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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-05-13.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ • Amazon employees are gaming internal leaderboards by "tokenmaxxing" their AI usage.
▸ • Google is ditching ChromeOS for Android-powered "Googlebooks" built around Gemini.
▸ • Twin IT brothers wiped 96 federal databases minutes after getting fired.
Google is rethinking laptops with "Googlebooks," a new line of premium devices running an Android-based OS instead of ChromeOS. They're built from the ground up for Gemini, featuring a "Magic Pointer" that nags you with contextual suggestions when you wiggle it. Because what we all needed was Clippy, but make it AI.
Google and SpaceX are reportedly in talks to build data centers in orbit. They're pitching space as the future home for AI compute, presumably because cooling servers is a lot easier when you're in the literal vacuum of space.
Anthropic is rolling out new tools specifically designed for law firms to automate clerical functions like document review and deposition prep. The AI legal services industry is heating up, which means your lawyer's billable hours are about to get a lot more questionable.
GitHub is updating its individual plans with new "flex allotments" for Pro users and introducing a brand new Max plan. Because the only thing better than AI writing your code is paying a premium for it to write more of your code.
Amazon set a target for 80% of its developers to use AI tools each week, and employees responded exactly how you'd expect: by gaming the system. Workers are using an internal tool called "MeshClaw" to automate completely unnecessary tasks just to inflate their token consumption and climb internal leaderboards. Goodhart's Law strikes again.
Medicare has quietly rolled out ACCESS, a new payment model built specifically to pay for AI agents. For the first time, there's a governmental mechanism to compensate an AI for monitoring patients between visits or coordinating housing referrals. The tech world hasn't noticed yet, but this is a massive green light for healthcare AI startups.
Sam Altman testified in the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial, revealing that Musk once mulled handing control of OpenAI over to his children. Altman noted that founders who have absolute control "usually become dictators," which is a spicy take to deliver under oath.
Cloudflare engineers hunted down a nasty bug where CUBIC's congestion window became permanently pinned at its minimum floor, causing performance to plummet. The culprit? A Linux kernel optimization that didn't correctly measure idle periods, turning a feature into a QUIC congestion collapse.
Someone actually used the GitHub Copilot CLI to build an extension that turns any codebase into a procedurally generated roguelike dungeon. Finally, a practical use for that legacy monolith you've been avoiding—now you can literally fight your tech debt.
Fleet management company Samsara has trained an AI model to detect different kinds of potholes and gauge how fast they're deteriorating. It's a brilliant use of edge compute on trucks, though it won't make your city fix them any faster.
Twin brothers Sohaib and Muneeb Akhter were fired from their federal IT contractor jobs. Because their access wasn't immediately revoked, they spent the next 56 minutes wiping 96 government databases. Let this be your daily reminder to revoke credentials before the HR meeting.
The newest pitch in the AI boom is asking residents to host mini data centers in their homes. It aims to speed up compute deployment while compensating homeowners, effectively turning your spare bedroom into a very loud, very hot space heater that mines tokens.