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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-01-26.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ Synthesia hits a $4B valuation with its AI avatars.
▸ Windows 11's first 2026 update is bricking PCs.
▸ TikTok immediately breaks following its US ownership transfer.
The AI video avatar platform raised another $200M, proving that corporate training videos are the true killer app for generative AI. They're also letting employees cash out, which is nice work if you can get it.
In a shock to absolutely no one, TikTok's first weekend under US ownership was a technical disaster. Uploads failed and the FYP broke, proving that maybe—just maybe—infrastructure migrations are hard.
The EU is taking a hard look at Elon Musk's X after Grok was used to generate non-consensual deepfakes. It's another regulatory headache for the platform that seems to collect them like Pokémon.
Alumni from Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI have formed 'Humans&' to build models focused on collaboration rather than just chat. Because we definitely need more AI meetings.
In a delicious twist of irony, ChatGPT has started pulling answers from 'Grokipedia,' the AI-generated encyclopedia from Elon Musk's xAI. It's the snake eating its own tail, but the snake is an LLM and the tail is hallucinated data.
Microsoft's first update of the year is causing shutdown issues and general instability. They've already issued an emergency fix, but it's a rough start to the year for the OS that just wants you to love it.
A visual deep dive into SF's graffiti culture and what it says about the city's current state. It's a stark, artistic look at the physical layer of the tech capital.
A new vector tile format designed for efficiency. If you're into GIS or building maps, this is a significant step forward from existing standards, promising smaller file sizes and faster parsing.
A technical discussion on the 'Holy Grail' of Linux compatibility. It's a deep thread on the challenges of linking and loading across different Linux distributions.
A thoughtful piece on digital preservation and the ephemeral nature of modern software. Are we building a digital world that will simply vanish when the servers turn off?
A former astronaut dropped some truth bombs about the current state of moon gear. Spoiler: It's not great.
Comic-Con and major sci-fi authors are taking a firm stance against generative AI. The people who predicted the future don't like the version we're building.