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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-04-25.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ • Google is dropping up to $40 billion into Anthropic, expanding their partnership and cloud capacity.
▸ • Cohere is merging with Germany's Aleph Alpha to create a $20B transatlantic AI powerhouse.
▸ • Firefox quietly integrated Brave's Rust-based adblock engine into version 149.
Alphabet is doubling down on Anthropic with a massive $40 billion investment, starting with $10B upfront at a $350B valuation. The deal expands their cloud partnership, giving Anthropic 5 gigawatts of compute capacity over the next five years.
Canadian AI startup Cohere is merging with Germany's Aleph Alpha in a $1.8 billion all-stock transaction, creating a $20B transatlantic entity. The move is a strategic play to capture the European sovereign AI market and counterbalance US dominance.
Microsoft is rolling out a feature to Dev and Experimental Insider channels that lets you indefinitely delay Windows updates up to 35 days at a time. No more forced restarts in the middle of a crucial gaming session or deployment.
Series, a social networking app gaining traction on college campuses, just raised a $5.1 million pre-seed round. Their pitch? Building an AI social network directly inside iMessage.
Internal Slack messages and interviews paint a picture of turmoil at Palantir, with employees expressing concern over the company's direction. Meanwhile, the company is reportedly helping the IRS investigate financial crimes using their software.
Apple and Samsung's comfortable duopoly in the US has led to a stagnation in smartphone innovation. While Chinese manufacturers are pushing the boundaries of battery tech and camera hardware, the US market remains trapped in a cycle of incremental upgrades.
Mozilla has quietly integrated Brave's Rust-based ad-blocking engine (adblock-rust) into Firefox 149. While it's currently disabled by default and lacks a UI, you can enable it via about:config to test network-level blocking without extensions.
A new open-source wiki layer for AI agents uses Markdown and Git as the source of truth, topped with a BM25 and SQLite index. It runs locally, allowing agents to maintain and take their knowledge base with them without relying on vector databases.
Jeff Geerling reviews the latest batch of 10 Gigabit Ethernet USB adapters, noting they are finally getting cooler, smaller, and cheaper. A welcome development for homelab enthusiasts tired of thermal throttling.
A modern port of Borland's classic Turbo Vision UI framework has hit Hacker News. It brings the nostalgic text-based user interface paradigm into the modern era with cross-platform support.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote a fiery letter blasting Joseph Sanberg, a founder he backed who recently pleaded guilty to fraud. Ballmer admitted he was "duped and feels silly."
BMW showcased the iX3 Flow Edition at the Beijing Auto Show, bringing us one step closer to a commercially available car wrapped in E Ink panels that can dynamically change its appearance.