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// Tech news at terminal velocity

cat 2026-04-03.md

Gemma 4 Goes Apache, Utah's AI Psychiatrist, and the Olive Garden Compass

$ cat TLDR.md

• Google drops Gemma 4 with a true Apache 2.0 license, finally giving developers the open-weight freedom they've been begging for.

• Microsoft flexes its in-house AI muscles with three new MAI foundational models for voice, transcription, and images.

• Utah becomes the first state to let an AI chatbot prescribe and refill psychiatric medications, because what could possibly go wrong?

Headlines & Launches

🔓 Google's Gemma 4 Goes Truly Open

Google just dropped Gemma 4, featuring four models ranging from 2.3B to 31B parameters. The real headline? They've ditched their custom restrictive terms for a standard Apache 2.0 license, making it a massive win for the open-source community.

Source: Ars Technica

🎙️ Microsoft's In-House AI Pivot

Proving they aren't just an OpenAI wrapper, Microsoft unveiled three proprietary MAI models for transcription, voice synthesis, and image generation. MAI-Transcribe-1 is already boasting speeds 2.5x faster than Azure's current offerings.

Source: TechCrunch

🎵 ElevenLabs Drops ElevenMusic

The voice cloning giant is stepping into the music industry with a new iOS app that lets users generate and remix songs via text prompts. It's a clear signal that ElevenLabs wants to own the entire audio stack, not just speech.

Source: TechCrunch

💊 Utah's AI Psychiatrist

In a bold (and slightly terrifying) move, Utah is piloting an AI system to handle routine psychiatric prescription refills without a human doctor. Officials hope it eases care shortages, while physicians are understandably raising their eyebrows at the opaque tech.

Source: The Verge

Deep Dives

🗄️ Cloudflare Rethinks the Cache for AI Bots

With AI bots now accounting for 32% of Cloudflare's traffic (over 10 billion requests a week), the CDN giant is having to redesign how caching works. Unlike humans who flock to popular pages, AI scrapers sequentially devour everything, breaking traditional cache-hit logic.

Source: Cloudflare Blog

🕵️ The Granola Privacy PSA

If you're using the trendy AI note-taking app Granola, you might want to check your settings. Despite claiming notes are 'private by default,' they are actually viewable to anyone with a link and used for internal AI training unless you explicitly opt out.

Source: The Verge

Engineering & Research

🔨 Nvidia GPUs Hit by New Rowhammer Attacks

Security researchers have unveiled GDDRHammer and GeForge, two new Rowhammer attacks targeting GDDR6 memory in high-performance Nvidia GPUs. These exploits allow malicious users to flip bits and gain complete root control of host machines, a nightmare for shared cloud environments.

Source: Ars Technica

Edge Caching Strategies to Cut Latency

A deep technical dive into how misconfigured caching is the stealthiest source of poor UX and runaway origin costs. The guide covers Cache-Control composition, sensible TTLs, and surrogate-key invalidation to move latency off the critical path.

Source: DEV Community

Odds & Ends

🧭 The Times Square Olive Garden Compass

Some beautiful weirdos have engineered a physical compass that points exclusively to the Times Square Olive Garden. It's the navigation tool absolutely nobody asked for, but we desperately need.

Source: The Verge

📚 AO3 Finally Exits Beta

After a mere 17 years of testing, the beloved fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially dropping its beta tag. Better late than never.

Source: The Verge

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