down, effective immediately engadget.com · “In 2023, the company reduced its headcount three times in an attempt to cut costs.”
Oct 9
Alameda had a $65B line of credit and 'unlimited withdrawals' techcrunch.com · “Because of these special privileges, Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit, Wang said.”
Oct 6
Delta is fourth major U.S. airline to find fake jet aircraft engine parts with forged airworthiness documents from U.K. company fortune.com · “Those engines account for less than 1% of the more than 2,100 power plants on its mainline fleet, the spokesman said.”
Oct 5
What we Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Chinese Mold Maker airgradient.com · “It is important that you clarify with the mold maker who exactly owns the mold because often they keep this opaque and call it a “contract mold”.”
Oct 5
The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax" thebignewsletter.com · “At this point, the price Amazon charges these third party sellers has grown to nearly 50% of its revenue.”
Oct 4
Redfin is Leaving NAR redfin.com · “In about half the U.S., including in cities like Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Long Island, Minneapolis, Nashville, Phoenix and Salt Lake City, we can’t quit NAR individually or en masse, because NAR membership is required for agents to access listing databases, lockboxes, and industry-standard contracts.”
Oct 3
Satya Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google, and Apple could fix it theverge.com · “Has Microsoft tried to become Apple’s default search engine, Severt asked? Yes, Nadella said. How’d it go? “Not well,” Nadella deadpanned.”
Oct 3

September 2023 22 posts

Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians? rocknerd.co.uk · “Epic only bought Bandcamp eighteen months ago.”
Sep 28
Reddit will start paying you real money for good posts techcrunch.com · “For users with between 100 and 4,999 karma, they will receive $0.90 per 1 gold.”
Sep 26
Unity apologizes to devs, reveals updated Runtime Fee policy gamedeveloper.com · “The Unity Runtime Fee will no longer apply to games built on Unity Personal.”
Sep 25
Expanding access to safer AI with Amazon anthropic.com · “As part of the investment, Amazon will take a minority stake in Anthropic.”
Sep 25
Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can't 404media.co · “The main reason scalpers continue to get tickets and fans continue to be upset is because ticket scalpers are professional ticket buyers, who in many cases have navigated Ticketmaster’s buying process every day for years.”
Sep 23
Cisco makes largest ever acquisition, buying cybersecurity company Splunk for $28 billion in cash cnbc.com · “The purchase price is equivalent to about 13% of Cisco’s market cap, a big number for a company that has historically avoided blockbuster deals.”
Sep 21
Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month blog.kagi.com · “With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users.”
Sep 21
FAA Authorizes Zipline International, Inc. to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones That Fly Beyond Operator's Line of Sight faa.gov · “The FAA authorized Zipline International, Inc., to deliver commercial packages around Salt Lake City using drones that fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight without visual observers.”
Sep 20
‘Less than half’ fresh produce sold globally makes any profit fruitnet.com · “Three-fifths of the fresh fruit and vegetables traded commercially around the globe are now sold at a loss or breakeven price, following an unprecedented increase in production and operating costs during the pandemic.”
Sep 20
AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5 Billion toonk.io · “That’s 7.3 Million IPv4 addresses x $43.80, almost $320 Million a year. At 25% usage, that’s nearly $800 Million a year. And at 31% usage, that’s a billion dollars!”
Sep 19
Striking UAW auto workers want a 40% pay increase: how much they make now cnbc.com · “Profits at the struck auto companies increased 92% from 2013 to 2022, totaling $250 billion, according to EPI.”
Sep 18
Collective letter from game development companies: Turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until new conditions are reviewed docs.google.com · “As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered.”
Sep 16
Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands theguardian.com · “For example, Carrefour said a bottle of sugar-free peach-flavoured Lipton iced tea, produced by PepsiCo, shrank to 1.25 litres (0.33 gallon) from 1.5 litres, resulting in a 40% effective increase in the price a litre.”
Sep 15
SpaceX’s Starlink made $1.4 billion last year theverge.com · “In a 2015 presentation to investors, the Elon Musk-founded company initially predicted that Starlink would make $12 billion and $7 billion in operating profit in 2022.”
Sep 14
Google is cutting hundreds of jobs in its recruiting organization cnbc.com · “In January, Alphabet-owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, affecting roughly 6% of the full-time workforce.”
Sep 14
The Death of Unity gamedeveloper.com · “We did the itch.io bundle for ukraine. That was approximately a million games given out per developer. If all those were installed, developers would owe $200,000 just for having given their game to charity.”
Sep 12
Credit card debt collection bitsaboutmoney.com · “Debts are conveyed to the debt buyers as large CSV files with minimal supporting documentation.”
Sep 12
We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here's what we learned earthly.dev · “We ended up with the most ridiculous negative qualification criteria I have ever heard of: if the prospect requires a demo, then they’re not worth going after.”
Sep 12
Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users ctrl.blog · “Despite not having implemented the changes everyone assumed it had, it has received lots of positive press attention for doing the right thing.”
Sep 11
Google, Meta, Amazon hiring low-paid H1B workers after US layoffs: report moneycontrol.com · “Just a month after Sundar Pichai announced Google’s plan to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January, the company filed applications for H1B visas to hire software engineers, analytical consultants, user experience researchers and other roles from outside the United States”
Sep 9
A track inspector claimed he was fired for reporting 'too many defects.' His secret recordings may cost BNSF millions. kstp.com · “Why in the world would we ever call the FRA about anything? Unless I’m absolutely blatantly telling you to break the rules”
Sep 8
Arm wrestles expert's domains away citing trademark issues theregister.com · “Arm’s takedown comes just a week after the Neoverse designer officially filed for an IPO on the US Nasdaq.”
Sep 1

August 2023 30 posts

Leaked Microsoft memo tells managers not to use budget cuts as an explainer for lack of pay rises: 'Reinforce that every year offers unique opportunity for impact' finance.yahoo.com · “Using budgets or factors besides the employee’s impact as an explanation for an employee’s rewards will erode trust and confidence within your team.”
Aug 31
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google theverge.com · “It’s quite literally a rogue executable file that has somehow appeared in c:\windows\temp\mubstemp and is digitally signed by Microsoft.”
Aug 30
Google to charge big businesses $30 per user per month for AI in Gmail and work apps cnbc.com · “We were a little surprised to see our friends in Redmond come up with the exact same pricing model that we had.”
Aug 30
'The Wallet Event': Crypto Startup Bankrupt After Losing Password to $38.9 Million Physical Crypto Wallet 404media.co · “It is worth mentioning that the company did not tell regulators or customers about this issue for months after it discovered the problem.”
Aug 28
New Images and Video Confirm Austin-Made Tesla Model Y Has Cracked Front Casting autoevolution.com · “Do not copy the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer.”
Aug 28
Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly thehustle.co · “Much of their earnings go back to Monotype, which takes a 50% cut of every sale on its site.”
Aug 27
This venture-backed startup has quietly bought more than 80 mom-and-pop shops techcrunch.com · “The plan instead is to generate revenue from a growing array of fintech products that it sells to the businesses it buys.”
Aug 26
Zoom CEO Says Employees Need to Be in the Office Because It's Hard to Build Trust Over Zoom gizmodo.com · “We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
Aug 25
Elon Musk says 'if LEGO can do it, so can we' about Cybertruck quality in leaked Tesla email electrek.co · “All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
Aug 25
Epic's First Run offers 100% revenue share to game devs in exchange for exclusivity techcrunch.com · “Steam, for all its shortcomings and 30% off the top, is the de facto platform for PC gamers, and developers have shared that when their game is available on both Steam and Epic, the latter makes up only a small fraction of sales.”
Aug 24
NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2024 nvidianews.nvidia.com · “On August 21, 2023, the Board of Directors approved an additional $25.00 billion in share repurchases, without expiration.”
Aug 23
Experian fined $650,000 for not letting you opt out of its spammy emails theverge.com · “Text at the bottom of emails shown in court docs reads, "This is not a marketing email," and claims the messages were notifications of recent account changes.”
Aug 22
SpaceX's new Bandwagon program is a big threat to small launch providers techcrunch.com · “Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.”
Aug 22
Meta threatens to fire workers for return-to-office infractions in leaked memo sfgate.com · “As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a Performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed.”
Aug 21
Google's plan to purge inactive accounts isn't sitting well with some users cnbc.com · “For the first time in its almost two decades as a public company, Google revenue has grown by less than 10% for four consecutive quarters.”
Aug 21
China's property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan court cnbc.com · “The application is a normal procedure for the offshore debt restructuring and does not involve bankruptcy petition.”
Aug 18
Spotify reportedly has a $38 million white noise problem theverge.com · “Spotify is spending a lot of money on podcasts that don’t actually involve any talking.”
Aug 18
EQT Private Equity Announces Voluntary Public Purchase Offer and Intention to Delist SUSE suse.com · “The interim dividend will be paid to all shareholders prior to the settlement of the Offer and will allow Marcel to finance its purchase of SUSE shares under the Offer and certain transaction costs incurred by it.”
Aug 17
Amazon will reportedly charge sellers an extra fee for shipping their own products theverge.com · “Documents viewed by the outlets indicate that Amazon will start imposing a fee on each product that merchants send out themselves.”
Aug 17
Setapp readies alt app store for iPhone, entices devs with up to 90% revenue share 9to5mac.com · “While the base rate of revenue shared with devs is the same 70% at Setapp that it is with Apple, there is a potential bonus.”
Aug 16
What exactly are the economics of AI? garymarcus.substack.com · “Driverless cars are powered by AI, but so far the money that has gone into them, on order of $100 billion dollars, vastly exceeds the actual revenue that has come out of them.”
Aug 15
Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It Was All a Lie.' businessinsider.com · “While it was able to execute some functions such as information collection in real time, other operations such as the processing and organizing of that data took hours to complete”
Aug 13
U.S. Bans Future Investments in Chinese AI, Semiconductor, and Quantum Computing tomshardware.com · “While the administration mentioned restrictions would concern only "narrow subsets" of these areas, precise details remain unspecified.”
Aug 11
80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: 'A lot of executives have egg on their faces' cnbc.com · “A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of employees’ office attendance, their usage of office amenities and other related factors, according to new research from Envoy.”
Aug 11
Supreme Court says Apple can keep its App Store payment rules for now theverge.com · “Kagan did not issue an explanation for the decision, but Epic’s petition was noted as denied on the Supreme Court’s website.”
Aug 10
Insights into Stack Overflow's traffic stackoverflow.blog · “This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.”
Aug 9
Amazon Says It Doesn't 'Employ' Drivers, But Records Show It Hired Firms to Prevent Them From Unionizing vice.com · “Motherboard reviewed five reports filed to the Department of Labor, which showed that Amazon spent more than $14.2 million total on anti-union consulting in 2022.”
Aug 8
Banks hit with $549 million in fines for use of Signal, WhatsApp to evade regulators' reach cnbc.com · “An analysis of 13 Wells Fargo employees, for instance, found that all had violated the bank’s communications policies by using text messages to communicate with co-workers and market participants.”
Aug 8
Amazon rolls out its virtual health clinic nationwide cnbc.com · “Amazon Clinic doesn’t yet accept insurance, but consumers can use insurance to help pay for medications prescribed through the service. Prescriptions can be filled at any pharmacy, including Amazon’s own online pharmacy, which handles fulfillment and delivery.”
Aug 2
Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it pluralistic.net · “My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college.”
Aug 2

July 2023 28 posts

New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights aws.amazon.com · “Effective February 1, 2024 there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not”
Jul 31
How the Ultrawealthy Use Private Foundations to Bank Millions in Tax Deductions While Giving the Public Little in Return propublica.org · “That allowed the Johnsons to collect more than $38 million in tax savings from the estate over five years, confidential tax records show.”
Jul 30
Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half bbc.com · “The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform.”
Jul 28
Meta's AR/VR Business Lost $7.7 Billion in the Past 6 Months cnet.com · “For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem”
Jul 27
Stack Overflow’s CEO doesn’t understand Stack Overflow jlericson.com · “Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.”
Jul 27
Your Ubisoft account can be permanently deleted for 'inactivity,' but Ubisoft says that won't happen if there are purchases attached to it (Updated) pcgamer.com · “In practice, as of today, we have never deleted accounts that have been inactive for less than 4 years”
Jul 24
Amazon is reportedly making employees relocate for return-to-office engadget.com · “Those affected will include workers hired for remote positions and those who moved during peak pandemic days.”
Jul 24
Shopify Employee Breaks NDA To Reveal Firm Quietly Replacing Laid Off Workers With AI thedeepdive.ca · “In a regulatory filing made in May, Shopify revealed that Lutke collected just over $20.0 million in total compensation in 2022, on par with the $20.0 million he collected in 2021, and an increase over the $15.1 million he made in 2020.”
Jul 22
Federal Reserve announces that its new system for instant payments, the FedNow® Service, is now live federalreserve.gov · “To start, 35 early-adopting banks and credit unions, as well as the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, are ready with instant payments capabilities via the FedNow Service.”
Jul 20
Tesla in discussion to license Full Self-Driving software to another automaker theverge.com · “Tesla is in “discussion” to license its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver-assist technology to another major automaker, Elon Musk said in an earnings call Wednesday.”
Jul 20
'No way out': how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders theguardian.com · “Should they reduce their outlay, she told GamesIndustry.biz, the company would “reach out and call them to find out what’s wrong”.”
Jul 19
The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech businessinsider.com · “The single most important fact in this paper is that Benchmark put $12 million into Uber and got $5.8 billion back.”
Jul 18
Engagement on Instagram's Threads Has Cratered gizmodo.com · “Similarweb’s data reportedly paints a picture equally as grim as daily active users dropped 25% from a peak on July 7 to Monday, while time spent on the app dropped over 50% from 20 minutes to 8 minutes.”
Jul 17
The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training stackdiary.com · “The crawler, which does not contain a unique user-agent string, respects robots.txt.”
Jul 15
How Disney, Netflix, and more streaming companies are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal businessinsider.com · “The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First Amendment.”
Jul 13
Sam Altman explains why he's helping to take nuclear microreactor company Oklo public via SPAC cnbc.com · “In Jan. 2022, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the nation’s top nuclear regulatory agency, denied its first application to build and operate its advanced nuclear reactor.”
Jul 12
Microsoft confirms more job cuts on top of 10,000 layoffs announced in January cnbc.com · “Microsoft filed a notice Monday saying it would cut 276 people in its home state of Washington. Of those, 66 are virtual.”
Jul 12
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment suse.com · “Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project.”
Jul 11
Intel Exiting the PC Business as it Stops Investment in the Intel NUC servethehome.com · “We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth.”
Jul 11
A petabyte of health insurance prices per month blog.turquoise.health · “For example, an insurance company may have a contract that says they pay $180,000 for a heart transplant. The payer follows the rules and publishes that price for the list of “all doctors in this hospital.” That means including a heart transplant rate for podiatrists, pediatricians, urologists, and neurologists.”
Jul 11
Getting weird results from GCP europe-west1 community.influxdata.com · “Same here. All my buckets just got deleted.”
Jul 9
Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift anotherangrywoman.com · “There’s an anecdote that a glitch with Facebook led to ads no longer being targeted over a period of several weeks. And absolutely nobody noticed because the metrics all looked normal, the engagement and purchasing was just the same.”
Jul 8
Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says techcrunch.com · “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
Jul 7
Wash Trading Gone Wrong - How A $100M/Day Crypto Exchange Accidentally Bankrupted Itself blog.everstrike.io · “The following day, BaseFEX’s trading volume decreased by 99.99%.”
Jul 6
How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history theverge.com · “Reddit isn’t profitable, and the infrastructure to support third-party apps costs Reddit $10 million per year.”
Jul 3
Apple is now the first publicly traded company to close above a $3 trillion market value techcrunch.com · “Earlier this year, Apple’s market cap fell below $2 trillion in trading for the first time since early 2021.”
Jul 3
Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts mattrickard.com · “Millions of search results are effectively dead links.”
Jul 2
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social · “Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.”
Jul 1

June 2023 33 posts

Twitter now requires an account to view tweets techcrunch.com · “If you’re not logged into your Twitter account and try to view a tweet, you’ll be presented with a sign-in screen.”
Jun 30
YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers androidpolice.com · “Some users are now seeing a revised version of this dialog box, with similar phrasing but the mention of a new three-strikes policy.”
Jun 29
Kagi raises $670K blog.kagi.com · “This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users.”
Jun 29
Google cuts jobs at Waze as it continues to merge mapping products cnbc.com · “Unfortunately, this will result in a reduction of Waze Ads monetization-focused roles in sales, marketing, operations and analytics.”
Jun 29
We Raised A Bunch Of Money fly.io · “If you want to get people to build apps on your platform, you need a shot at being around 10 years from now. Hardware is what makes the margins work.”
Jun 28
FedEx Accused of Largest Odometer Rollback Fraud in History With Used Vans thedrive.com · “FedEx, with the knowledge and assistance of Holman, replaced thousands of odometers on FedEx/Holman Vehicles”
Jun 27
Unicorn social app IRL to shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake techcrunch.com · “An internal investigation by IRL’s board of directors found that 95% of the app’s reported 20 million users were “automated or from bots,” The Information first reported.”
Jun 27
The Hidden Cost of Air Quality Monitoring airgradient.com · “It is quite paradox that one of the most popular outdoor air quality sensor for citizen science projects has actually in their T&Cs that you do NOT own the very data you collect.”
Jun 27
JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence in multi-million record retention screwup theregister.com · “In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently”
Jun 26
Europe's Inflation Outlook Depends on How Corporate Profits Absorb Wage Gains imf.org · “Profits accounted for 45 percent of price rises since the start of 2022.”
Jun 26
We’ve officially entered a new era of ‘cultivated’ meat production techcrunch.com · “Prior to today, Singapore was the only country allowing sales of cultivated chicken.”
Jun 22
FTC sues Amazon over 'deceptive' Prime sign-up and cancellation process cnbc.com · “Amazon used an internal term called "Iliad" to describe the process, referencing Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War, the agency said, citing a report by Insider.”
Jun 21
AI Is a Lot of Work theverge.com · “By the beginning of this year, pay for the Kenyan annotators I spoke with had dropped to between $1 and $3 per hour.”
Jun 21
Apple's union-busting practices violated employee rights at NYC store, judge rules engadget.com · “Managers were found to have taken away pro-union flyers in the break room and attempted to dissuade employees from joining unions, which prosecutors argued had led employees to end the organizing campaign.”
Jun 21
You can't trust Google world.hey.com · “That was a $180m/year business, servicing 10 million domains!”
Jun 20
Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle wired.com · “Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced.”
Jun 19
Goodbye, Twilio blog.miguelgrinberg.com · “The new Twilio wants to help companies collect, use and even make up customer data, all with the goal to drive more sales.”
Jun 18
The Rot Economy wheresyoured.at · “Neumann turned a (nominally) $47bn company into a $2.9bn company. In a sane and just world, he wouldn’t see a dollar of funding for the rest of his life.”
Jun 17
The New Language Model Stack sequoiacap.com · “94% are using a foundation model API. OpenAI’s GPT was the clear favorite in our sample at 91%, however Anthropic interest grew over the last quarter to 15%.”
Jun 16
Google Domains shutting down, assets sold and being migrated to Squarespace 9to5google.com · “Squarespace says it will “honor all existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction,” which is expected to occur in Q3 2023.”
Jun 15
11 years of hosting a SaaS ghiculescu.substack.com · “He basically convinced me that paying for Heroku was like setting money on fire. He was a lovely guy, and I really appreciated his help at the time, but 10 years later I can honestly say this was awful advice (the buck stops with me for listening to it).”
Jun 15
Twitter is being evicted from its Boulder office over unpaid rent techcrunch.com · “Twitter owes three months’ rent to its Boulder landlord, and a judge has signed off on evicting the tech giant from its office there, court documents show.”
Jun 14
Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys“R”Us: here’s why that matters theverge.com · “If you consider them together with their portfolio companies, Carlyle, KKR, and Blackstone would be the third-, fourth-, and fifth-largest employers in America.”
Jun 13
Varda: The Space Drug Factory notboring.co · “The company is executing over $60 million in programs with the DoD, and is on the precipice of finalizing a contract with a top 20 biopharma company for its second mission.”
Jun 13
Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO's recent remarks theverge.com · “At the time of publishing, a pinned bot post on the r/ModCoord sub’s post about the protest says nearly 4,500 communities are pledging to go dark, while Reddark, a site tracking the protesting subreddits, says over 200 already have.”
Jun 12
GM follows Ford in adopting Tesla's EV charging standard theverge.com · “Unwilling to expend the money to build their own network, automakers were left to cobble together their own out of available third-party providers.”
Jun 12
Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California theregister.com · “It can only operate during the day on certain limited roads, and only at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.”
Jun 10
Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA techcrunch.com · “He said that if Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year, Reddit should cut him a check to put an end to the app.”
Jun 9
Google doesn't want employees working remotely anymore. theverge.com · “Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”
Jun 8
Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my 'Chrome' search with a fake AI answer theverge.com · “Let me put things a different way: Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction.”
Jun 7
Google No Longer Automatically Indexes Websites: WTF? natehoffelder.com · “The site is a year old, perfectly functional, and I had already submitted a sitemap in Search Console, and yet even though Google has a sitemap showing 9 pages, Google had only indexed the home page.”
Jun 5
Meta will require employees to return to the office three days a week starting in September cnbc.com · “We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home”
Jun 2
Amazon workers walk out over 'lack of trust' in leadership cnbc.com · “Approximately 2,000 employees worldwide walked off the job shortly after 3 p.m. EST, with about 1,000 of those workers gathering outside the Spheres, the massive glass domes that anchor Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, according to employee groups behind the effort. Amazon disputed the figure and said about 300 employees participated.”
Jun 1

May 2023 37 posts

Reddit API Pricing Would Cost Apollo Developer $20 Million Per Year daringfireball.net · “Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year.”
May 31
Lyft's secret plan to take control of its maps, and its future lyft.com · “As a product team, it’s a pretty weird experience to not own 80% of the pixels that your users interact with.”
May 30
Profit-Obsessed Private Equity Is Now Dominating the US Hospice System jacobin.com · “As of 2020, over 72 percent of hospices are for-profit and approximately 24 percent are nonprofit. Less than 3 percent are publicly owned.”
May 28
Amazon Gives up Shipment Zero, a Key Part of Its Climate Pledge businessinsider.com · “The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030.”
May 26
Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com · “To my surprise, 12 out of the last 25 reviews were exact copies of each other: exact duplicate reviews coming in 12-20 days after the first such review.”
May 26
Tesla Model Y overtakes Corolla to be world's best-selling car in 2023 thedriven.io · “New data from JATO Dynamics has revealed that in the first quarter of 2023 the Tesla Model Y is the best-selling car in the world, selling 267,200 in the first three months of the year, eclipsing Toyota Corolla’s 256,400 sales.”
May 26
Whistleblower Drops 100 Gigabytes Of Tesla Secrets To German News Site: Report jalopnik.com · “The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings.”
May 25
Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page bugzilla.mozilla.org · “Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back yesterday.”
May 25
Apple Announces Multibillion-Dollar Deal With Broadcom to Make Components in the USA macrumors.com · “Apple noted that it already supports over 1,100 jobs in Broadcom’s Fort Collins FBAR filter manufacturing facility”
May 23
Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco flocrivello.com · “The solution is to just avoid the bad parts! That’s SOMA and the Tenderloin, mostly.”
May 23
Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation en.wikipedia.org · “This shows that outgoing CEO Katherine Maher was paid a severance package of US$623,286 in 2021 – slightly more than one-and-a-half times her base compensation in her last full year at the Wikimedia Foundation.”
May 22
Microsoft exec tells employees to improve its stock performance in lieu of raises theverge.com · “Capossela cashed out $1.55 million worth of Microsoft stock earlier this month and sold another $2.85 million last week.”
May 22
WeWork has frittered away $46.7 billion in value as the stock sinks below 50 cents, one of the biggest startup failures of all time, and venture capitalists haven't learned a thing businessinsider.com · “As of Monday, with shares trading at $0.47 and a market cap of $345.7 million, the company has lost some $46.7 billion in value over four years”
May 20
Apple execs were reportedly skeptical on headset, with one likening it to a 'science project' cnbc.com · “Apple has reportedly revised sales estimates down from 3 million a year to 900,000 a year, as the company has revised the headset’s form factor and utility.”
May 19
One million cancel broadband as living costs rise bbc.com · “Watchdog Ofcom has warned 4.3 million eligible people are missing the deals.”
May 18
Wizards Of The Coast Raids YouTuber’s House To Take Back Magic: The Gathering Cards kotaku.com · “They cited statures with punishments such as a $200,000 fine and up to a decade of jail time.”
May 17
Big Tech Resumed Hiring Foreign Workers Just Weeks After Layoffs leefang.com · “Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs.”
May 16
Elon Musk says he wants to personally approve every new Tesla hire electrek.co · “No one can join Tesla, even as a contractor, until you receive my email approval.”
May 16
Mormon who left Wall St. to work for charity blows whistle on what he says is his church's "clandestine hedge fund" cbsnews.com · “SEC investigators found the church "went to great lengths" to hide $32 billion in securities over nearly 20 years. It created 13 shell companies that were "…assigned a local phone number that would go directly to voicemail" in case regulators checked in.”
May 15
Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office techradar.com · “Unlike some other companies’ approaches, Dell seems to be asking workers who live within an hour’s commute to work from the office for three days per week, rather than specific job roles.”
May 15
ASUS UK PR believes it is ‘legal to buy positive reviews’ kitguru.net · “Directors from ASUS UK asked us to send over the evidence and we did. Now, around 4 months later, we have yet to hear anything back.”
May 13
Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Coinbase had an incredible 2021 and did not have to care about costs.”
May 12
Microsoft just made a huge, far-from-certain bet on nuclear fusion theverge.com · “Altman is Helion’s board chair and largest investor, The Washington Post reports, and may have been involved in brokering Helion’s power purchase agreement with Microsoft.”
May 11
IRS Files $44 Billion Claims Against Bankrupt FTX unchainedcrypto.com · “According to bankruptcy filings on April 27 and 28, the IRS filed claims worth nearly $44 billion against the firms, including FTX.US and Alameda Research.”
May 11
Research reveals majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage bristol.ac.uk · “On average respondents were earning £8.97 per hour – around 15% below the current UK minimum wage, which rose to £10.42 this month.”
May 11
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers bleepingcomputer.com · “We’re running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium”
May 10
Intel Announces Layoffs After Paying $1.5 Billion In Q1 Dividends wccftech.com · “These losses came as the firm ensured that its investors were happy and paid $1.5 billion in dividends out of pocket during Q1, keeping the payments nearly similar to the year ago quarter’s figures.”
May 8
Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances pauley.me · “Since the start of 2023, spot ratios have spiked as much as 55% (in us-east-1 ).”
May 8
'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees theguardian.com · “The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free.”
May 7
When "free forever" means "free for the next 4 months" blog.zulip.com · “The "free forever" note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers.”
May 5
OpenAI Reportedly Lost $540 Million Developing ChatGPT in 2022 thewrap.com · “Specifically, the report mentions that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman may be aiming to raise up to $100 billion in the next few years to develop artificial intelligence so smart it can improve itself.”
May 5
Google employees complain about CEO Sundar Pichai's pay raise as cost cuts hit rest of the company cnbc.com · “SEC filings showed Pichai was paid a total of $226 million last year, mostly through a $218 million stock award, which he receives every three years.”
May 4
Important team and business changes news.shopify.com · “There’s no way to make this good news, but we designed a package that will attempt to make it the best possible version of a bad day.”
May 4
Microsoft is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge, and IT admins are angry theverge.com · “Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT admins will be able to alter the policy, but those on Microsoft 365 for business will have to manage this change on individual machines.”
May 3
Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature to Promote Its Edge Browser gizmodo.com · “There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update.”
May 2
JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, Columbus, Ohio Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank, San Francisco, California fdic.gov · “The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion.”
May 1
SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on Starship this year, as Elon Musk pushes to reach orbit cnbc.com · “The rocket took off with only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines ignited at the base of the Super Heavy booster.”
May 1

April 2023 34 posts

Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices. Here's why that's a big deal. grist.org · “It was also important to Microsoft that the bill only cover products manufactured after the bill’s implementation date, and that manufacturers be required to provide the public only the same parts and documents that their authorized repair providers already receive.”
Apr 30
Clubhouse needs to fix things, and today it cut more than half of staff techcrunch.com · “It’s difficult for us to communicate the strategy to cross-functional teams when it’s evolving by 1% each day, or to make quick changes when each surface is owned by a different product squad.”
Apr 28
Is Gmail killing independent email? tuta.com · “Those blue dots show over 3,500 Gmail customers having the booking confirmation email they asked for delayed by up to 12 hours.”
Apr 28
Coinbase offers a fiery response to the SEC's threat of enforcement action cnbc.com · “To date, the SEC has never approved a crypto-asset entity as a national securities exchange, despite an extensive dialogue with Coinbase over the years.”
Apr 28
A message from our CEO blog.dropbox.com · “I’ve said in the past that our business is stable and profitable. So why would we take a step like this? What’s changed?”
Apr 27
Brave Search removes last remnant of Bing from search results page, achieving 100% independence and providing real alternative to Big Tech search brave.com · “We’ve removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.”
Apr 27
Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says 9to5mac.com · “At one point, Rockwell’s team considered building alternative methods for controlling the device using voice commands, the people said (the headset team ultimately ditched that idea).”
Apr 27
Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election sfgate.com · “The unionization vote passed 41-0.”
Apr 26
How Russia killed its tech industry technologyreview.com · “In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a record 14 million people a day headed to Yandex News. But instead of reading about civilian deaths and destruction, they were told that Russian liberators were “denazifying” Ukraine.”
Apr 23
Bing Jail dariusz.wieckiewicz.org · “Firstly, don’t bother contacting Bing Support. This support is simply non-existent. Nobody will reply to your emails, and nobody will care unless you are heavy paying customer.”
Apr 23
Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility manufacturingdive.com · “The site will employ more than 1,700 people in molding, processing and packing machinery once completed.”
Apr 23
iOS 17 app sideloading might only be available in Europe techradar.com · “Gurman says Apple won’t “shoot themselves in the foot” by adding it everywhere, and will probably introduce the feature quietly and without fanfare.”
Apr 22
Seagate stung $300m for selling sanctioned storage to Huawei theregister.com · “Seagate persisted and between August 2020 and September 2021 sold 7.4 million hard drives to China, in 429 transactions worth a combined $1.1 billion.”
Apr 20
Reddit will begin charging for access to its API techcrunch.com · “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Apr 19
Software firms across U.S. facing massive tax bills that threaten tech startup world survival cnbc.com · “Landsman said he is able to tap lines of credit for now, but is paying 9% interest, and he says many other founders he knows don’t have that option.”
Apr 19
Pricing v3, plans, packages, and debugging tailscale.com · “Monthly paid plans now include three free users, and bill you only for additional users who actively exchange data over Tailscale (“usage-based billing”) rather than for a fixed number of seats.”
Apr 18
Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu theregister.com · “In March, with the KB5023778 preview build, Microsoft began sending them out to a few users, with the promise the practice would be more widely deployed in the following months.”
Apr 18
Google in shock as Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine on Galaxy phones sammobile.com · “Google currently has over 160 designers, engineers, executives, and other staff working on the project ‘Magi’.”
Apr 17
AWS staff spending 'much of their time 'optimizing cloud' theregister.com · “That list does not include cost savings, a factor that has seen SaaS outfit 37Signals quit the cloud and software vendor Ahrefs estimate that operating its own hardware in a colo datacenter saves it $400 million.”
Apr 17
AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable adriano.fyi · “I’m somewhat surprised to see the wget test with a transfer rate of ~30KB/s.”
Apr 16
Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful tech.slashdot.org · “Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.”
Apr 15
The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat opencoreventures.com · “The biggest reason why we don’t see support and services companies achieving hyper-growth is that they are uninvestable. Annual revenues are low and nonrecurring, and margins are tight. VCs are looking for 80%+ gross margins and hockey stick growth.”
Apr 15
Apple will use 100 percent recycled cobalt in batteries by 2025 apple.com · “In 2022, a quarter of all cobalt found in Apple products came from recycled material, up from 13 percent the previous year.”
Apr 13
Sony is gearing up for a new cloud gaming push amid rumors of a PlayStation handheld theverge.com · ““Are you a ground-breaking innovator in the cloud streaming product space? Then you likely agree that Cloud Gaming is on its way to becoming a major part of the gaming industry,” reads part of a Sony job posting for a Director of Product Management for Cloud Gaming.”
Apr 12
Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI techcrunch.com · ““We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.””
Apr 11
First came the return-to-office policies. Now comes the discipline: How companies are punishing work-from-home holdouts finance.yahoo.com · “So in recent months, businesses have begun to put down their carrots and pick up their sticks.”
Apr 11
I worked at Google for -10 days andgein.ru · “Thus, the contract with me has been terminated 10 days before it was supposed to take effect.”
Apr 11
Stability AI is on shaky ground as it burns through cash and looks at a management overhaul semafor.com · “According to people familiar with the matter, Stability’s commitment to pay for Amazon Web Services, which he guaranteed against his own personal wealth, was $75 million.”
Apr 10
Google to Ban Financial Lending Apps From Accessing User Photos, Contacts pcmag.com · “By accessing borrowers’ personal contacts and their personal images, debt collectors have sent manipulated photos to friends and family of debtors. A number of these targeted individuals took their lives after the harassment, TechCrunch says.”
Apr 8
Mark Zuckerberg is spending most of his time on A.I., says Meta CTO cnbc.com · “Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is overseen by Bosworth and is home to the company’s metaverse technologies and projects, posted a $13.72 billion loss in 2022.”
Apr 6
Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for 'multi-year' savings cnbc.com · “We’ve baked too many muffins on a Monday, seen GBuses run with just one passenger, and offered yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when folks are more likely to be working from home.”
Apr 4
Tesla removes parking sensors to save money, the results are predictably terrible carexpert.com.au · “In the video the car can be seen reversing into a pedestrian at low speed, while claiming it still had room to continue further back.”
Apr 3
Apple Halted M2 Chip Production in January Amid 'Plummeting' Mac Sales macrumors.com · “Taiwan’s TSMC did not send 5 nano-process M2 chip wafer workpieces to the outsourced semiconductor package test (OSAT) in January and February, according to the OSAT industry on the 3rd.”
Apr 3
How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps (printer companies hate this!) theverge.com · “The genuine HP ink cartridges, for which I paid as much as I paid for the actual printer, would not work with the printer they were designed to work with because I bought it in a different part of the world.”
Apr 2

March 2023 34 posts

Price transparency is broken dolthub.com · “It happened over and over that for an item that should have been reimbursed at $250, United had listed said it only reimbursed the company $5, and so on, for many other matches.”
Mar 28
Amazon starts flagging ‘frequently returned’ products that you maybe shouldn’t buy theverge.com · “These three items have a reasonably high star rating, which may initially reassure prospective consumers, but glancing at the customer reviews indicates that the products are not true to size or have previously arrived damaged.”
Mar 28
Elon Musk now says Twitter is worth $20 billion, or less than half of what he paid theverge.com · “As noted by Schiffer, Musk adds that he sees “a clear but difficult path” to achieving a $250 billion valuation, which would eventually make Twitter’s current stock grants worth 10 times as much as they are now”
Mar 27
Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia theguardian.com · “You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff.”
Mar 26
How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them propublica.org · “Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show.”
Mar 25
We're no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan docker.com · “Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan:”
Mar 24
Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally? blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”
Mar 24
Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion hindenburgresearch.com · “Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”
Mar 23
A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece nightingaledvs.com · “On January 1, 2023, Apple sunsetted (pun intended) the Dark Sky mobile app on iOS.”
Mar 22
Netflix is 'underway' on cloud gaming work, aims to bring games to 'any Netflix device you have' 9to5google.com · “40 games are slated for launch this year and 70 more in development.”
Mar 21
Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers in addition to earlier cuts cnbc.com · “The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.”
Mar 20
Zippyshare Quits After 17 Years, 45m Visits Per Month Makes No Money torrentfreak.com · “The site still enjoys around 45 million visits per month and Zippyshare.com is one of the top 1000 most-visited domains on the internet today.”
Mar 20
Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees cnbc.com · “Those who spoke with CNBC said they’ve been told they’ll only receive pay through their designated end date, along with standard severance.”
Mar 20
AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight lastweekinaws.com · “The problem that I want to highlight today is that if I spin up MySQL myself on EC2 instances, I’ll have to pay 2¢ per GB that I replicate between AZs, whereas I will pay nothing if I use RDS.”
Mar 18
Bandcamp United bandcampunited.org · “We all chose to join this company as an extension of our own love for independent music, and believe that a site such as Bandcamp that aims to offer an ethical and fair alternative to the streaming economy should reflect its mission internally.”
Mar 16
Glass Enterprise Edition Announcement FAQ support.google.com · “As of March 15, 2023, we will no longer sell Glass Enterprise Edition.”
Mar 16
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know blog.alexellis.io · “Docker is holding us hostage here, if we don’t pay up, systems will break for many free users.”
Mar 15
Stripe announces new round of funding and plan to provide employee liquidity stripe.com · “Stripe does not need this capital to run its business.”
Mar 15
Apple Expands Hiring Freeze, Delays Bonuses for Some Employees macrumors.com · “Apple is leaving positions open as employees depart the company as a way to cut down on the workforce.”
Mar 15
Microsoft just laid off one of its responsible AI teams platformer.news · “The pressure from [CTO] Kevin [Scott] and [CEO] Satya [Nadella] is very very high to take these most recent openAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers hands at a very high speed”
Mar 14
Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency about.fb.com · “Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”
Mar 14
Changes at YC ycombinator.com · “But late stage investing turned out to be so different from early stage that we found it to be a distraction from our core mission.”
Mar 13
Joint Statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC home.treasury.gov · “Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”
Mar 12
FDIC Creates a Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara to Protect Insured Depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California fdic.gov · “As of December 31, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank had approximately $209.0 billion in total assets and about $175.4 billion in total deposits.”
Mar 10
Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promotions to senior roles cnbc.com · “The L6 distinction refers to the first layer of staff that’s considered senior and typically includes people with about a decade of experience.”
Mar 8
How a single engineer brought down Twitter theverge.com · “But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told.”
Mar 7
Retail, search and Amazon's $40bn 'advertising' business ben-evans.com · “In 2021 Amazon started splitting it out, and last year Amazon had $38bn of ad revenue, more than any traditional media company and bigger than the entire (now much reduced) global newspaper industry.”
Mar 7
There Were Half as Many Affordable Homes for Sale in 2022 as There Were in 2021 redfin.com · “Only 9% of homes for sale last year were affordable for the typical Black household, compared with 28% for the typical white household and the lowest share of any race in this analysis.”
Mar 6
Amazon pauses construction of second headquarters in Virginia cnbc.com · “We’re always evaluating space plans to make sure they fit our business needs and to create a great experience for employees, and since Met Park will have space to accommodate more than 14,000 employees, we’ve decided to shift the groundbreaking of PenPlace (the second phase of HQ2) out a bit”
Mar 6
Amazon Go closing 8 of its c-stores cstoredive.com · “Amazon shuttering more than a quarter of its Go stores highlights the company’s ongoing challenges in building its physical retail footprint.”
Mar 5
How to lose $950 very quickly on AirBnB chriskiehl.com · “AirBnB has stricter booking polices than an airline. Who knew.”
Mar 5
Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment pmarca.substack.com · “Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time.”
Mar 4
Starbucks illegally fired US workers over union, judge rules bbc.co.uk · “It also repeatedly sent high-ranking staff to stores “in order to more closely supervise, monitor, or create the impression that employees’ union activities are under surveillance,” he said.”
Mar 2
Amazon is letting employees use their stock to finance home purchases and even second homes techcrunch.com · “Even former Amazon employees with vested equity can use the service, according to Better.com, and there are many, following Amazon’s companywide layoffs.”
Mar 1

February 2023 23 posts

Ford Applies to Patent Self-Repossessing Cars That Can Drive Themselves Away thedrive.com · “If it will cost the bank more to repo the vehicle as compared to what it could sell it for, then “the repossession system computer may cooperate with the vehicle computer to autonomously move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a junkyard.””
Feb 27
‘An economic fairytale’: Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits and not wages, analysis finds theguardian.com · “Increases in labour costs account for just 18% of the inflation above what the RBA wants to see before it eases interest rate increases.”
Feb 24
The job market for new grads: worse than in 2008, but better than 2002 blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Since every big company is doing the same, it’s a ‘safe’ time to do layoffs without setting off any alarm bells or lawsuits.”
Feb 24
Tech Layoffs Are Feeding a New Startup Surge wired.com · “Seed stage funding slumped 35 percent for startups year over year by late 2022, data from Crunchbase shows.”
Feb 23
We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit world.hey.com · “That’s a total of $840,000/year for everything. Bandwidth, power, and boxes on an amortization schedule of five years. Compared to $2.3m in the cloud.”
Feb 22
Report: Apple gets a cut of search revenue from Chrome as part of secret Google deal 9to5mac.com · “Given this revenue share, when (X) or Safari is successful in competing for an iOS user, rather than winning a full share of the search traffic revenue it only wins a partial share (ie the revenue to which it was not previously entitled).”
Feb 20
Amazon wants employees to return to the office in May engadget.com · “Starting in May, Amazon will require employees to work out of the office at least three days per week.”
Feb 20
Revenue is easy, profit is harder edge.ceo · “Illustratively, a startup with a 3-month payback period can grow 8X faster on a monthly basis than a startup that has a 24-month payback period with the same amount of growth capital.”
Feb 19
Apple doesn't want you developing hobby apps bennettnotes.com · “Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don’t want to publish your app on the Appstore!”
Feb 15
Shrinkflation, SanDisk style ounapuu.ee · “I’m a whole 607125504 bytes short!”
Feb 15
Amazon Is Taking Half of Each Sale From Its Merchants finance.yahoo.com · “One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising.”
Feb 14
Restructuring Twilio, and reducing the size of our team twilio.com · “We’re exiting the last phase with a great market position, and very strong cash reserves, but unfortunately that’s not enough to get us through the next phase.”
Feb 13
Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people techcrunch.com · “In an interview with Axios , Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said that these layoffs are not a result of economic issues”
Feb 10
Amazon secures key FCC approval to deploy its Project Kuiper broadband satellites engadget.com · “If Amazon experiences disposal failure with satellites within a single year, it has to report that fact to the FCC, as well.”
Feb 10
My Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder mtlynch.io · “While it sounds impressive to grow revenue by $350k, it’s a little less exciting that I’m only walking away with $6k in profit.”
Feb 10
GitHub lays off 10% and goes fully remote techcrunch.com · “And as another sign of cost cutting, it’s moving its laptop refresh cycle from three to four years.”
Feb 9
An announcement from GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij about.gitlab.com · “I had hoped reprioritizing our spending would be enough to withstand the growing global economic downturn.”
Feb 9
The Great Betrayal: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model a.team · “After over 16 years at the company, this was the only information he received to tell him that he was one of the 12,000 employees laid off.”
Feb 8
A Message from Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom blog.zoom.us · “To that end, I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus.”
Feb 7
Google invested $300 million in AI firm founded by former OpenAI researchers theverge.com · “According to a report from the Financial Times, in late 2022, Google invested around $300 million in the startup, though the news was not reported at the time.”
Feb 6
Scalability is overrated waseem.substack.com · “Only 20% of the people I reach out to actually take up the offer, but 100% of them know I’m personally committed to making sure their experience is good.”
Feb 4
Twitter to start charging developers for API access cnbc.com · “Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.”
Feb 3
PayPal to lay off 2,000 employees in coming weeks, about 7% of workforce cnbc.com · “But PayPal raised EPS guidance for the full fiscal year, saying it’s benefited from "ongoing productivity initiatives."”
Feb 1

January 2023 30 posts

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text theverge.com · “Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly”
Jan 31
What is Google doing with its open source teams? theregister.com · “For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google’s OSPO 18 years ago, was let go.”
Jan 28
PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in Worst Layoff Email Ever gizmodo.com · “In a 1,669-word email to employees, Tejada echoed the script many tech CEOs have recited in recent months, stating that today’s “volatile economy requires additional transformation” by the company.”
Jan 27
Smartphone shipments plunge to a low not seen since 2013, their largest ever decline cnbc.com · “We have never seen shipments in the holiday quarter come in lower than the previous quarter.”
Jan 27
Stripe eyes an exit over next 12 months techcrunch.com · “Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that Stripe had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion.”
Jan 27
Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT futurism.com · “This is important because your inputs may be used as training data for a further iteration of ChatGPT”
Jan 26
Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History hindenburgresearch.com · “We have identified 38 Mauritius shell entities controlled by Vinod Adani or close associates.”
Jan 25
Amazon launches a $5 monthly subscription for unlimited prescription medications theverge.com · “Customers who are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, or any other government healthcare program are not eligible for RxPass but can still use government insurance to fill prescriptions at Amazon Pharmacy.”
Jan 25
Microsoft extends OpenAI partnership in a ‘multibillion dollar investment’ theverge.com · “The key part of the deal means that Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and Microsoft’s cloud services will power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research.”
Jan 24
An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes newsroom.spotify.com · “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company.”
Jan 23
Twitter is down to fewer than 550 full-time engineers cnbc.com · “The company’s trust and safety team, which makes policy recommendations, design and product changes with the aim of keeping all of Twitter’s users safe, is down to fewer than 20 full-time employees.”
Jan 23
Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens windowscentral.com · “The team behind AltSpaceVR and also the Mixed Reality Tool Kit have been laid off in their entireties.”
Jan 22
Capital One cuts over 1,000 roles in Technology theregister.com · “The Agile role in our Tech organization was critical to our earlier transformation phases but as our organization matured, the natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices”
Jan 21
A difficult decision to set us up for the future blog.google · “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Jan 20
Amazon closing AmazonSmile to focus its philanthropic giving to programs with greater impact aboutamazon.com · “However, after almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.”
Jan 19
Twitterrific: End of an Era blog.iconfactory.com · “The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s.”
Jan 19
Subject: Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity blogs.microsoft.com · “Today, we are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10,000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3.”
Jan 18
Our cloud spend in 2022 dev.37signals.com · “In total, we spent $3,201,564 on all these cloud services in 2022. That comes out to $266,797 per month. Whew!”
Jan 16
I'm Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing) daverupert.com · “To solve this, I took the first step and signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools to try to know what Bing knows about my site and sure enough: zero clicks, zero impressions, and zero indexed pages for my site.”
Jan 15
Internal Google Document Compares Company to Slime Mold As It Grows businessinsider.com · “Like Meta and Amazon, Google has hired aggressively over the past couple of years, onboarding 30,000 new employees in the first nine months of 2022 and bringing its total headcount to 186,779, according to a company filing.”
Jan 14
JPMorgan shutters website it paid $175 million for, accuses founder of inventing millions of accounts cnbc.com · “Instead of gaining a business with 4.25 million students, JPMorgan had one with "fewer than 300,000 customers," JPMorgan said in the suit.”
Jan 13
How Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years sacra.com · “they grew 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses.”
Jan 13
PC shipments saw their largest decline ever last quarter engadget.com · “Acer took a staggering 41 percent hit, according to Gartner.”
Jan 13
Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion in creator of buzzy A.I. tool ChatGPT cnbc.com · “Microsoft will reportedly get a 75% share of OpenAI’s profits until it makes back the money on its investment, after which the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI.”
Jan 11
Buy with Prime, which brings Prime to third-party sites, officially launches in US on Jan. 31 techcrunch.com · “After a shopper leaves a review on Amazon.com, that review will then appear on the merchant’s site wherever Buy with Prime is enabled.”
Jan 11
Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage news.cornell.edu · “Across the state, 39.1% earn at least a living wage, with white employees (46%) faring significantly better than Black (29.7%) and Hispanic (26%) employees.”
Jan 10
Shorting Tether For Fun and Profit fakemoneynews.substack.com · “As of June 2022, Tether allegedly had over $60 billion in assets but employed just 50 people.”
Jan 8
Here's how much top tech jobs in California pay, according to job ads cnbc.com · “However, the new law doesn’t require employers to post total compensation, or a measure of pay that includes equity, stock options, benefits and bonuses in addition to salary.”
Jan 6
Salesforce to cut staff by 10% in latest tech layoffs cnbc.com · “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that”
Jan 4
The infrastructure behind ATMs bitsaboutmoney.com · “The typical transaction rhymes with "I’ll sell you $40 worth of paper for $43, with a few minutes of operator attention being required every several hundred transactions."”
Jan 2

2022 257 posts

December 2022 17 posts

Why "OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems" is not in Amazon's Kindle store mwl.io · “TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over.”
Dec 31
JPMorgan to spend $1B on rental homes in the US to become a megalandlord businessinsider.com · “Haven Realty Capital and JPMorgan Chase’s asset management arm said they will invest up to $1 billion to develop build-to-rent single-family homes across the country, according to a November 15 announcement.”
Dec 31
Games people play with cash flow commoncog.com · “For the next two decades, Amazon grew its revenue and made no profits, leading journalist Matthew Yglesias to write, in 2013: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.””
Dec 30
Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee modest.coffee · “We have approximately 30,000 bags of coffee, 5,000 cases, that we are going to sell for half off and offer free shipping.”
Dec 30
Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround tedgioia.substack.com · “But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.”
Dec 28
Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours npr.org · “The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline.”
Dec 27
Apple 'created decoy labor group' to derail unionization theregister.com · “The Communications Workers of America (CWA) filed a complaint with the federal US National Labor Relations Board charging Apple with unfair labor practices.”
Dec 18
IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license theregister.com · “With Oracle Database SE2, customer license costs remain the same regardless of the number of cores in the socket.”
Dec 16
Tesla FSD data is getting worse, according to beta tester self-reports electrek.co · “It’s unfortunately the best data available because Tesla has gone out of its way to not release disengagement data that other companies developing self-driving systems are making available.”
Dec 14
Binance freezes withdrawals of stablecoin USDC as investors pull $2B markets.businessinsider.com · “The world’s largest crypto exchange will freeze all withdrawals of USD Coin while it conducts a "token swap" to boost its holdings of the dollar-pegged token, CEO Changpeng Zhao said Tuesday.”
Dec 13
What if your entire worldview was just because of near-zero interest rates? novum.substack.com · “The near-zero interest rate regime functioned much like an opiate.”
Dec 11
Stripe's real pricing: a primer github.com · “We asked this question to dozens of SaaS founders and none of them was able to provide a precise figure.”
Dec 9
FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard ftc.gov · “The Commission vote to issue the complaint was 3-1, with Commissioner Christine S. Wilson voting no.”
Dec 8
Everything SBF is doing is in singular pursuit of not going to jail newsletter.mollywhite.net · “But in reality, he is laundering his reputation.”
Dec 8
Federal court requires Amazon to stop firing employees for protected activities nlrb.gov · “If Amazon violates the cease-and-desist order, it could be held in contempt by the court.”
Dec 5
Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks? mattstoller.substack.com · “Booz Allen and 13 government agencies have been renting back to the public access to our own lands by forcing us to pay junk fees to use national parks.”
Dec 2
TSMC to make 4nm chips in Arizona for Apple, AMD, Nvidia techmonitor.ai · “The new chip factory, or fab, will cost $12bn and is part of TSMC’s global expansion plan.”
Dec 1

November 2022 25 posts

At SpaceX, work was taken away from me in case I “might retire or die.” lioness.co · “I knew no one there who worked more hours than I did.”
Nov 30
The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned ericlippert.com · “A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path.”
Nov 30
BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads cnbc.com · “The company also listed an outstanding $275 million loan to FTX US, the American arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt empire.”
Nov 28
Congressmembers Tried to Stop the SEC’s Inquiry into FTX prospect.org · “Emmer and Gottheimer led the Blockchain Eight in donations from FTX with each receiving $11,600.”
Nov 25
While crypto bro scammed clients, reporters scammed readers fair.org · “His image was simply fun to write about.”
Nov 20
AWS and Blockchain tbray.org · “In practice, the technology is a database.”
Nov 20
My ADHD founder toolbox hypatia.ca · “Highly recommend not yelling at yourself constantly.”
Nov 17
FTX used corporate funds to purchase employee homes, new filing shows cnbc.com · “"The Debtors do not have an accounting department," Ray wrote, stating he expected it would be "some time" before reliable financial statements could be prepared.”
Nov 17
Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons evernote.com · “For Evernote, this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain.”
Nov 16
Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself vox.com · “In doing so, he all but confirmed the view of critics who have argued that his overtures to Washington were much more about image than substance.”
Nov 16
Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer danfitdegree.hashnode.dev · “But this is what we have to deal with as small devs in the year 2022.”
Nov 16
Digital books wear out faster than physical books blog.archive.org · “Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all.”
Nov 15
FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals poker.org · “Friedberg isn’t even the only former UB lawyer to have found a home with a major crypto firm.”
Nov 14
FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M coindesk.com · “More than $600 million was siphoned from FTX’s crypto wallets late Friday.”
Nov 12
Demystifying financial leverage bam.kalzumeus.com · “A 10:1 levered firm is wiped out if assets lose 1/11th (~9.09%) of their value.”
Nov 11
US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected bls.gov · “The energy index rose 17.6 percent over the past 12 months.”
Nov 10
The Age of PageRank Is Over blog.kagi.com · “Ads became a global "tax" on using the web, paid mostly by the most vulnerable, non-tech-savvy, users.”
Nov 9
Meta lays off 11,000 people about.fb.com · “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
Nov 9
You Might Also Like basicappleguy.com · “Apple took a lot of heat last week after the rollout of iOS 16.1 introduced ads on every app product page.”
Nov 7
Update on Supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max apple.com · “The facility is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity.”
Nov 6
Quantum winter is coming backreaction.blogspot.com · “Unfortunately, I have to inform you that Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature.”
Nov 5
I fought the PayPal and I won jessesingal.substack.com · “Arbitration is nothing more than privatized dispute resolution.”
Nov 4
Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun techcrunch.com · “The email was impersonally signed “Twitter.””
Nov 4
Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce stripe.com · “Our business is fundamentally well-positioned to weather harsh circumstances.”
Nov 3
Laws barring noncompete clauses spreading businessinsurance.com · “Observers say insurance brokers are among the types of business most likely to be affected by the laws.”
Nov 1

October 2022 22 posts

Remixing Shopify remix.run · “Under Shopify’s stewardship Remix receives long-term backing and support from an established leader in commerce.”
Oct 31
How we became the world's foremost expert on Google Play Store policy violations blog.pushbullet.com · “Your app did not receive a deliberate analysis by a human leading to the violation notification.”
Oct 27
Most People (92%) Never Finish Online Job Applications shrm.org · “According to Appcast, one of the industry’s most respected recruitment data providers, the candidate drop-off rate for people who click ‘Apply’ but never complete an application is a whopping 92 percent.”
Oct 26
Blink-182 Tickets Are So Expensive Because Ticketmaster Is a Disastrous Monopoly and Now Everyone Pays Ticket Broker Prices vice.com · “Soon after that fiasco, Ticketmaster and Live Nation did merge and became a single company.”
Oct 21
How Google is forcing us to make our open source app worse voys.co.za · “With the removal of these features, not only did the app perform less well, but Google still continued to reject the app.”
Oct 20
Focus Is Saying No To Good Ideas commoncog.com · “There’s a famous saying, often attributed to Steve Jobs, that goes "focus is saying no to good ideas."”
Oct 19
An accident at SpaceX semafor.com · “SpaceX was fined $18,475 by OSHA for two safety violations, one of which was rated the highest penalty level of "serious" and a maximum gravity of 10.”
Oct 18
How Equifax used employment records it collects from 2.5 million companies to fire dozens of its own employees for working second jobs businessinsider.com · “Equifax used one of its own products, The Work Number, to help it suss out who was holding down multiple jobs simultaneously.”
Oct 14
Unlaunching The 12GB 4080 nvidia.com · “The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right.”
Oct 14
TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging bbc.com · “Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.”
Oct 13
Nick Clegg, Other Meta Executives 'Inadvertently' Identified in OnlyFans Bribery Suit gizmodo.com · “In court, however, its lawyers are less focused on proving the allegations false than arguing that, even if true, Meta itself would be shielded from liability.”
Oct 13
How BuiltWith generates $14 million a year while having zero employees 5to9.beehiiv.com · “He added a BuiltWith.com link to every record in their index to provide BuiltWith information regarding each business.”
Oct 12
Why an 'everything app' is bad news for liberal democracies and free markets nitinpai.in · “It is practically impossible for person in China to opt out of WeChat.”
Oct 10
Stripe is Paypal circa 2010 learnjsthehardway.com · “After integrating both Stripe and Paypal I’ve come to the realization that they are nearly the same, including all the evil.”
Oct 9
I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls sofuckingagile.com · “As a prospect you didn’t even need to put up much of a fight, you just had to exhale loudly at the right time and suddenly discounts are coming your way.”
Oct 8
Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers' Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark nber.org · “This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree ("business managers") reduce their employees’ wages.”
Oct 7
SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc simulavr.com · “I seriously doubt we have much to add to this case.”
Oct 6
Celsius Execs Cashed out at Least $17 Million in Crypto Before Halting Withdrawals for Customers gizmodo.com · “Celsius owes roughly $4.7 billion to users but doesn’t have the money to pay them.”
Oct 6
Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta. simonbackx.com · “In fact, the form even states that they won’t be able to review reports.”
Oct 6
The Deception of "Buying" Digital Movies worldofmatthew.com · “You are not provided any ownership of the content you have bought.”
Oct 4
Did Apple's privacy feature help to drive its own ad business? adguard.com · “While Apple effectively tracks users on its own platform, the pre-installed apps are exempted from displaying a message asking permission to track users.”
Oct 3
Stadia died because no one trusts Google techcrunch.com · “The last first; it was only two months ago that Stadia’s Twitter account assured a concerned user that the service was not in fact shutting down.”
Oct 2

September 2022 34 posts

Co-Founding Considered Harmful florentcrivello.com · “I’ve come to view the idea that you absolutely need a co-founder as one of the most harmful memes in Silicon Valley.”
Sep 30
A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy blog.google · “The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming.”
Sep 29
Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons and Hardly Anyone Noticed/Cares cogdogblog.com · “Google is broke, I spotted it, and no one really seems to care.”
Sep 28
Penpot inks $8M as signups for its open source spin on Figma jump 5600% after Adobe's $20B acquisition move techcrunch.com · “Because we are open source, it means you can hack in, self host, and tweak, and expand,” he said.
Sep 27
Nvidia In the Valley stratechery.com · “The days of no-work performance scaling are over.”
Sep 26
McMaster Carr - The Smartest Website You Haven't Heard of bedelstein.com · “McMaster has chosen function over form.”
Sep 25
Downturn career decisions. lethain.com · “Only spend money exercising options if you can financially weather the options becoming worthless.”
Sep 25
Hertz Is Still Having Rental Car Customers Wrongfully Arrested, Lawsuit Claims thedrive.com · “Hertz reported that it files at least 3,365 theft reports against customers each year.”
Sep 24
Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023 theregister.com · “Support of Fitbit accounts will continue until at least early 2025.”
Sep 24
You don't want to be on Cloudflare's naughty list ctrl.blog · “It felt like we’d been transported back to an earlier era with unbearably slow internet.”
Sep 20
What I've Learned from Users paulgraham.com · “Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.”
Sep 20
Google removed our website from search because it uses youtube-dl kapwing.com · “We are willing to do whatever it takes to comply with the law - we just wish we knew what it was.”
Sep 19
Bitcoin Is Not a Store-of-Value. cryptostackers.substack.com · “BTC is an open system that leaks value, disguised as a closed system that preserves value.”
Sep 18
California sues Amazon for preventing third-party sellers offering cheaper prices elsewhere engadget.com · “If they defy Amazon, they risk losing buy buttons, prominent listings or even basic access to Amazon’s marketplace.”
Sep 16
A new collaboration with Adobe figma.com · “Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously.”
Sep 15
The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second-Biggest Blockchain coindesk.com · “Ethereum should now consume 99.9% or so less energy.”
Sep 15
The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game spectrum.ieee.org · “This was the break fans of Ethereum were waiting for.”
Sep 15
We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business eyeondesign.aiga.org · “Because I forgot to get out of the business.”
Sep 13
"Secrets" about the consumer audio business you may find interesting audiosciencereview.com · “Retail price is free to deviate upward from COGS in an unlimited fashion.”
Sep 13
A note from Jack blog.patreon.com · “I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward”
Sep 13
How Zoho became a $1B company without a dime of external investment techcrunch.com · “Yet it has never taken so much as a penny of external investment.”
Sep 10
The next chapter for Learning on YouTube blog.youtube · “Learning remains a top priority for YouTube.”
Sep 9
Amazon CEO says company will slow hiring rate, no hard return to office planned theregister.com · “Right now, we see a stabilization in the workforce.”
Sep 9
Rolls-Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership airwaysmag.com · “The move comes as RR continues to deal with significant financial challenges.”
Sep 8
A trillion prices dolthub.com · “I naively thought that insurers would be publishing the prices they negotiated with the 6,000 hospitals in the US.”
Sep 6
Accelerating value for Bitwarden users - Bitwarden raises $100 million bitwarden.com · “PSG, the lead investor, has taken a minority position in the Company and will join the board of directors.”
Sep 6
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won. cfenollosa.com · “I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.”
Sep 4
I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and CloudFlare helped rasbora.dev · “There are no free speech or human rights considerations here, there is only the right choice and the wrong one.”
Sep 4
Biomanufactured materials are coming tsungxu.com · “Spiber has raised a whopping $640 million in equity and securitization financing.”
Sep 4
Blocking Kiwifarms blog.cloudflare.com · “We have never been their hosting provider.”
Sep 3
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero bam.kalzumeus.com · “Trust, though, is an immensely socially useful technology.”
Sep 3
Cannabis legalization decreases the stock market value of major pharmaceutical firms news.unm.edu · “The current study concludes that cannabis acts as a new competitor in drug markets.”
Sep 2
Important Notice Regarding Customer Information samsung.com · “In late July 2022, an unauthorized third party acquired information from some of Samsung’s U.S. systems.”
Sep 2
Kagi status update: First three months blog.kagi.com · “We sent exactly 0 marketing emails to our users since the launch of the public beta 3 months ago.”
Sep 1

August 2022 20 posts

Cloudflare's abuse policies & approach blog.cloudflare.com · “Our guiding principle is that organizations closest to content are best at determining when the content is abusive.”
Aug 31
Why is WebMD so awful? blog.tjcx.me · “So why hasn’t any of this innovation made online health information even slightly better?”
Aug 30
Welcome Home, Garry Tan ycombinator.com · “Today we announced that I am stepping down from my role as YC’s President and CEO at the end of this year.”
Aug 29
Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers community.blokada.org · “This could mean Google is cracking down on VPN-based ads and tracker filtering apps behind the scenes.”
Aug 29
Time Till Open Source Alternative staltz.com · “Software itself really doesn’t have a future in making money.”
Aug 28
#17: One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants peabee.substack.com · “All the restaurants registered under these two FSSAI licenses are very poorly rated and reviewed on both Swiggy and Zomato.”
Aug 27
Why Slack's free plan change is causing an exodus blog.zulip.com · “At first blush, this might look like a minor policy tweak.”
Aug 26
Removal of Heroku Free Product Plans FAQ help.heroku.com · “There are no changes to our existing paid plans, except for the renaming of Hobby dynos and Hobby-Dev databases to Basic.”
Aug 25
Apple expands Self Service Repair to Mac notebooks apple.com · “Customers will have access to the tool kit for one week and it will be shipped free of charge.”
Aug 22
App Store doesn't accept "too simple" apps notes.alinpanaitiu.com · “But I think they just don’t like the idea of the app, and no matter what I add to it, they won’t accept it.”
Aug 19
More content by people, for people in Search blog.google · “We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers.”
Aug 19
American Airlines Announces Agreement to Purchase Boom Supersonic Overture Aircraft, Places Deposit on 20 Overtures boomsupersonic.com · “American has paid a non-refundable deposit on the initial 20 aircraft.”
Aug 16
Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory toolguyd.com · “These tools are made in the USA from start to finish.”
Aug 14
Inside the Layoffs at Klarna blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “The mandatory meeting turned out to be very bad news.”
Aug 14
Is this the end of social networking? reb00ted.org · “Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine.”
Aug 11
Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC pcgamer.com · “Space Junkies, the multiplayer VR shooter, cost $40 at release and remains available for sale on Steam, with no notice that it will be rendered unplayable in two months.”
Aug 6
How we're improving search results when you use quotes blog.google · “Using quotes can definitely be a great tool for power users.”
Aug 5
Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. reasonablypolymorphic.com · “SEO techniques are extremely potent, and their widespread adoption is what’s wrong with the modern web.”
Aug 4
Y Combinator narrows current cohort size by 40%, citing downturn and funding environment techcrunch.com · “The S22 batch is significantly smaller than our most recent batches.”
Aug 3
What's actually going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes? We surveyed 1000 engineers to find out. blog.interviewing.io · “Google is indeed not extending offers throughout the duration of the freeze.”
Aug 1

July 2022 19 posts

I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don't Have To weh.wtf · “In essence, this is a working system, with a blockchain slapped on the side for PR reasons.”
Jul 30
Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down gamerant.com · “On its official Twitter page, Google Stadia has denied the rumors that it will be shutting down its services.”
Jul 29
Why is it so hard to give Google money? paulbutler.org · “I submitted an appeal on July 6th and waited.”
Jul 26
Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas electronicsweekly.com · “Samsung already operates a fab in Austin and is building another and has started work on its first fab in Taylor.”
Jul 24
Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port container-news.com · “Both the 40-foot containers are bearing the same number: SLHU4500470.”
Jul 22
I regret my website redesign mtlynch.io · “It took eight months, $46k, and a lot of headache.”
Jul 21
VCs are scared when they should be greedy blog.aaronkharris.com · “Fundraising has never been a sure thing.”
Jul 20
$9.99/month basicappleguy.com · “My current subscription tally came to $1,500 ($1,520 to be exact) per year, or $126/month!”
Jul 17
Amazon instructs New York workers "don't sign" union cards engadget.com · “Amazon, the second-largest employer in the United States, has made plain its desire to keep its workforce from unionizing.”
Jul 16
A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term zumsteg.net · “Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment.”
Jul 12
The Uber leak exposes the global war on workers tribunemag.co.uk · “Ontario’s recent gig work law closely mirrors what Uber has been pushing for.”
Jul 12
The world needs a non-profit search engine daoudclarke.net · “Search funded by advertising is a recipe for disaster because there will always be a conflict of interest.”
Jul 10
Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else? velvetshark.com · “There is a trend in logo design that started around 2017-2018.”
Jul 9
Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement sec.gov · “Twitter has provided only a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs’ final Board presentation.”
Jul 8
Problems at Roblox thebearcave.substack.com · “Items bought with Robux can be resold in Roblox’s marketplace and some trade for thousands of dollars.”
Jul 7
EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms macrumors.com · “So far, Apple has heavily resisted attempts by governments to enforce changes to its operating systems and services.”
Jul 5
Is the Ride over for Uber? smartcompany.com.au · “In the March quarter, Eats sales embarrassingly grew globally by only 12%.”
Jul 3
It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak leejo.github.io · “I realised last month the app hasn’t been of much use to me, in terms of learning, for a while.”
Jul 3
Watching an acquirer ruin your company startupwin.kelsus.com · “Sphero told us they needed fully revamped iOS and Android apps six months later with no schedule wiggle room.”
Jul 2

June 2022 14 posts

Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable, the market has its valuation all wrong, says Adam Schwab smartcompany.com.au · “Even with the near 60% share price calamity, Atlassian is trading on a multiple of more than 19 times sales.”
Jun 30
Driverless Robotaxi Fleet Paralyzed for Hours in San Francisco thelastdriverlicenseholder.com · “The cars blocked the intersection and the street and had to be manually driven to the depot by Cruise employees.”
Jun 30
The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't) posthog.com · “Since we started PostHog, our team has interviewed 725 people.”
Jun 28
One of the most prominent crypto hedge funds just defaulted on a $670 million loan cnbc.com · “Voyager said it intends to pursue recovery from 3AC (Three Arrows Capital).”
Jun 27
How we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS plausible.io · “We’re a completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped team of four.”
Jun 24
Deno raises $21M deno.com · “There are thousands of megabytes of dependencies, many of which are unnecessary, insecure, and out-of-date.”
Jun 21
Facebook Says Apple is Too Powerful. They're Right. eff.org · “Unfortunately, reality has an anti-surveillance bias.”
Jun 20
Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire vox.com · “Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed.”
Jun 17
Coinbase Lays Off Around 1,100 Employees coindesk.com · “Coinbase estimated it would incur $40 million to $45 million in total restructuring expenses.”
Jun 14
IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers theregister.com · “The emails contained within Exhibit 10 evidence an interest at the then CEO-level to change the profile of IBM employees so that it reflected a younger workforce.”
Jun 14
I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones alexanderell.is · “They’ve got you to enable notifications, since they can be helpful, but now they’ve co-opted that notification consent to send you marketing notifications.”
Jun 5
Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers, by email sfgate.com · “Affected new hires were informed Thursday, Brock said, via email.”
Jun 4
Elon Musk feels 'super bad' about economy, needs to cut 10% of Tesla jobs cnbc.com · “So far, demand for Tesla cars and other electric vehicles has remained strong and many of the traditional indicators of a downturn - including increasing dealer inventories and incentives in the United States - have not materialized.”
Jun 3
Facebook parent Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down cnbc.com · “The move is not because of the company’s regulatory overhang or its current advertising slowdown, she said.”
Jun 1

May 2022 25 posts

S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010 sfchronicle.com · “The city lost 54,813 people, or 6.3% of its population, from July 2020 to July 2021.”
May 27
How This Ends avc.com · “That recession could easily last until the end of 2023.”
May 22
Apple shipped me a 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery theverge.com · “I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all.”
May 21
I Spent 2 years Launching Tiny Projects tinyprojects.dev · “I ended up selling for $5,300, which blew my tiny mind.”
May 18
Fly.io: the Reclaimer of Heroku's Magic christine.website · “This allows them to get your app running in multiple regions for a lot less than it would cost to run it on Heroku.”
May 15
The problem with bitcoin miners paulbutler.org · “Last year, one MARA executive earned over $220 million in cash and stock-based compensation, in a year when the company’s total revenue was $150 million.”
May 15
Exclusive: Over 800 WhiteHat Jr Employees Resign As Edtech Giant Asks To Report To Office inc42.com · “Over 800 full-time employees put down their papers and exited coding startup WhiteHat Jr in the last 60 days as the startup, which was acquired by edtech giant BYJU’S, asked all its employees to work from office within a month’s time.”
May 14
Former employee blows whistle on baby formula production plant tied to outbreak foodsafetynews.com · “The FDA did not interview the whistleblower until late December 2021.”
May 14
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fires two top executives, freezes hiring theverge.com · “Effective this week, we are pausing most hiring and backfills, except for business critical roles.”
May 12
Coinbase admits users may lose crypto if exchange goes bankrupt fortune.com · “Coinbase users would become “general unsecured creditors,” meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings.”
May 11
Announcing D1: our first SQL database blog.cloudflare.com · “D1 is built on SQLite.”
May 11
We Need A Middle Class For Startups neilthanedar.com · “It’s near impossible to return money raised and get your equity back.”
May 10
The music lives on apple.com · “iPod touch will be available while supplies last.”
May 10
UST Stablecoin Loses Dollar Peg for Second Time in 48 Hours, LUNA Market Cap Falls Below UST's coindesk.com · “TerraUSD (UST) has lost its dollar peg for the second time in three days, falling to as low as $0.65 on Monday, according to the most recent price estimates from CoinMarketCap.”
May 9
No Fixed Address Bank Account hsbc.co.uk · “HSBC UK’s No Fixed Address Account is a specialist service available in selected branches to help people without a fixed home address open a bank account.”
May 8
Monsanto’s Ghostwriting to Influence Science and Media disinformationchronicle.substack.com · “Monsanto ghostwrote research and essays to promote the safety of the pesticide glyphosate.”
May 8
Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work macrumors.com · “Apple employees began returning to Apple Park last month, with the three-day in-office work policy being enacted on May 23.”
May 7
Shaving is too expensive johnwhiles.com · “The double edged razor has become a product that you can only buy on the internet, and which you will only buy if you know that it exists.”
May 7
When negotiating a price, never bid with a round number hbswk.hbs.edu · “Rather, bid with a more precise number, like $9,800 or $1.03 million or $14.80 per share.”
May 6
Homes in 97% of U.S. cities are overvalued, Moody's says cbsnews.com · “By Moody’s reckoning, Boise’s homes are 73% overvalued, making it the most overpriced city in the nation.”
May 6
Holy ship! Shopify to acquire Deliverr for $2.1B: building the future of global logistics for independent brands news.shopify.com · “Founded in 2017, Deliverr’s hassle-free logistics network now delivers more than a million orders per month for thousands of merchants across the U.S.”
May 5
Tailscale raises $100M… to fix the Internet tailscale.com · “We don’t want people to worry that we’re going to cancel their free plan, because the free plan is where all our referrals come from.”
May 4
The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures warp.dev · “And so we would deprioritize product polish for projects that looked better to a promotion committee.”
May 4
The strange business of hole-in-one insurance thehustle.co · “A standard tournament with 100 golfers playing a 165-yard hole with a $10k prize sets an event back ~$235.”
May 3
I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government beanlog.vercel.app · “Slowly it dawned on me that not only did I just loan $19,975 to the government for 2 months with zero interest, but I’d locked myself out of the golden window for buying I-bonds.”
May 1

April 2022 20 posts

Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere news.airbnb.com · “During the second half of 2021, 20% of our nights booked were for stays of longer than a month, and half were for stays of longer than a week.”
Apr 29
Apple’s Self Service Repair now available apple.com · “Apple will offer tool rental kits for $49, so that customers who do not want to purchase tools for a single repair still have access to these professional repair tools.”
Apr 27
Apple Discontinues macOS Server support.apple.com · “As of April 21, 2022, Apple has discontinued macOS Server.”
Apr 21
The unreasonable fight for municipal broadband tylercipriani.com · “And, even better, the city insists I’ll pay $49.95 forever.”
Apr 20
TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing slate.com · “For the vast majority of Americans, the IRS already knows what we owe in taxes.”
Apr 18
Samsung Electronics cultural issues causing disasters in foundry, LSI, DRAM semianalysis.substack.com · “There are credible reports of lies and deceit within the Samsung Foundry operations.”
Apr 17
DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results torrentfreak.com · “Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies.”
Apr 15
Ethereum Has Issues blog.dshr.org · “It turns out that front-running is the tip of an iceberg of fundamental problems that Ethereum and similar systems suffer.”
Apr 14
Inside the longest Atlassian outage newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com · “It took until Day 9 for executives at the company to acknowledge the outage.”
Apr 13
Consumer prices rose 8.5% in March – highest since 1981 cnbc.com · “Due to the surge in inflation, worker wages, despite rising 5.6% from a year ago, weren’t keeping pace with the cost of living.”
Apr 12
Why I'll never use Affirm again gist.github.com · “After waiting on hold for nearly an hour, I was finally connected with a supervisor who found my open cases and consolidated them into a new case they created during the call.”
Apr 8
What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com · “In this article, they published the damning claim that the startup only generated $600K in revenue in 2021, all while burning about $10M/month in cash, and being close to running out of money.”
Apr 7
I stopped advertising and nothing happened theantistartup.com · “Over 85% of our organic search traffic comes from users typing in our brand name - Total Car Check.”
Apr 7
The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020) ctrl.blog · “It serves no purpose other than to pad the files to make them 0,5 MB larger.”
Apr 7
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin promised them free crypto for an eyeball scan buzzfeednews.com · “The men were offering all comers a T-shirt and a voucher for $20 worth of Worldcoin, which one of the men boasted would appreciate 500%.”
Apr 6
The next Google dkb.io · “DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google.”
Apr 5
Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as "union", "pay raise", "slave labor" theintercept.com · “In addition to the automated system, managers will have the authority to flag or suppress any Shout-Outs that they find inappropriate, the documents show.”
Apr 4
Vizio TVs are now showing banner ads over live TV flatpanelshd.com · “Vizio will first identify what is on your screen and then place interactive banner ads over live TV programs.”
Apr 3
What are you doing, WordPress.com? rootprivileges.net · “But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB.”
Apr 3
YouTube cancelled my Nextcloud installation how-to mccormick.cx · “Your interface does not allow me any way to speak to a human being about this.”
Apr 2

March 2022 23 posts

Taking our next step in the City by the Bay blog.waymo.com · “Since sharing that we were ready to take the next step and begin testing fully autonomous operations in the city, we’ve begun fully autonomous rides with our San Francisco employees.”
Mar 30
FTC Sues Intuit for Its Deceptive TurboTax "free" Filing Campaign ftc.gov · “In spite of this advertising, many consumers who took the time to gather their documents, entrust their personal information to Intuit, and begin the filing process found that they could not file their taxes for free.”
Mar 29
I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea blog.tjcx.me · “And so in the year of our lord 2017 I had a Brilliant Startup Idea: use a structured database of clinical trials to provide simple, practical answers to common medical questions.”
Mar 28
Obtaining My Personal Data From Amazon Was a Nightmare theintercept.com · “The first thing I learned is that Amazon is in no hurry to give you your data, nor does it really encourage you to ask for it in the first place.”
Mar 27
Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes, whistleblower alleges theverge.com · “In 2016, Yasser Elabd noticed a $40,000 payment to a client in Africa that didn’t smell right.”
Mar 25
Introducing MDN Plus: Make MDN your own hacks.mozilla.org · “For today’s premium subscription service, MDN Plus, we are releasing three new features that begin to address this need: Notifications, Collections and MDN Offline.”
Mar 24
An email urging lower wages for new employees due to higher gas prices sparks walkout at Lawrence Applebee's www2.ljworld.com · “The advantage this has for us is that it will increase application flow and has the potential to lower our average wage.”
Mar 24
Why You Should Start Self Hosting rohanrd.xyz · “There are some stories where the user never figured out what they had done wrong to deserve suspension of account.”
Mar 23
Mercedes Drive Pilot Beats Tesla Autopilot By Taking Legal Responsibility roadandtrack.com · “Once you engage Drive Pilot, you are no longer legally liable for the car’s operation until it disengages.”
Mar 22
Why Don't You Use ... brendangregg.com · “They are usually well aware of various technologies but have reasons not to use them which they usually won’t share.”
Mar 21
Vimeo: "We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube." ymcinema.com · “Filmmakers claim that Vimeo demands them to pay thousands of dollars or their videos will be deleted.”
Mar 20
Crypto is an Unproductive Bubble alexkolchinski.com · “The hallmark of a bubble is people buying an asset primarily in the hopes of future appreciation driven by other buyers, rather than because of any notion of its long-term value.”
Mar 18
How our free plan stays free tailscale.com · “Rather, increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans.”
Mar 16
US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018 theguardian.com · “The Fed raised rates by a quarter percentage point from near zero, in what is expected to be the first in a series of raises in the coming months.”
Mar 16
CSS-Tricks is joining DigitalOcean! css-tricks.com · “DigitalOcean is committed to continuing to produce high-quality content on front-end development and tending to the trove of content that exists here already.”
Mar 15
Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? danluu.com · “More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it’s fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good.”
Mar 14
Microsoft is testing ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft has begun testing promotions for some of its other products in the File Explorer app on devices running its latest Windows 11 Insider build.”
Mar 14
A short conversation with a bank newsletter.danhon.com · “you: you… you deleted the statement from 2016”
Mar 10
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote sive.rs · “There was no mention of confidentiality at the meeting and no agreement to sign.”
Mar 9
Apple CEO Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th theverge.com · “For others, it may also be an unsettling change.”
Mar 4
My Stripe Tax Story gist.github.com · “I deployed it on November 6, 2021, the same day that Stripe stopped billing a significant number of my customers, left all their invoices in a Draft state, and didn’t tell me about it.”
Mar 3
Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as 'Fortnite' Maker Expands Into Music variety.com · “According to Bandcamp, under its revenue model artists receive net an average of 82% of every sale.”
Mar 2
Trapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System wired.com · “Yet those successes have, almost exclusively, come from historically privileged castes.”
Mar 1

February 2022 20 posts

Namecheap: Russia Service Termination news.ycombinator.com · “If you hold any top-level domains with us, we ask that you transfer them to another provider by March 6, 2022.”
Feb 28
'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments, says Gabe Newell pcgamer.com · “50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number.”
Feb 26
On the removal of Come Back Alive blog.patreon.com · “This morning, Patreon suspended a Ukrainian organization’s page from our site called “Come Back Alive” because it violated our policies.”
Feb 25
AMD is now worth more than rival Intel finance.yahoo.com · “AMD’s market cap currently stands at $188 billion after shares rose nearly 2% in Tuesday’s session.”
Feb 24
Behind Pornhub’s decade-old moderation problems theverge.com · “In the early days of the company, I was tasked with content moderation.”
Feb 23
Subaru, Kia shut off some car features rather than adhere to 'right to repair' law ksdk.com · “About 75% of Massachusetts voters sided with the auto repair industry in 2020 by passing a ballot initiative that’s supposed to allow car owners and their preferred auto shops to more easily peek into a car’s trove of online data.”
Feb 23
Why I will never buy another Samsung device lehtimaeki.medium.com · “During the technical inspection of your device, the technician was able to determine that in addition to the display, the frame is also broken and that this damage is due to a mechanical impact, such as a fall, bending or excessive pressure.”
Feb 22
Coinbase CEO tries to weave a compelling story about how their own team came up with a Super Bowl ad web3isgoinggreat.com · “I guess if there is a lesson here it is that if you’re going to take credit for someone else’s idea to try to make your team sound good, maybe you shouldn’t also use it as an opportunity to dunk on the people who actually came up with the idea.”
Feb 21
Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work news.ycombinator.com · “I’ve never posted anything like this, but this is the only place I have any hope of a human response after youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company.”
Feb 19
The United States of Amazon: The Day Amazon Sent the FBI to Take My Family’s Bank Accounts medium.com · “According to court filings, the government has collaborated with Amazon attorneys to seize millions in assets from at least 53 companies, investors, law firms, and individuals.”
Feb 18
Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account theverge.com · “Microsoft says it’s planning to update Windows 11 Pro so it will require an internet connection and a Microsoft Account during the initial setup phase.”
Feb 18
Google Search Is Dying dkb.io · “You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.”
Feb 15
Akamai to Acquire Linode akamai.com · “As a result of structuring the transaction as an asset purchase, Akamai expects to achieve cash income tax savings over the next 15 years that have an estimated net present value of approximately $120 million.”
Feb 15
Dell deletes Latitude CPU Throttling issue after link is posted here news.ycombinator.com · “After a link to the Dell forum post was ported to HN, the post mysteriously was deleted in the same day.”
Feb 14
Nearly a third of TV ads play to empty rooms news.cornell.edu · “Advertising pricing relies on measuring how many TVs are tuned in to a specific channel, and not whether people are actually watching the TVs.”
Feb 12
EE380 Talk blog.dshr.org · “As has been true for the last seven years, no more than five mining pools control the majority of the Bitcoin mining power and last November two pools controlled the majority of Ethereum mining.”
Feb 12
Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone apple.com · “Once Tap to Pay on iPhone becomes available, merchants will be able to unlock contactless payment acceptance through a supporting iOS app on an iPhone XS or later device.”
Feb 8
Apple will charge 27% commission for app purchases made using alternative payment systems in the Netherlands 9to5mac.com · “Each month, developers will have to send a report to Apple that lists their sales.”
Feb 4
The Nintendo Switch has now outsold the Wii theverge.com · “That brings the system’s lifetime total to 103.54 million units shipped, meaning it took just under five years to overtake the Wii’s 101.63 million.”
Feb 3
Framework Raises $18M Series A frame.work · “Products that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired to last longer are better for consumers and less harmful to the environment, while also being the core of our business model.”
Feb 1

January 2022 18 posts

Don't forget Microsoft luttig.substack.com · “If it plays its cards right, Microsoft can become the first $10T company.”
Jan 30
AG Ferguson investigation shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide atg.wa.gov · “The “Sold by Amazon” program allowed the online retailer to agree on price with third-party sellers, rather than compete with them.”
Jan 26
Google Rewrites 61% of Page Title Tags [SEO Study] zyppy.com · “In our analysis, we found that Google rewrote 61.6% of the titles.”
Jan 26
Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone vice.com · “Despite being just three years old, no Pixel 3 will ever receive another official security update.”
Jan 25
The Great Resignation? More like The Great Renegotiation npr.org · “In a recent poll by The New York Times and Momentum, only about 17% of Americans said their pay was keeping up with surging prices.”
Jan 25
Once billed as a revolution in medicine, IBM's Watson Health is sold off in parts statnews.com · “The sale came after IBM spent billions of dollars acquiring health information companies to build a new enterprise aimed at using AI to supply insights to hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and researchers.”
Jan 23
Why skyscrapers are so short worksinprogress.co · “The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller.”
Jan 22
Bringing human-centric security to everyone blog.1password.com · “Admittedly, it seems peculiar for a consistently-profitable company to accept outside funding.”
Jan 19
Google requiring all 'G Suite legacy free edition' users to start paying for Workspace this year 9to5google.com · “In an email to administrators this morning, Google said it “will now transition all remaining users to an upgraded Google Workspace paid subscription based on your usage.””
Jan 19
Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device news.microsoft.com · “Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion, inclusive of Activision Blizzard’s net cash.”
Jan 18
It's not still the early days blog.mollywhite.net · “So this raises the question: How long can it possibly be “early days”?”
Jan 15
Google and Facebook's top execs allegedly approved dividing ad market among themselves theregister.com · “Specifically, Google made AMP unable to execute JavaScript in the header, which frustrated publishers’ use of header bidding.”
Jan 15
PayPal faces lawsuit for freezing customer accounts and funds engadget.com · “Lena Evans, one of the plaintiffs who’d been a PayPal user for 22 years, said the website seized $26,984 from her account six months after it got frozen without ever telling her why.”
Jan 14
More than 1 million fewer students are in college. Here's how that impacts the economy npr.org · “That represents the largest two-year decrease in more than 50 years, Shapiro says.”
Jan 13
New year, new CEO signal.org · “I was writing all the Android code, was writing all of the server code, was the only person on call for the service, was facilitating all product development, and was managing everyone.”
Jan 10
T-Mobile begins blocking iPhone users from enabling iCloud Private Relay in the US 9to5mac.com · “Customers who chose plans and features with content filtering (e.g. parent controls) do not have access to the iCloud Private Relay to allow these services to work as designed.”
Jan 10
My first impressions of web3 moxie.org · “People do not want to run their own servers.”
Jan 7
web3 is Centralized blog.wesleyac.com · “The funny thing is, web3, as it exists today and appears to be building towards, is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace.”
Jan 2

2021 296 posts

December 2021 12 posts

Ubisoft Deleted Account With Hundreds Of Dollars' Worth Of Games For Inactivity mmos.com · “When he tried contacting Ubisoft regarding the email, the company’s representatives told him that they won’t be able to recover any of his games because his account had been closed.”
Dec 27
Exiled from the Metaverse before it even started: the dangers of relying on Facebook brian.jp · “But even then there are routes to appeal, you can be granted clemency, parole, et cetera.”
Dec 24
CFPB Shutters Lending by VC-Backed Fintech for Violating Agency Order consumerfinance.gov · “The order would also impose a $100,000 civil money penalty based on LendUp’s demonstrated inability to pay.”
Dec 22
Tinder just permabanned me or the problem with big tech paulefou.com · “Now I didn’t have a single match, had 0 likes, and yet I was able to violate their terms of service, pretty impressive isn’t it?”
Dec 22
Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox's Default Browser Workaround howtogeek.com · “Basically, this means that “microsoft-edge:// links” can no longer be forced to open in your default browser of choice.”
Dec 16
I blew $720 on 100 notebooks from Alibaba and started a Paper Website business daily.tinyprojects.dev · “In the process I went viral on Twitter, made $1,000 in two days, and blew $720 on 100 paper notebooks from Alibaba.”
Dec 14
Plans you're not supposed to talk about dynomight.net · “Critically, you get everyone to agree that it’s gauche to discuss the reasons for doing all this.”
Dec 14
Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain bunniestudios.com · “After waiting about 28 weeks, on August 12th, we got an email from our distributor informing us that they had to cancel our entire order for SiT8021s.”
Dec 14
The Internet Has a Rat Poison Problem audubon.org · “It contained 12 pounds of waxy pink seed-size pellets laced with brodifacoum, a chemical engineered to trigger massive internal bleeding and hemorrhaging when digested, whether by rat, dog, bird, or child.”
Dec 12
Apple CEO Tim Cook 'Secretly' Signed $275 Billion Deal With China in 2016 macrumors.com · “Other internal documents reportedly showed that Apple’s pledge amounted to more than $275 billion in spending over a period of five years.”
Dec 8
Apple broke up with me merecivilian.com · “Do not get too attached to your Apple account; it belongs to Apple, NOT YOU!”
Dec 5
How Amazon beats supply chain chaos with ships and long-haul planes cnbc.com · “It’s even taking control at the first step of the shipping journey by making its own 53-foot cargo containers in China.”
Dec 5

November 2021 21 posts

Proof of stake is a scam and the people promoting it are scammers yanmaani.github.io · “When I say that, I mean that proof of stake is (1) claimed to be a consensus system, and (2) constitutionally incapable of actually producing a consensus.”
Nov 28
Bank transfers as a payment method bam.kalzumeus.com · “Stripped to its fundamentals: a payment is a message, with new information, about a debt, with a certain confidence level associated with it.”
Nov 27
California port truckers 'drowning' in supply chain inefficiencies freightwaves.com · “Recently, some truckers were lined up for 10 hours to grab containers from one of the terminals that couldn’t handle the influx of trucks, even though the drivers had appointment times.”
Nov 26
Black Friday: Which? warns over price offers bbc.com · “It said 184 out of 201 items from six retailers, which included Amazon and John Lewis, were priced the same or cheaper before Black Friday in 2020.”
Nov 25
Samsung plans $17 billion chip plant in Taylor, Texas datacenterdynamics.com · “Taylor previously offered Samsung property tax breaks of over 90 percent for its first ten years.”
Nov 24
Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money stevenbuccini.com · “They thought they needed to build a machine learning model when they really needed to build an entirely new organization , one that possessed the technical and cultural mindset necessary to succeed in this space.”
Nov 24
The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger stephendiehl.com · “Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database.”
Nov 24
Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You reactionwheel.net · “Even calling it “transitions” downplays the subject.”
Nov 23
Microsoft Edge's new 'Buy now, pay later' feature is the definition of bloatware xda-developers.com · “I don’t want to see advertisements from my browser for a payment company when I’m trying to buy something, and at least right now, Microsoft hasn’t mentioned any way of turning it off.”
Nov 20
Crypto Wash Trading arxiv.org · “We quantify the wash trading on each unregulated exchange, which averaged over 70% of the reported volume.”
Nov 19
10 years of... whatever this has been apenwarr.ca · “Bitcoin is casino chips.”
Nov 18
Apple announces Self Service Repair apple.com · “Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022.”
Nov 17
Facebook Employees Are Now More Willing to Leave, Tech Recruiters Say businessinsider.com · “Tech recruiters struggled for years to get people to leave Facebook.”
Nov 14
Debit cards as financial infrastructure bam.kalzumeus.com · “They’re actually a core piece of financial infrastructure, accidentally upgraded checking accounts, and drive (and fund) much fintech innovation.”
Nov 13
Windows now blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links ctrl.blog · “Microsoft uses these links instead of regular web links to force users to open them in its Microsoft Edge web browser.”
Nov 11
It's Mostly a Demand Shock, Not a Supply Shock, and It's Everywhere bridgewater.com · “The mechanics of combined monetary and fiscal stimulus are inherently inflationary: MP3 creates demand without creating any supply.”
Nov 9
Apple's New Screen Repair Trap Could Change the Repair Industry Forever ifixit.com · “The new iPhone 13 completely disables its flagship Face ID functionality when you replace its screen.”
Nov 6
How credit cards make money bam.kalzumeus.com · “Credit cards aren’t just a bundle, they’re a Mandelbrot set of bundles.”
Nov 5
Thank you, GitHub github.blog · “I will become Chairman Emeritus, which fulfills my lifelong ambition of having a title in Latin.”
Nov 3
Zoom Supports Continued Access for Basic Users with Advertising Program blog.zoom.us · “For this initial program, ads will be rolled out only on the browser page users see once they end their meeting.”
Nov 2
Meet skimpflation: A reason inflation is worse than the government says it is npr.org · “It’s when, instead of simply raising prices, companies skimp on the goods and services they provide.”
Nov 1

October 2021 29 posts

It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is pluralistic.net · “It’s run by an oligopoly of wildly profitable companies that coerce academics into working for free for them, and then sell the product of their labors back to the academics’ employers (often public institutions) for eye-popping sums.”
Oct 31
Oculus Quest is Getting Rid of Facebook Account Requirement gamerant.com · “During the recent Facebook outage, certain Oculus devices were effectively rendered useless due to their inability to connect to the larger Facebook platform.”
Oct 29
Financial innovations brought by technology bam.kalzumeus.com · “Free checking wasn’t free.”
Oct 29
Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners, study finds techspot.com · “NBER found that the top 10 percent of mining operations control around 90 percent of the Bitcoin mining capacity.”
Oct 27
Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs' decrypt.co · “Worldcoin, which already touts a $1 billion valuation, aims to onboard more people into crypto by doling out free coins to anyone who scans their eyes on a device called "the Orb" that will convert an image of your eyes into "short numeric code" to check whether you already have Worldcoins.”
Oct 26
How I failed 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 kwcodes.com · “We spent more than one year building it after work and over the weekends.”
Oct 24
Google 'colluded' with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy theregister.com · “Several years ago, to deal with the competitive threat of header bidding – a way for multiple ad exchanges to get a fair shot at winning an automated auction for ad space – Google allegedly hatched a plan called "Jedi" to ensure that its ad exchange always won.”
Oct 23
Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser brave.com · “Brave Search is currently not displaying ads, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported.”
Oct 20
Hindenburg Research Announces $1,000,000 Bounty For Details On Tether's Backing hindenburgresearch.com · “Despite multiple regulatory sanctions over its alleged lack of truthful disclosure about its reserves, and despite Tether now having a $70 billion market cap, Tether still refuses to provide transparency to the public on its holdings.”
Oct 19
AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go swyx.io · “By far, the show-stopper this year was the announcement of R2 Storage, an S3-compatible Object Storage service that directly takes aim at AWS’ "Hotel California" business model.”
Oct 18
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks cnbc.com · “The top 1% gained more than $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the bottom 90% added $1.2 trillion, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve.”
Oct 18
Valve bans blockchain games and NFTs on Steam, Epic will try to make it work theverge.com · “Games that use blockchain technology or let users exchange NFTs or cryptocurrencies won’t be allowed on Steam, according to a rule added to Valve’s "What you shouldn’t publish on Steam" list.”
Oct 15
Apple joins Blender Development Fund blender.org · “Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to the Blender HQ and development community to help support Blender artists and developers.”
Oct 14
What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021 jacobian.org · “There’s a huge information asymmetry here: employers have access to detailed industry data on salaries (e.g. Radford), but employees don’t.”
Oct 14
What if Performance Advertising is Just an Analytics Scam? sparktoro.com · “In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales.”
Oct 13
Kape Technologies (Formerly Crossrider) Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN "Review" Websites restoreprivacy.com · “Kape Technologies (formerly Crossrider) has now acquired four different VPN services and a collection of VPN "review" websites that rank Kape’s VPN holdings at the top of their recommendations.”
Oct 13
Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely, indefinitely seattletimes.com · “That’s a change from Amazon’s previous expectation that most employees would need to be in the office at least three days a week once offices reopen in January.”
Oct 11
Ireland joins OECD International Tax agreement gov.ie · “This 15% rate will apply to 56 Irish multinationals employing approximately 100,000 people, and 1500 foreign owned MNEs based in Ireland employed approximately 400,000 people.”
Oct 8
Facebook banned me for life because I help people use it less slate.com · “It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts.”
Oct 7
Bitcoin is a Ponzi ic.unicamp.br · “Thus the investors, as a whole, are always in the red, and their collective loss only increases with time.”
Oct 7
Account deletion within apps required starting January 31 developer.apple.com · “The updates to App Store Review Guideline 5.1.1 last June provided users with greater control over their personal data, stating that all apps that allow for account creation must also allow users to initiate deletion of their account from within the app.”
Oct 6
Facebook whistleblower renews scrutiny of the social media giant npr.org · “Haugen’s planned testimony this week, as well as the information she shared so far, suggests the company deceived the public and its investors about its ability to deal with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.”
Oct 5
Open Source Tax Software ctskennerton.github.io · “The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to get you to pay for it and upsell you on something that should be free.”
Oct 5
Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge ctrl.blog · “It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser.”
Oct 4
Pandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful theguardian.com · “Branded the Pandora papers, the cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.”
Oct 3
Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill theguardian.com · “None of the companies contacted by the Guardian would rebuke the stance of the lobby groups they are part of and none said they would review their links to these groups.”
Oct 2
NFT Projects are just MLMs for Tech Elites every.to · “We posit that the most prominent NFT projects, things like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Pudgy Penguins, hold such a remarkably similar structure to Multi-Level-Marketing companies (MLMs) that they will also suffer from the same failures.”
Oct 1
DeFi protocol Compound mistakenly gives away $90 million to users cnbc.com · “About $90.1 million has mistakenly gone out to users of popular decentralized finance, or DeFi, staking protocol Compound, after an upgrade gone epically wrong.”
Oct 1
'Google' is most searched word on Bing, Google says bbc.com · “Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95% of users prefer Google to rival search engines.”
Oct 1

September 2021 22 posts

Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees blog.cloudflare.com · “Traditional object storage charges developers for three things: bandwidth, storage size and storage operations.”
Sep 28
In 1973, I invented a ‘girly drink’ called Baileys irishtimes.com · “On December 3rd, 2007, Diageo announced the sale of the billionth bottle of Baileys since it was first introduced in 1973.”
Sep 26
Demonopolizing the internet with interoperability pluralistic.net · “A rule that requires Big Tech to throw everything at unsolvable problems will make the cost of entry into the tech sector so expensive that Big Tech will get to rule unchallenged, forever.”
Sep 25
This Is All Exactly What It Looks Like defector.com · “The discourse around it is absolutely catastrophic, just disastrously obnoxious and dishonest and stilted at every turn, but that is generally true when it comes to conversations about money.”
Sep 24
Apple Will Not Reinstate Epic’s Fortnite Developer Account, but Epic’s Other Developer Accounts Remain Active daringfireball.net · “That doesn’t sound like the words of a man poised to comply with the App Store rules around in-app purchases.”
Sep 23
TikTokers Are Trading Stocks By Copying What Members Of Congress Do text.npr.org · “Last year, Josephs noticed that the trades, actually made by Pelosi’s investor husband and merely disclosed by the speaker, were performing well.”
Sep 21
That Time I Told My Wife I Wanted to Quit My Job keygen.sh · “At the time, my side project, now a side business, was making about half of what my senior software engineer position at $CRYPTO_EXCHANGE was netting me, before theft taxes.”
Sep 21
As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support, and this is what happened plumshell.com · “This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite.”
Sep 20
Russia restricts opposition election voting app from Apple App Store and Google Play Store netblocks.org · “On Friday, sources confirmed on background that at least one of the U.S.-based companies implementing the restriction felt compelled to comply for fear that local staff could face legal action upon receipt of a takedown order from the Russian Federation.”
Sep 19
Why the University of Florida gets a ~$20m cut of Gatorade profits every year thehustle.co · “The trust then sends 20% to the university, which employed the professor who invented the drink nearly 60 years ago.”
Sep 19
Amazon says it’s permanently banned 600 Chinese brands for review fraud theverge.com · “Amazon has now permanently banned over 600 Chinese brands across 3,000 different seller accounts, the company confirms to The Verge.”
Sep 18
Mailchimp Insiders React to Employees Getting No Equity From Intuit Sale businessinsider.com · “When employees were recruited to work at Mailchimp there was a common refrain from hiring managers: No, you are not going to get equity, but you will get to be part of a scrappy company that fights for the little guy and we will never be acquired or go public.”
Sep 17
Apple blocked the FlickType Watch keyboard... then announced a clone of it inputmag.com · “A separate version for the Apple Watch would remain, but then Apple pulled that one as well, telling Eleftheriou that keyboards aren’t allowed on the Apple Watch.”
Sep 15
Apple co-founder announces private space company to clean up the space debris clogging the planet independent.co.uk · “Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is starting a private space company called Privateer.”
Sep 14
Stripe Banned Us for Payment Disputes but We Never had a Dispute justuseapp.com · “Throughout our 3 months on Stripe, we have only had one dispute on Stripe for a $10 charge which we won easily after submitting evidence to J.P Morgan (the user’s bank).”
Sep 14
Intel Is Reducing Server Chip Pricing in Attempt to Stem the AMD Tide: Report tomshardware.com · “However, it’s noteworthy that Intel hasn’t changed its official recommended pricing, so these deals are likely coming as part of volume purchases with its largest customers.”
Sep 14
Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows theverge.com · “Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows.”
Sep 13
Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules nltimes.nl · “For example, a driver may only refuse a few trips before being logged out by the system.”
Sep 13
Apple must allow other forms of in-app purchase, rules judge in Epic v. Apple theverge.com · “In short, iOS apps must be allowed to direct users to payment options beyond those offered by Apple.”
Sep 10
Revealed: Google illegally underpaid thousands of workers across dozens of countries theguardian.com · “Google has been illegally underpaying thousands of temporary workers in dozens of countries and delayed correcting the pay rates for more than two years as it attempted to cover up the problem, the Guardian can reveal.”
Sep 10
Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea blog.garrytan.com · “Yahoo keeps it around because it’s fantastic for recruiting.”
Sep 10
The Red Warning Light on Richard Branson’s Space Flight newyorker.com · “Aborting at that moment, however, would have dashed Branson’s hopes of beating his rival Bezos, whose flight was scheduled for later in the month, into space.”
Sep 1

August 2021 26 posts

Apple and Google must allow developers to use other payment systems, new Korean law declares theverge.com · “If tech companies fail to comply with the new law, they could face fines of up to 3 percent of their South Korea revenue.”
Aug 31
Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies theregister.com · “The company has renamed its Free plan to "Personal" and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop.”
Aug 31
Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic apple.com · “Primephonic is no longer available for new subscribers and will be taken offline beginning September 7.”
Aug 30
Why Facebook is the AOL of 2021 zdnet.com · “Facebook didn’t have to resort to such cheesy tactics, but it similiarly has offered a curated set of free activities that have trapped people inside a walled garden, just like AOL.”
Aug 30
The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D semianalysis.substack.com · “In the new joint venture, Arm Limited, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M.”
Aug 27
App Store Payments Will Have Increased Competition kalzumeus.com · “To appreciate why, remember that a large share (60% or so) of revenue on the App Store is from games, and game developers are in the business of incentivizing users to take small incremental actions within a play session.”
Aug 27
TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage asia.nikkei.com · “TAIPEI – Contract chipmaking giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. told clients Wednesday that it plans to raise prices on products by as much as 20%, in what would be the company’s steepest single increase.”
Aug 26
OnlyFans Drops Planned Porn Ban, Will Continue to Allow Sexually Explicit Content variety.com · “OnlyFans dropped plans to ban pornography from its service, less than a week after the U.K. content-creator subscription site had announced the change citing the need to comply with policies of banking partners.”
Aug 25
Googlespeak™ - How Google Limits Thought About Antitrust zyppy.com · “For example, under no circumstances are Googlers to talk about “Market Share.””
Aug 24
Samsung Supports Retailers Affected By Looting With Innovative Television Block Function news.samsung.com · “TV Block is a security solution that detects if Samsung TV units have been unlawfully activated, and ensures that the television sets can only be used by the rightful owners with a valid proof of purchase.”
Aug 24
A bike parts company ditched Amazon to support indie shops instead theverge.com · “After leaving his job in global business development at Amazon, Aaron Kerson used his knowledge of the platform’s sales algorithms to power up his new business.”
Aug 23
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Platforms Want To Be Utilities, Self-Govern Like Empires eff.org · “These services often work great…but they fail very, very badly.”
Aug 23
Tesla is actually going to make a ‘Tesla Bot’ humanoid robot for general purpose use electrek.co · “Tesla announced that it is actually going to make a humanoid robot, called Tesla Bot, and it will be able to grab your groceries for you and perform other menial tasks.”
Aug 20
Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store, Epic filing claims theverge.com · “Google quietly paid game developers hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to keep their games on the Play Store, a newly unredacted complaint from Epic Games in its antitrust suit against Google alleges.”
Aug 19
Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40% bbc.com · “The world’s biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles.”
Aug 19
FTC Alleges Facebook Resorted to Illegal Buy-or-Bury Scheme to Crush Competition After String of Failed Attempts to Innovate ftc.gov · “And to further moat its monopoly, Facebook lured app developers to the platform, surveilled them for signs of success, and then buried them when they became competitive threats.”
Aug 19
Ask HN: Google is confusing me with others in a harmful way – what can I do? news.ycombinator.com · “Four months after I published my book, Google created a knowledge panel for me and, because I didn’t have a photo online, they just grabbed a photo of another Andrea Vassell who lives in Canada and displayed it alongside my book and claimed this woman was the author.”
Aug 18
Nail Your Startup Pitch: Use Pixar's Story Formula to Win Over Investors startuppitch.substack.com · “Pixar has been one of the most successful studios in the film industry, making movies grossing over $14 billion at the box office, and winning 23 Academy Awards.”
Aug 14
Remove all direct links to languagetransfer.org github.com · “Our app isn’t allowed to link to the homepage of the project’s own website unless we completely remove our users’ ability to discover a way to give us money.”
Aug 13
TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app asia.nikkei.com · “A global survey of downloads in 2020 shows TikTok, a video-sharing app developed in China, on top of the list of social media providers for the first time since the study was first conducted in 2018.”
Aug 10
End of the line for Uber pluralistic.net · “Uber was never going to be profitable.”
Aug 10
Apple’s Mistake stratechery.com · “In this case, though, Apple is building the capability, and the only thing holding the company back is policy.”
Aug 9
After DeepMind’s cofounder was placed on leave for bullying, Google promoted him morningbrew.com · “At least two incidents reportedly led to confidential settlements in excess of $150,000 each.”
Aug 7
Why Facebook’s claims about the Ad Observer are wrong blog.mozilla.org · “In our view, those claims simply do not hold water.”
Aug 5
It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription calpaterson.com · “The secret of printers is that you aren’t buying the printer but instead entering into a subscription for printer cartridges, which are often ruinous.”
Aug 2
Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era latimes.com · “Last month, employers posted more than 365,000 job openings for IT workers, the highest monthly total since September 2019, according to IT trade group CompTIA.”
Aug 1

July 2021 24 posts

Cloudflare's inaccessible browser contradicts the company's mission mwcampbell.github.io · “Cloudflare’s neglect of accessibility in this product raises a new barrier to employment for blind people as companies adopt this product to improve the security of their networks.”
Jul 30
1 Out of 153 American Workers Is Now an Amazon Employee businessinsider.com · “That means one out of every 350 Americans works for Amazon, or one out of every 153 employed workers in the US.”
Jul 30
Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, founder of electric carmaker Nikola, on three counts of fraud cnbc.com · “A federal grand jury charged Nikola founder Trevor Milton with three counts of criminal fraud for lying about “nearly all aspects of the business” to bolster stock sales of the electric vehicle start-up, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday.”
Jul 29
Amazon's older Kindles will start to lose their internet access in December theverge.com · “For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all.”
Jul 29
IPv4 pricing docs.hetzner.com · “Supply and demand determine the price at IPv4 brokers, so the prices have skyrocketed.”
Jul 28
Techdirt Is Now Entirely Without Any Google Ads Or Tracking Code techdirt.com · “Only the largest websites (or highly, highly specialized ones) can really pull their own weight on advertising.”
Jul 28
Element raises $30M to boost Matrix matrix.org · “However, there are no plans to use cryptocurrency incentives in Matrix or Element any time soon.”
Jul 27
AWS's Egregious Egress blog.cloudflare.com · “AWS was a huge step forward in terms of flexibility and scalability, but a massive step backward in terms of pricing.”
Jul 23
Low Pay Is The Main Reason So Many Workers Are Quitting Restaurant Jobs npr.org · “They are leaving at the highest rate in decades.”
Jul 20
GM Will Suck Lithium from the Salton Sea to Make Batteries autoweek.com · “So GM has just signed an innovative agreement with a company called Controlled Thermal Resources to extract Lithium from superheated waters beneath the Salton Sea in the desert of Southern California.”
Jul 17
I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week vice.com · “I haven’t gotten a raise in a decade.”
Jul 17
The case for banning non-competes slowboring.com · “The question here is roughly something like “is innovation difficult, or is innovation expensive?””
Jul 16
If You Want To Transform IT, Start With Finance zwischenzugs.com · “If you want to change an organisation, you need to look at how money works within it.”
Jul 13
Tesla's $16,000 Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters thedrive.com · “After taking his vehicle to a Tesla service center, he was handed an estimate for more than $16,000 to replace said pack.”
Jul 12
Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies montanafreepress.org · “And though conventional farming continues to account for the overwhelming majority of Montana’s $4.6 billion ag sector, things are shifting.”
Jul 12
NDA Expired - let's spill the beans on a weird startup shkspr.mobi · “We’re only going to get you interviews in companies which don’t already use our clients’ products.”
Jul 9
Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement bbc.com · “It allows repairs by its own authorised technicians only and does not generally provide spare parts or repair information.”
Jul 9
Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on a performance management plan seattletimes.com · “The company expects more than one-third of employees in Focus to fail the program and leave Amazon.”
Jul 9
We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200+ vacant apartments caretaker.com · “As one might expect, a big concern was the potential for abuse.”
Jul 8
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story erikbern.com · “Our data scientist ran the numbers, and our online ad cost per click keeps going down.”
Jul 8
The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes propublica.org · “Records reviewed by ProPublica show his federal income tax rate was just 12%.”
Jul 8
America's Growth Ponzi Scheme strongtowns.org · “Cities also assume the long-term liability for servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure, a promise that won’t come fully due for decades.”
Jul 4
Two Portland Delivery Companies Revolt Against Amazon, Shut Down vice.com · “Amazon refused, and the two companies in the Portland area terminated their contract with Amazon, their only client, effectively shutting down.”
Jul 2
Intuit to Share Payroll Data from 1.4M Small Businesses With Equifax krebsonsecurity.com · “At the time, all you needed to view someone’s entire work and salary history was their Social Security number and date of birth.”
Jul 1

June 2021 33 posts

A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing kleinbottle.com · “They could do this because Amazon’s Brand Registry only respects issued trademarks.”
Jun 30
SafeDollar ‘stablecoin’ drops to $0 following $248,000 DeFi exploit on Polygon cryptoslate.com · “SafeDollar (SDO) stablecoin proved to be anything but stable today as its price collapsed on the heels of an alleged cyberattack.”
Jun 28
Judge dismisses FTC and state antitrust complaints against Facebook cnbc.com · “In the filing, the court states that the FTC did not prove Facebook maintains a monopoly.”
Jun 28
Windows 11, Amazon, and Uncomfortable Questions commonsware.com · “The problem is that Amazon modifies all those apps to be different than what the developers intended to ship.”
Jun 27
So, You Want to Build a House More Efficiently austinvernon.eth.link · “Whether you are shipping 100 boxes of cellulose insulation or 100 boxes of computer chips, transportation from place A to place B costs about the same.”
Jun 26
Google turned me into a serial killer hristo-georgiev.com · “It turns out that Google’s knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer.”
Jun 24
Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do? news.ycombinator.com · “It was a critical function that locks us with them and goes against their selling message of “you own your data”.”
Jun 24
The Teamsters Announce Coordinated Nationwide Project to Unionize Amazon vice.com · “The Teamsters have 1.4 million members in the United States and Canada.”
Jun 23
Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of office workers seattletimes.com · “The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show.”
Jun 21
The Memo chrislaing.net · “This is unfortunate, because it’s no exaggeration to say that the API Mandate completely transformed Amazon as a business and laid the foundation for its success.”
Jun 20
Start Your Own ISP startyourownisp.com · “This site is dedicated to helping you start your own Internet Service Provider.”
Jun 17
The Document Culture of Amazon justingarrison.com · “Most of the time, if there isn’t a doc there isn’t a meeting.”
Jun 17
The Meltdown of IRON irony-97882.medium.com · “Like many financial collapse stories, this is a story of folly.”
Jun 17
Rethinking Triplebyte triplebyte.com · “We no longer require a quiz or interview to join.”
Jun 17
4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers' Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says npr.org · “And as its workers took five Fridays off in August, they printed nearly 60 percent fewer pages.”
Jun 16
Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC digiday.com · “But Amazon’s blocking appears scattered.”
Jun 15
Europe's Software Problem berthub.eu · “Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms.”
Jun 15
Stripe Identity: Verify identities with confidence stripe.com · “Poor image capture is the most common reason legitimate users are mistakenly rejected.”
Jun 14
“The great resignation”: Upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs axios.com · “Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.”
Jun 14
Apple admits why its own Files app was ranked first when users searched for competitor Dropbox theverge.com · ““Dropbox wasn’t even visible on the first page [of search results],” Sweeney wrote.”
Jun 11
Stripe Tax: Automate tax collection on your Stripe transactions stripe.com · “SaaS sales are 100% taxable in New York, 80% in Texas, and non-taxable in California.”
Jun 10
The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains ez.substack.com · “The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul.”
Jun 10
Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees cnbc.com · “Additionally, Zuckerberg said Facebook will begin allowing employees to request remote work across international borders.”
Jun 9
Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility dispatch.com · “The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages.”
Jun 8
FaceTime is coming to Android and Windows via the web theverge.com · “The video calling service was previously only available on iOS and Mac devices.”
Jun 7
Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors farms.com · “On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself.”
Jun 7
G7: Rich nations back deal to tax multinationals bbc.co.uk · “They also agreed in principle to a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15% to avoid countries undercutting each other.”
Jun 5
United Airlines will buy 15 ultrafast airplanes from start-up Boom Supersonic cnbc.com · “Boom’s first commercial supersonic jet, the Overture, has not been built or certified yet.”
Jun 3
Developer relations marco.org · “The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy.”
Jun 3
Microsoft’s Irish subsidiary posted £220bn profit in single year theguardian.com · “The profit generated by Microsoft Round Island One is equal to nearly three-quarters of Ireland’s gross domestic product – even though the company has no employees.”
Jun 3
Apple asks staff to return to office three days a week starting in early September theverge.com · “Managers need to approve remote work requests.”
Jun 2
PayPal Shuts Down Long-Time Tor Supporter with No Recourse eff.org · “PayPal denied that the shutdown was related to the concerns about Tor, claiming only that “the situation has been determined appropriately” and refusing to offer a specific explanation.”
Jun 2
Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing theguardian.com · “Users can disable Sidewalk in the settings section of the Alexa or Ring apps, but have until 8 June to do so.”
Jun 1

May 2021 27 posts

Wikipedia Endowment: The Site Is Rich. Why Is It Fundraising? dailydot.com · “But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year, according to a casual 2013 estimate by Erik Möller, its VP of engineering and product development at the time.”
May 31
Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie mattstoller.substack.com · “Free shipping is the God of online retail, so powerful that France actually banned the practice to protect its retail outlets.”
May 30
Couple Buys $7,000 Camera from Amazon, Gets Empty Boxes Instead petapixel.com · “Chiles says that he and his wife have proof that the package was not correctly delivered, as the UPS tracking label lists the weight of the box as just two pounds.”
May 30
Booking.com gives €28m in bonuses to three top execs; Took €65m in State aid nltimes.nl · “The company also let go of thousands of people during the coronavirus pandemic.”
May 28
Stripe Payment Links stripe.com · “The same payment link can be shared with many customers and used across multiple channels.”
May 25
How a Japanese Company Cut 80% of the Time Needed to Manually Count Pearls countthings.com · “Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting pearls took almost 100 hours a year.”
May 24
One Man’s Fight for the Right to Repair Broken MacBooks columbianewsservice.com · “Apple contractually forces recycling partners to shred old devices, according to a 2017 Motherboard investigation, preventing the parts from being reused.”
May 23
Monetizing Open-source is problematic marak.com · “No one pays for Faker development.”
May 23
You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup every.to · “There is a romantic vision of startup employment that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny.”
May 22
Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search plausible.io · “Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.”
May 18
Apple Music announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio apple.com · “These new features will be available for Apple Music subscribers starting next month at no additional cost.”
May 17
Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban themarkup.org · “Reed had inadvertently stumbled into a cottage industry of sites that charge high premiums for what are otherwise free or inexpensive government services.”
May 14
What I learnt roasting 200 landing pages in 12 months blog.roastmylandingpage.com · “It ended up generating me over £70,000 of work, over 2,000 email subscribers, and an ever-growing list of insights into the pains and challenges of early stage businesses and the amazing people that run them.”
May 13
As much as $365 billion wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops car purchases with bitcoin cnbc.com · “Musk said Tesla will not be selling any bitcoin and intends to use it for transactions “as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.””
May 13
'Champions League of tax avoidance:' Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on nearly $6 billion in revenue, report says businessinsider.com.au · “Despite earning $5.8 billion in global revenues in 2019, Uber claimed a $4.5 billion loss for tax purposes.”
May 12
The Ultimate Guide to Inflation lynalden.com · “This article looks at 150 years of data across multiple countries to provide a general idea of what inflation is, what to look for, and how to invest with inflationary and deflationary risks in mind.”
May 9
The global chip shortage is starting to have major real-world consequences cnbc.com · “The severity of the global chip shortage has gone up a notch over the last few weeks and it’s now looking as though millions of people will be impacted.”
May 9
Facebook threatens to make iOS users pay. Please do it, Mr. Zuckerberg zdnet.com · “Facebook is unhappy about this because it makes money by tracking you all over the web until the end of time.”
May 7
Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach safetydetectives.com · “In total, 13,124,962 of these records (or 7 GB of data) have been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical activities.”
May 7
WhatsApp will progressively kill features until users accept new privacy policy androidpolice.com · “However, after a few weeks of that, WhatsApp will then switch off all incoming notifications and calls for your account, effectively rendering it useless.”
May 7
Why I Work on Ads jefftk.com · “Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive: a newspaper at $220/y is effectively much more expensive for someone earning $10k than $100k.”
May 6
The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you signal.org · “Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.”
May 4
Please fix the AWS Free Tier before somebody gets hurt cloudirregular.substack.com · “AWS is the only cloud provider that creates these problems.”
May 4
Efficiency is the Enemy fs.blog · “Gloria’s job is to ensure Tony is as busy as he needs to be.”
May 4
How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents berthub.eu · “So the core of the company is no longer building something, the core of the company is buying something, and managing risk with contracts and procedures.”
May 2
SSD Makers start warning that Mining Products Like Chia Coin Will Void Warranty guru3d.com · “A new trend in cryptocurrency mining is using SSDs for Chia Coins mining.”
May 1
Muse Group formed to support MuseScore, Ultimate Guitar; acquires Audacity scoringnotes.com · “The company that already owns the music notation software and online catalog MuseScore and the Ultimate Guitar community and guitar tab catalog has announced its acquisition of Audacity, the popular free audio editing software.”
May 1

April 2021 23 posts

EU says Apple’s App Store breaks competition rules after Spotify complaint cnbc.com · “European regulators said Friday that “Apple has a monopoly” in the distribution of music streaming apps to owners of Apple devices.”
Apr 30
The 'Capitalism is Broken' Economy annehelen.substack.com · “Current pay for most of those positions: $10.50 an hour.”
Apr 30
Never run Google ads if you have an Android app danfabulich.medium.com · “If Google decides to ban you from AdMob/AdSense, they may also ban your Android app from the Google Play Store.”
Apr 28
Google Have Declared DroidScript Is Malware and Accused Us of Ad Fraud! groups.google.com · “The Google Play system has declared DroidScript is Malware and accused us of committing Ad Fraud!”
Apr 27
Changes at Basecamp world.hey.com · “No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.”
Apr 26
Lambda School Reaches Settlement with DFPI, Agreeing to End Deceptive Educational Financing Practices dfpi.ca.gov · “Lambda is a coding school that offers its California students the option of financing the cost of the program through a contract by which students defer tuition until they begin working in a specified job earning a specific income.”
Apr 26
Apple Is Sued for Telling You That You're "Buying" Movies nofilmschool.com · “You actually have rented them at a higher fee, for a longer time.”
Apr 23
Apple's M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model extremetech.com · “x86 OEMs almost never standardize a product family on a single CPU.”
Apr 23
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3 grafana.com · “Going forward, we will be relicensing our core open source projects (Grafana, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo) from the Apache License 2.0 to the Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.”
Apr 20
MAINTAINERS: update git.kernel.org · “You are an IBM employee 100% of the time.”
Apr 20
Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times? washingtonmonthly.com · “For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant.”
Apr 19
5G: The outsourced elephant in the room berthub.eu · “Driven by balance-sheet mechanics and consultants, service providers have been highly incentivised to outsource anything that could possibly be outsourced, and then some.”
Apr 17
Coinbase from YC to IPO blog.ycombinator.com · “We are proud to say that Coinbase is a Y Combinator company and a member of the Summer 2012 batch.”
Apr 14
Bitcoin Is a ‘Boon for Surveillance’, Says Former CIA Director decrypt.co · “The technology behind Bitcoin is a “boon for surveillance” and shouldn’t be shunned by governments but embraced, according to an ex-CIA boss.”
Apr 14
Just Be Rich keenen.xyz · “Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn’t mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s.”
Apr 13
How People Get Rich Now paulgraham.com · “In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance.”
Apr 12
Introducing OpenSearch aws.amazon.com · “Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.”
Apr 12
Microsoft buys Nuance for nearly $20 billion as it readies deal frenzy axios.com · “The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company, for example, powered the speech recognition engine behind Apple’s voice assistant, Siri.”
Apr 12
The Ponzi Career drorpoleg.com · “Masmej recruited other humans to share the risks of his early career in exchange for a share of the rewards.”
Apr 11
Google’s lawyer accidentally made a sensitive document public mattstoller.substack.com · “In a response to the complaint of a group of state attorney generals, Google’s lawyers - Paul Yetter at Yetter Coleman - filed a response, but accidentally forgot to redact critical information.”
Apr 11
Google does not want you to tell your players about your donation page agateau.com · “I added a link to my donation page within the game, depriving Google of some precious money it totally cannot survive without!”
Apr 10
Et Tu, Signal? stephendiehl.com · “It’s an old scam with a new face.”
Apr 7
LG is getting out of the mobile phone business axios.com · “LG was once one of those, but hasn’t been for many years, and had no clear path to change that.”
Apr 5

March 2021 22 posts

'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter bbc.com · “Twitter has now suspended many of the accounts, and Amazon has confirmed at least one is fake.”
Mar 30
Unsplash is being acquired by Getty Images unsplash.com · “This is not one of those tech acquisitions where the company is bought to be shut down.”
Mar 30
Announcing the Deno Company deno.com · “Deno is our attempt to breathe new life into this ecosystem.”
Mar 29
Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface twitter.com · “Hey @Ubiquiti, why are you pushing ads on the management interface for hardware I bought outright?”
Mar 29
Men Clamming Up femfosec.com · “When this happens, women are missing out on potentially valuable advice.”
Mar 28
Google's Got A Secret knuckleheads.club · “Anybody who has ever written a web crawler knows that Googlebot gets more access than everybody else.”
Mar 26
The Drivers Cooperative drivers.coop · “We are a driver-owned cooperative in New York City specializing in paratransit and Non-Emergency Medical Transportation.”
Mar 26
Is that ship still stuck? istheshipstillstuck.com · “It (probably) cost “us” $59 billion.”
Mar 25
Addon Unavailable on Google Chrome github.com · “The mention of all the people who helped to develop and translate ClearURLs is against Google’s rules because it could “confuse” the user.”
Mar 24
SF poop-testing startup, once compared to Theranos, charged in $60M fraud scheme sfgate.com · “The federal indictment states that uBiome sought upwards of $300 million in reimbursement claims from private and public health insurers between 2015 and 2019.”
Mar 21
Boosting developer success on Google Play android-developers.googleblog.com · “With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees.”
Mar 17
RethinkDB: why we failed defmacro.org · “In hindsight, two things went wrong – we picked a terrible market and optimized the product for the wrong metrics of goodness.”
Mar 13
Vitalik escalates ETH 2.0 merge as miners plan a 51% attack our.status.im · “Miners have strongly opposed this change, as it will significantly decrease their revenue, and they have even went as far as creating a website dedicated to stopping its integration.”
Mar 12
I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service tinyprojects.dev · “Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven.”
Mar 11
How I earn a living selling my open source software indiehackers.com · “I initially developed open3A because I needed it myself to write invoices to my customers.”
Mar 11
Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building travaux.ovh.net · “Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2.”
Mar 10
Excel Never Dies notboring.co · “Anyone who has worked in finance or consulting grew up on it, learned to love it over thousands of hours of practice and improvement.”
Mar 8
NFTs are a dangerous trap seths.blog · “They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators.”
Mar 7
Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version theregister.com · “The deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder.”
Mar 3
Killing Turbotax kunle.app · “Even the Justice Department recognizes TurboTax as a functional monopoly, and forced Intuit to sell CreditKarma Tax in order to complete the acquisition.”
Mar 3
Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald's, KFC & Pizza Hut agfundernews.com · “The three-year strategic agreement with McDonald’s will see Beyond Meat become the ‘preferred supplier’ of patties for the fast food chain’s new McPlant plant-based burger.”
Mar 2
Apple Card disabled my iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts dcurt.is · “Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.”
Mar 2

February 2021 26 posts

Are you trading or gambling? investinglessons.substack.com · “Gambling occurs when you have a poor understanding of risk, resulting in either (1) negative expected value bets, or (2) poor bet sizing that leads to ruin.”
Feb 27
Why Is Facebook Launching An All-Out War On Apple's Upcoming iPhone Update? npr.org · “In the coming weeks, Apple will update its iOS software for iPhones to require apps to get explicit consent to track what people are doing on their phones for the purposes of sharing it with third parties.”
Feb 26
GamestonkTerminal: The next best thing after Bloomberg Terminal github.com · “Gamestonk Terminal is an awesome stock market terminal that has been developed for fun, while I saw my GME shares tanking.”
Feb 25
Amazon Sends 'Vote NO' Instructions to Unionizing Employees, Tells Them to Use New Mailbox vice.com · “A USPS mailbox intended for mailing union ballots was recently installed just feet from where Amazon workers exit and enter the warehouse, a move that workers say makes them feel surveilled in the election, which is supposed to be anonymous.”
Feb 25
Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison kevinslin.com · “The initial onboarding call was entirely about how much money I was planning on spending with google (as opposed to the Amazon call where they wanted to help me architect my service).”
Feb 24
Attorney General James Ends Virtual Currency Trading Platform Bitfinex's Illegal Activities in New York ag.ny.gov · “Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie.”
Feb 23
Unsealed court document claims Facebook 'knew for years' that a metric was inflated and ignored an employee warning to avoid a revenue hit news.yahoo.com · “The lawsuit claims Facebook discovered removing duplicate or fake accounts from the total number would cause a 10% drop in potential reach numbers.”
Feb 19
Uber drivers are workers not self-employed, Supreme Court rules bbc.co.uk · “The decision could mean thousands of Uber drivers are entitled to minimum wage and holiday pay.”
Feb 19
GeForce Is Made for Gaming, CMP Is Made to Mine blogs.nvidia.com · “RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.”
Feb 18
Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? paygo.media · “The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money.”
Feb 17
IKEA to Discontinue Its Annual Catalog, Ending a 70-Year Run architecturaldigest.com · “At 40 million copies, its circulation is only about 20% of what it had been just five years earlier.”
Feb 17
Fake Amazon reviews 'being sold in bulk' online bbc.com · “These included “packages” of fake reviews available for sellers to buy for about £15 individually, as well as bulk packages starting at £620 for 50 reviews and going up to £8,000 for 1,000.”
Feb 16
Spotify says it's letting employees work from anywhere, while still paying San Francisco and New York salaries businessinsider.com · “Spotify said it would continue to pay at San Francisco or New York salary rates, based on the type of job.”
Feb 15
50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat npr.org · “The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding.”
Feb 13
Is an $800 purifier best to clean your home's air? Marketplace tested 5 top brands and their claims cbc.ca · “The Dysons we tested averaged a CADR of about 140 m3/hour, lower than most of the other air purifiers we tested, and well below the approximately 200 m3/hr Siegel recommends for cleaning small to medium-sized rooms.”
Feb 11
How Lyft discovered OpenStreetMap is the Freshest Map for Rideshare eng.lyft.com · “OpenStreetMap has a very high-quality road network in 30 large North American cities.”
Feb 9
Tesla buys $1.5B in bitcoin, may accept the cryptocurrency as payment in the future techcrunch.com · “As the news broke, the price of bitcoin instantly rose by around 7% to more than $40,000 per coin.”
Feb 8
How to lower the price of plant-based meat us14.campaign-archive.com · “The average price for meat alternatives sold in US grocers’ meat departments last year was $9.87/lb, twice the average price of beef ($4.82/lb), and fourfold the average price of chicken ($2.33/lb).”
Feb 6
Big name corporations more likely to commit fraud news.wsu.edu · “Fortune 500 firms with strong growth profiles are more susceptible to “cooking the books” than smaller, struggling companies, according to a recent study published in Justice Quarterly.”
Feb 6
Netflix's Annual Reports (10-Ks) used to be a work of art. What happened? singhkays.com · “2007, 2008, and 2009 are basically clones of each other.”
Feb 6
Google And Apple Have Caved To Pakistani Pressure To Take Down Apps Made By This Persecuted Religious Minority buzzfeednews.com · “Over the last two years, the government of Pakistan has forced Google and Apple to take down apps in the country created by developers based in other nations who are part of a repressed religious minority.”
Feb 5
My product is my garden herman.bearblog.dev · “I reached basic profitability, matching an average developer salary here, about 10 months ago, and since then I’ve been improving my projects.”
Feb 3
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees aboutamazon.com · “Today, we employ 1.3 million talented, dedicated people, serve hundreds of millions of customers and businesses, and are widely recognized as one of the most successful companies in the world.”
Feb 2
Google Stadia Shuts Down Internal Studios, Changing Business Focus kotaku.com · “Neither had released any games yet.”
Feb 1
Facebook testing notification to users about Apple privacy changes axios.com · “Developers forecast that only around 10-30% of users will actually opt-in to having their data collected, making it much harder for advertisers to target potential Apple customers without as much access to their data.”
Feb 1
My Third Year as a Solo Developer mtlynch.io · “By the end of the year, I earned $63k in revenue, far exceeding my goal.”
Feb 1

January 2021 31 posts

GitHub Should Start An App Store ankshilp.com · “In any case, it doesn’t make any sense for a single entity to govern what gets installed and not on billions of devices.”
Jan 31
Why Robinhood Disabled Buys but not Sells stu2b50.dev · “As volatility increased, the DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) increased the deposit requirements for brokers.”
Jan 31
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu · “We identify 22 third-party entities that provide shopping websites with the ability to create dark patterns on their sites.”
Jan 30
Statement of Acting Chair Lee and Commissioners Peirce, Roisman, and Crenshaw Regarding Recent Market Volatility sec.gov · “The Commission will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors or otherwise unduly inhibit their ability to trade certain securities.”
Jan 29
Robinhood denies claims that it sold GameStop shares out from under its traders theverge.com · “That contradicts the stories of twelve people who spoke with The Verge, saying that the app unexpectedly sold off their holdings in some of these companies.”
Jan 29
WE are Preparing a Class Action LAWSUIT against Robinhood! old.reddit.com · “I’m friends with a lawyer who says we have a good case for a class action lawsuit.”
Jan 28
Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life theverge.com · “These Discord servers are offshoots of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, where all of this seemingly began.”
Jan 27
A Bootstrapped SaaS Journey to $10K MRR bannerbear.com · “The API launch definitely alienated some of these early customers and they churned.”
Jan 27
WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update theguardian.com · “By contrast, Signal wasn’t even in the top 1,000 apps in the UK on 6 January, yet by 9 January it was the most downloaded app in the country.”
Jan 25
Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats github.com · “After a tiny unrelated description update, Just Player got suspended from the Google Play Store for “Sexual Content and Profanity policy”.”
Jan 25
Google has turned off access to sync features for Chromium bodhi.fedoraproject.org · “There is no good reason for Google to do this, other than to force people to use Chrome.”
Jan 23
Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch aws.amazon.com · “In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.”
Jan 21
New Intel CEO Making Waves: Rehiring Retired CPU Architects anandtech.com · “News in the last 24 hours, based on public statements, states that former Intel Senior Fellow Glenn Hinton, who lists being the lead architect of Intel’s Nehalem CPU core in his list of achievements, is coming out of retirement to re-join the company.”
Jan 21
Retiring Tucows Downloads tucows.com · “We have made the difficult decision to retire the Tucows Downloads site.”
Jan 21
Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing elastic.co · “Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.”
Jan 19
Intel Problems stratechery.com · “The only way to fix this incentive problem is to spin off Intel’s manufacturing business.”
Jan 19
A new and innovative way for Google to kill your SaaS startup gomox.medium.com · “Did you know that it’s possible for your site’s domains to be blacklisted by Google for no particular reason, and that this blacklist is not only enforced directly in Google Chrome, but also by several other software and hardware vendors?”
Jan 16
Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living news.ycombinator.com · “Over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list.”
Jan 15
Bill Gates is America's Largest Farmland Owner landreport.com · “The co-founder of Microsoft ranks as America’s largest private farmland owner.”
Jan 14
Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware's Pat Gelsinger to replace him cnbc.com · “Critics have pointed to the fact that Intel’s chief executive did not come from a technical background, having previously served as CFO.”
Jan 13
Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce cnbc.com · “The move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day.”
Jan 13
Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division's Suit to Block justice.gov · “According to the complaint, the transaction would have enabled Visa to eliminate this competitive threat to its online debit business before Plaid had a chance to succeed, thereby enhancing or maintaining its monopoly.”
Jan 12
WhatsApp rival Signal reports growing pains after Elon Musk's tweet economictimes.indiatimes.com · “Encrypted messaging app Signal said it saw a “giant spike” in India after WhatsApp announced it would be sharing more user data with parent Facebook under an updated privacy policy and new terms of service.”
Jan 9
No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees sahillavingia.com · “And it’s working: our creators earn over $175 million a year, and we generate $11 million in annualized revenue, growing 85% year-over-year.”
Jan 7
Online banker Simple, once among Portland's most promising tech companies, is closing down oregonlive.com · “Simple told clients it will transfer their accounts to BBVA but set no timetable for the change.”
Jan 7
My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero goodcheapandfast.com · “Then, Google’s May 2020 algorithm update cut my traffic by around 70%.”
Jan 5
Google workers announce plans to unionize theverge.com · “Prior to the announcement, about 230 Google employees and contractors had signed cards in support of the union.”
Jan 4
After spending over $57 million on Facebook ads, they kicked me and my pages off without warning or explanation jordan-shared.medium.com · “To date, we have not been able to find an avenue through which to talk to Facebook and hopefully find a resolution that will ensure we can continue to run our businesses while complying with all Facebook policies.”
Jan 4
My Experience @ Apple ex-apple-engineer.medium.com · “In this post you will read about how a team at Apple fabricated results for a project, their history of abuse, scapegoating, firing and forcing out employees, nepotism and corruption in the organization and contribution of senior management and HR to further worsening the situation.”
Jan 1
California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement leginfo.legislature.ca.gov · “A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to take orders and deliver meals prepared by the food facility.”
Jan 1
Apple has threatened to remove Amphetamine from the App Store github.com · “On December 29th, 2020, a representative from Apple contacted and informed me that, after 6 years on the Mac App Store, Amphetamine had spontaneously began violating one of Apple’s App Store Guidelines.”
Jan 1