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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-04-24.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ • DeepSeek drops V4 Pro and Flash, proving they can still punch in the heavyweight AI class at a fraction of the cost.
▸ • The UK Biobank suffers a massive leak, with 500,000 anonymized health records ending up for sale on Alibaba.
▸ • A US Special Forces soldier gets busted for insider trading on Polymarket after betting on a classified military operation.
DeepSeek just dropped V4 Pro and V4 Flash, a 1.6 trillion parameter behemoth that claims to rival GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. It's proof that the open-weights ecosystem is still very much alive and kicking closed-source models in the shins.
In what might be the worst e-commerce listing of the year, the anonymized health records of 500,000 UK Biobank volunteers were spotted for sale on Alibaba. The listings are down, but the panic over medical database security is just getting started.
Meta is testing 'Instants,' a dedicated app for disappearing photos that is essentially a 1:1 clone of Snapchat. Because why innovate when you can just copy-paste features from 2015?
The US is officially accusing China of 'industrial-scale' AI theft, setting the stage for massive sanctions. China calls it slander, we call it just another Tuesday in global tech geopolitics.
A US Special Forces soldier just learned that betting on classified military operations is frowned upon. Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly made over $400K on Polymarket betting on the capture of Nicolas Maduro—a mission he helped plan. It's the DOJ's first foray into prediction market insider trading, and it's a doozy.
MIT and University of Tokyo researchers have used a chemical dopant to boost the conductivity of carbon nanotubes to within 15% of annealed copper. It's a massive leap for materials science that could eventually lead to lighter, more resilient wiring for aerospace and enterprise IT.
Following Australia's lead, a growing list of countries are moving to ban social media for children. It's a fascinating look at how governments are trying to put the algorithmic genie back in the bottle to protect developing brains.
Jeroen Ooms has figured out a clever way to mount tar archives directly as a filesystem in WebAssembly. It's a neat trick for handling file systems in the browser without the usual overhead.
Someone built 'nowhere,' an entire website completely encoded within its own URL. It's a brilliant, slightly unhinged exercise in data compression and web architecture.
Despite all our technological advancements, we still don't have a more precise value for 'Big G' (the gravitational constant). Sometimes the universe just refuses to be measured.
South Korean police arrested a man who generated an AI image of a runaway wolf and successfully panicked local authorities. It's the modern, high-tech equivalent of pulling a fire alarm.
Vast revealed the flight suits for its upcoming commercial space station, confirming that you cannot, in fact, wear shorts and a t-shirt in orbit. Comfort takes a backseat to not dying in the vacuum of space.