Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

India releases the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, meant to enforce the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, for public comments (Aroon Deep/The Hindu)

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Belgium-based Swave Photonics, which is developing its Holographic eXtended Reality platform for smart glasses and heads-up displays, raised a $28.27M Series A (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

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Samsung and Google plan to enable Eclipsa Audio, a new open-source 3D audio standard, on some YouTube videos later in 2025 via Samsung's 2025 TVs and soundbars (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Memo: Sameer Singh, TikTok's head of the North America ads team, is leaving the company at the end of February, as the company faces a US ban if it doesn't sell (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)

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Filing: Dara Khosrowshahi resigns from self-driving truck startup Aurora's board, to focus on his job as Uber's CEO and to reduce external board commitments (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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PitchBook: generative AI startups worldwide raised $56B from VCs in 2024 across 885 deals, up 192% from 2023, with startups outside the US raising just $6.2B (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

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In a test, iteratively asking Claude 3.5 Sonnet to "write better code" improved the code's features and speed, but aggressive prompt engineering introduced bugs (Max Woolf/Max Woolf's Blog)

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Sources: Tim Cook will personally donate $1M to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural committee in the spirit of unity; Apple is not expected to donate (Mike Allen/Axios)

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An in-depth look at Elon Musk's criticisms of Wikipedia, as he joins a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking information sources outside their control (Molly White/Citation Needed)

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Microsoft says it expects to spend $80B in FY 2025 on the construction of data centers that can handle AI workloads, with 50%+ of the spending in the US (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Sources: Getty Images is exploring a merger with rival Shutterstock; Getty jumped 13% for a $983M market value, Shutterstock rose 7.9% for a $1.1B market value (Bloomberg)

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After backlash, Meta says newly viral AI profiles on Facebook and Instagram were created in 2023 in "an early experiment", and it is deleting the profiles (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

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That Elon Musk 'Adrian Dittmann' screenshot is almost certainly fake (The Verge)

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Apple Intelligence, with features like Genmoji and Image Playground in iOS 18.2, requires 7GB of storage, compared to 4GB in iOS 18.1 (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

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The US sanctions Beijing-based cybersecurity company Integrity Technology over its alleged links to China-backed hacking group Flax Typhoon (Carly Page/TechCrunch)

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An unredacted lawsuit from Utah's AG claims TikTok has long known that TikTok Live promoted sexual content streams to minors and facilitated money laundering (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg)

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Elon Musk fanboy Adrian Dittmann's X activity and alleged 4chan posts suggest he might be Musk's fake online persona; source: the viral 4chan screenshot is fake (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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Meta required a public statesman like Nick Clegg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but now turns to the in-house Republican Joel Kaplan to appease Trump (Dave Lee/Bloomberg)

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Influencer marketing company Later acquires Mavely, which pays commissions to social-media creators for the sales they generate, for $250M in cash and stock (Katie Deighton/Wall Street Journal)

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Apple and Strava partner to feature Strava athletes in Apple Fitness+ programming, add more detailed Fitness+ workout summaries in the Strava app, and more (Victoria Song/The Verge)

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