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// Tech news at terminal velocity
cat 2026-07-12.md
$ cat TLDR.md
▸ • Big Tech's AI datacenter boom pushes their carbon emissions to rival the entire country of France.
▸ • OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT's reach by building dedicated features for families and older adults.
▸ • Fields Medalist Terence Tao proves AI coding agents are the real deal by porting his 1999 Java applets in hours.
Microsoft, Amazon, and Google's collective carbon emissions have surged by nearly 20% in the past year, hitting 119 million metric tonnes. Thanks to the AI datacenter construction boom, these three companies now emit about a third as much carbon as the entire country of France. So much for those 'net zero' pledges.
OpenAI is hiring a dedicated product manager to build ChatGPT experiences specifically for families, caregivers, and older adults. With 31% of their users now aged 35 and older, the company is clearly looking to move beyond coding assistants and into the lucrative 'helping grandma fix the Wi-Fi' market.
The new G2 smart glasses feature a bright neon heads-up display focused entirely on productivity, ditching cameras and speakers completely. It's a refreshing privacy-first take on wearables for professionals who just want glanceable notifications without looking like a walking surveillance state.
When a Fields Medalist validates your workflow, you know you're onto something. Terence Tao recently used modern AI coding agents to port his ancient 1999 Java math applets into functional JavaScript in just a matter of hours. It's a fascinating look at how top-tier mathematical minds are leveraging LLMs to resurrect legacy code without getting bogged down in syntax.
The terminal is a developer's primary interface, yet architecturally, it remains a house built on sand. This deep dive explores why HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto chose Zig to build Ghostty, breaking the stagnation of legacy escape sequences with a multi-threaded architecture and dedicated render threads.
Speaking of Ghostty, the ecosystem is already expanding. Ghostel.el is a new terminal emulator for Emacs powered directly by libghostty. Because if there's one thing Emacs users love, it's embedding entirely new, high-performance subsystems into their text editor operating system.
After setting the music gear internet on fire in 2023, the mint green Nopia 'harmony machine' is basically finished. The chord-generating synth will launch in a couple of months for around £550, proving that sometimes viral hardware concepts actually do make it to production.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has been tapped to head the new UAP Science Advisory Council for the White House and Pentagon. Yes, they actually put the guy who keeps claiming interstellar objects are alien probes in charge of the UFO group. What could possibly go wrong?