Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Sources: the Trump administration is set to receive a ~$10B fee from investors in TikTok's US business for the government's role in brokering the TikTok US deal (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

Digg announces a "hard reset" and shuts down operations two months after it was relaunched by Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian, citing the scale of AI bot spam (Richard Lawler/The Verge)

Techmeme

Facebook launches new tools to help creators detect and report impersonation, and updates guidelines to better define what it considers to be "original content" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Sources: Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers to develop AI models for scientific research, is in talks to raise $175M at a $1B valuation (The Information)

Techmeme

Didi reports Q4 revenue up 10.5% YoY to $8.46B, international revenue up 47% YoY to $638M, and a net loss of $43.48M amid an overseas expansion push (Reuters)

Techmeme

MacBook Neo teardown: most repairable MacBook in ~14 years, with no parts pairing issues, a screwed-down battery, and relatively easy keyboard replacement (Elizabeth Chamberlain/iFixit News)

Techmeme

Travis Kalanick renames CloudKitchens' parent company as Atoms, focused on creating "gainfully employed robots" for the food, mining, and transport industries (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now offer a 1M context window at standard pricing; it is the default for Claude Code Max, Team, and Enterprise users on Opus 4.6 (Anthropic)

Techmeme

Meta says Instagram will no longer support end-to-end encrypted messages starting May 8, saying "very few people" were using E2EE in their DMs (Karandeep Singh Oberoi/Android Police)

Techmeme

Sources: Travis Kalanick prepares to launch a self-driving car company with backing from Uber and has been discussing acquiring Anthony Levandowski's Pronto.ai (Jessica E. Lessin/The Information)

Techmeme

Elon Musk says xAI "was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up" (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

Techmeme

AWS plans to deploy Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine chip for AI inference functions; AWS will still offer slower, cheaper computing using its Trainium processors (Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

Amazon Prime Video plans to raise the price of its ad-free plan, Ultra, to $4.99 per month, and add support for up to five simultaneous streams, from April 10 (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Techmeme

Sources: Elon Musk pushed out two more xAI co-founders after getting frustrated with xAI's coding product progress and brought in "fixers" from SpaceX and Tesla (Financial Times)

Techmeme

Adobe will pay a $75M fine and provide $75M in free services to users to resolve a US government lawsuit accusing it of concealing termination fees, and more (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Techmeme

Peacock adds a new feature to its app that uses AI to curate personalized vertical video playlists, narrated by a generative AI avatar of host Andy Cohen (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Techmeme

Banking, manufacturing, and other EU businesses warn "tech sovereignty" could hit profits and competitiveness as Brussels aims to cut reliance on US tech giants (Financial Times)

Techmeme

Uber is relaunching a robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas; the service will have a safety driver behind the wheel until the end of 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

STMicro says it will retrain workers and deploy humanoid robots in its older chip plants for repetitive and physically demanding tasks, aiming to avoid closures (Nathan Vifflin/Reuters)

Techmeme

Sources: HSBC and Standard Chartered are set to be among the first licensed stablecoin issuers in Hong Kong, as the city pushes to become a crypto hub (Bloomberg)

Techmeme