Tech News

Tech News and Analysis from around the web



People might be curious to see the list of feeds that make up the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. It's dynamic, I can add or remove feeds through a very simple user interface designed for managing systems like this. It's like the user inteface of a product like WordPress, for designers and developers, producing results that are for users. There are now apps for the NBA, Devs and all my feeds.

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
TrueFoundry, which helps enterprises deploy AI systems at scale, raised $19M led by Intel Capital, taking its total funding to $21M, and claims 30 customers  —  TrueFoundry, a startup run by a group of former Meta engineers to help enterprises deploy AI systems at scale, has raised $19 million in fresh investment led by Intel Capital.


Big picture, the US is being turned into Russia.

California Senator Adam Schiff said, I think it was yesterday, that Trump and Musk are removing honest FBI investigators and DOJ attorneys so they can raid the treasury of the United States. It's obvious, but you don't hear it said very often. It's the money they want. All of it.

Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg:
Roblox reports Q4 revenue up 32% YoY to $988.2M, bookings up 21% YoY to $1.36B, vs. $1.37B est., and DAUs up 19% YoY to 85.3M, vs. 88.4M est.; RBLX falls 15%+  —  The number of daily active users rose to 85.3 million in the three months ended Dec. 31, versus Wall Street forecasts for 88.4 million.



Casey Hall / Reuters:
Trump's de minimis cancellation is likely to hit Shein harder than online dollar-store Temu, which has shifted to an Amazon-like bulk overseas shipment strategy  —  The Trump administration move to stop low-cost imports entering the U.S. tariff-free is likely to hit fast fashion retailer Shein harder …


Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Spanish police arrest a hacker for allegedly conducting 40 cyberattacks on critical public and private organizations, seizing 50 crypto accounts, PCs, and more  —  The Spanish police have arrested a suspected hacker in Alicante for allegedly conducting 40 cyberattacks targeting critical public …


Foster Wong / Bloomberg:
DeepSeek says it suspended letting customers top up their API credits due to server capacity shortages after being overwhelmed with demand since January 2024  —  DeepSeek, the Chinese startup whose artificial-intelligence model roiled global markets last week, said it would restrict access …


Kate Clark / Bloomberg:
SEC filing: Sequoia's evergreen fund has grown to $19.6B, up from $13.6B in early 2023, a signal that the firm continues to grow despite a VC funding slowdown  —  The fund's total includes new cash commitments, shares of now-public companies that Sequoia previously backed and cash returns from mergers and acquisitions.



Emma Roth / The Verge:
OpenAI opens ChatGPT search to users who are not logged in, after launching it to paying subscribers in October 2024 and logged-in users in December 2024  —  OpenAI is making its AI search engine more accessible.  —  OpenAI is making its AI search engine more accessible.


Bloomberg:
Sources: Andy Jassy's campaign to flatten Amazon's middle management raises fears among staff of lean years and fewer promotions, as old career paths dry up  —  Campaign to restructure workforce is capitalizing on a moment when return-to-office policies are more common and the technology job market is cooling off.


Kate King / Wall Street Journal:
Amazon has shrunk its Amazon Go store portfolio by ~50% since early 2023 to 16 stores in four US states, as its efforts to compete in physical retail falter  —  The e-commerce giant is closing more of its convenience stores; 'I don't think they really understand retail,' a consultant says


Anton Shilov / Tom's Hardware:
In Q4 2024, AMD outsold Intel in the data center area for the first time, with revenue up 69% YoY to $3.86B, vs. Intel's $3.4B, but analysts expected more sales  —  But sales of Instinct GPUs disappoint.  —  AMD on Tuesday announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024 and for the whole year.



Brent Crane / Bloomberg:
A profile of Joseph Firmage, who co-founded USWeb, which went public with a $2.5B market cap in 1997, and is now being sued by “antigravity machine” investors  —  Joseph Firmage helped create today's digital economy.  These days, he's being sued by antigravity-machine investors …





Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
XOi, whose software lets field technicians get info about the machines they need to fix, raised $230M from KKR and buys its rival Specifx for an undisclosed sum  —  Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology.


Henry Stockdale / UploadVR:
Interviews with nearly two dozen VR studios on shipping games on Quest, Meta's increased focus on Horizon Worlds, concerns over declining game sales, and more  —  With concerns about declining sales and discoverability, UploadVR spoke with nearly two dozen VR studios to discuss the state of VR development for Quest.


Sohee Kim / Bloomberg:
China's “mini-drama” industry grew 35% YoY to ~$6.91B in 2024, surpassing the country's box office and forcing iQiyi and Tencent to embrace short-form dramas  —  - New kind of web series tell stories in ultra-brief episodes  — Chinese companies are now exporting mini dramas to the US


Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Stanford and University of Washington AI researchers claim they trained AI reasoning model s1, distilled from a Gemini 2.0 model, for under $50 in cloud compute  —  AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits …







One of my next projects, Murphy-willing, will be JavaScriptScript.








And btw to Mitch McConnell, fuck you. You had a chance, with one freaking vote, to avoid this. You are among a small number of people who could have stopped this. This should be the first line in your obituary. "He could have saved the United States, but chose not to do it."

Highly recommend this week's Ezra Klein podcast. It made me wonder if any of the readers of my blog voted for Trump. I can't imagine too many did, unless they've been willing to overlook my strenuous support for any option that opposes him. However if any of you are still here, I'd like you to know that what's happening now is exactly what we thought would happen. If you agree that this is unacceptable, maybe we can use that as common ground to work together to get our country back from the chaotic authoritarian mess that Elon Musk is turning it into. He makes Trump look like an absolute moderate. Certainly no one who voted for Trump with any kind of appreciation for the American system, where your vote and mine matter, can stand by and not object to what he's doing to our system of government. If not now, keep this in mind as Musk's chaos becomes more and more real.






I possibly was a bit hasty in declaring the coup over yesterday. I'm sure there will be new restraining orders from the courts telling Musk to stop, and so far Trump has been obeying those, so there's some hope when that happens he'll order Musk to stop, and then we'll find out who the boss is and how our new post-coup reality works. The shock of Trump's plan for Gaza, announced yesterday may get even the most "loyal" Repubs in Congress to think again about what hell they hath wrought on they country they all grew up in. I have some faith that American values are installed in their personal operating systems, somewhere in there is the remnant of the ideals of the Constitution. So I might have missed the mark, I hope I did. Meanwhile I wonder if Musk's wonderboys have managed to penetrate the military, and if they're planning on giving them orders about how to restrain the anti-Musk protests that are starting to break out around the country. Oh mama we live in interesting times.

I updated the Developers account on Bluesky to follow Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Techdirt, Manton Reece and Cory Doctorow. I took my feeds off the list, and added other developer accounts I regularly read. I'm trying to bootstrap something here, to see what can be done, and feel it's important to take myself out of the list for now.






The coup is over. This time, unlike the last time it was tried, it worked. We're in the post-coup world now. He showed us exactly what he would do if he could and we somehow collectively acted as if he hadn't shown us. Sanewashing was just the tip of the iceberg, you can't blame it on the press, we didn't demand they get their shit together, we didn't try to change the subject so they'd have to tell the real story. We had a lot of tools available to us that we didn't use because we are lazy and selfish. BTW, if you want to follow the power, don't look at what governments do, look at what the other oligarchs do. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.


Freaky warning. As easily as Musk can turn off government websites, he can turn off our sites. He could turn off all .com or .org sites. He'll probably do it just that way. Only one domain will work in the future, x.com. Goodbye Google, Amazon, your drug store. Bubye. Not sure if moving your DNS to Europe or Asia will make a difference. He's taking advantage of centralization, and will try to make it more centralized. Totally centralized. A journalist couldn't report this, because what proof do I have? It's because there's a pattern here. And it's pretty obvious the tools he's using.

devs.feediverse.org on Bluesky. An interesting experiment.

I was just setting up an account for another Feed Reader experiment on Bluesky and found that they have a Suggested User List that recommended the usual people who get in the way of telling the story that's really happening. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, really felt it. We went through this with Twitter, it created influencers based on how loyal they were to the people who run Twitter, people who overlooked the obvious flaws in the system. We're living with their influence to this day, they have a million followers, completely manufactored by fealty to the owners. I swear to god these systems have to be publicly owned. The idea of turning to tech insiders to run them has run its course, don't you think. Over on Facebook this morning I saw an old friend with a cute meme that says people should paste swastika stickers on Teslas. That's nice. The reason you can get away with that is that you're attacking innocent people. More of the same. Of course publicly owned now means Musk Owned. See how things have changed, so quickly.

I would love to manage individual DNS domains using GitHub. I already have great tools for updating stuff over there. And everything on my current DNS system is manual and laborious.

Jesse Stay who I have known from early blogging days proposes to build the billionaire-proof social network using the AT Protocol. I'm going to help if I can. I'm developing apps that run on AT Proto, so at least I should be able to test my apps with his service.

What's happening in the US is like when a person who is a lifetime smoker gets cancer and stops smoking. You hope the cancer doesn't kill you, and swear to never smoke again if you're lucky enough to survive it.

We didn't appreciate how good we had it with our representative form of government. We could have stopped the erosion of our power at any time, when our reps would have more or less had to listen. Now, when we start trying to get their attention, which hasn't happened yet, it's going to be a competition between the rule of law, which is undermined, and the forces that would keep our would-be rulers in line if only our reps felt we were behind them, which they justifiably, do not.

The prognosis isn't good. But we should get our shit together asap because it's our only hope.

PS: Blaming other people is easy and powerless. Accepting your own responsibility and doing something to change it is powerful.