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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-01-29.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ Waymo robotaxi strikes a child in Santa Monica, sparking fresh safety probes.
▸ Meta burned $19B on the metaverse last year but is now pivoting to 'AI social feeds'.
▸ Windows 11 hits 1 billion users faster than its predecessor, despite the haters.
A driverless Waymo vehicle hit a child near an elementary school, resulting in minor injuries and a major headache for the company. The NHTSA is already investigating, proving that while robots don't get tired, they still have a learning curve in school zones.
Runtime cloud security startup Upwind has raised a massive Series B at a $1.5B valuation. Investors are betting big that scanning code before deployment isn't enough—you need to watch the cloud while it's actually running.
Microsoft's latest OS has crossed 1 billion active users, hitting the milestone faster than Windows 10 did. Despite the strict hardware requirements and taskbar complaints, it seems resistance was futile.
CEO Carl Pei confirmed there won't be a Nothing Phone 4 in 2026. The company is skipping a year to focus on software and AI, meaning the Phone 3 will have to carry the torch a little longer.
Meta's Reality Labs burned through $19B last year, but Zuck has a new shiny object: AI-generated social feeds. He's betting that AI will be the 'next big media format,' potentially replacing your friends' updates with infinite, machine-generated slop. It's a bold pivot from a metaverse no one visited to a feed no one asked for.
Tesla is facing a double whammy: profits fell 46% in 2025, and a new TÜV report ranks the Model Y as having the 'worst reliability' among 2-3 year old cars. While the company is still moving units, the combination of aging hardware and quality control issues is starting to show in the data.
Apple is bundling Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro into a new 'Creator Studio' subscription. It's a move that screams 'services revenue,' locking creative pros deeper into the ecosystem while potentially softening the blow of individual app subscriptions. If you live in the Apple garden, the walls just got a little higher (and pricier).
A delightful deep dive into how GitHub built a multi-terminal-safe, accessible ASCII animation for their CLI. It involves custom tooling, ANSI color roles, and way more thought than you'd expect for a loading screen. A great read for anyone who loves terminal UI.
New research suggests early supermassive black holes didn't just eat everything in sight; they grew inside protective 'cocoons' of high-density gas. This butterfly-like phase might explain how they got so big so fast in the early universe.
Deezer is sharing its AI detection tech with rival platforms to help flag fully AI-generated tracks. It's a rare moment of industry solidarity to prevent the charts from being flooded by bots, though it's likely an arms race they can't win forever.
An Australian travel site's AI recommended a 'stunning' hot spring that doesn't exist. Tourists drove for hours only to find empty fields, proving once again that LLMs are great at creative writing but terrible at geography.
Google has disabled the 'Take a Message' feature on older Pixels after a bug was found that inadvertently leaked audio to callers. If your phone felt like it was listening to you, for once, it actually was.