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The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 DOGE is on the cusp of accessing US taxpayer data
What they’re planning to do with it is anyone’s guess. (CNN)
+ FDA staff reviewing Musk’s company Neuralink were fired by DOGE last weekend. (Reuters $)
+ A top official at the Social Security Administration just left after refusing DOGE’s request to access sensitive records. (NBC)
+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)
2 DeepSeek may be shifting towards monetizing its AI models
Right now, they’re open source and free. How long can that last? (South China Morning Post $)
+ How DeepSeek ripped up the AI playbook—and why everyone’s going to follow its lead. (MIT Technology Review)
3 We’re inching closer to a norovirus vaccine 💉
Plenty of people might welcome this, especially after this winter’s nasty rash of infections. (Scientific American $)
4 The war on diversity and inclusion initiatives is a smokescreen
And the people waging it will go much further, if we let them. (The Verge)
5 Some states claim zero abortions
Which is impossible, and hints at something worrying: official statistics are being politicized in the US. (Undark)
6 China is looking for its own ways to protect data from quantum computers
It’s spurning algorithms created in the US in case they contain secret back doors. (New Scientist $)
+ Chinese President Xi Jinping met some of the country’s top tech execs yesterday. (The Information $)
7 Reddit moderators are fighting to keep AI slop off the platform
It’s an important battle to many—but it’s only going to get harder and harder. (Ars Technica)
8 Meta has wasted $70 billion on the metaverse. This advert shows why.
This must presumably be the best they could do, and yet it’s just embarrassingly bad. (Forbes)
9 Working from home has turned us into office weirdos
But hey, maybe this is our chance to carve out some better, kinder office etiquette. (Business Insider $)
+ To be fair, we still don’t know how to behave on Slack or Zoom either. (NYT $)
10 Are noise cancelling headphones causing hearing problems?
Audiologists say excessive use may interfere with the way teens learn to process speech and noise. (BBC)
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