mindbento

All tech news and insights in one place

Techmeme

2025 GDC survey: about 35% of all game developers work in VR/AR development, 8% of them make games for visionOS, 18% say their next games will be on visionOS (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

Survey of 3,000+ game devs: 11% were laid off in the past year, 58% back unionization, 30% say generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, more (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

2025 GDC: 63% of game devs say Meta Quest/Horizon Store is the VR/AR platform that interests them the most, with 59% currently making games for the platform (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

Trump says he would be open to Elon Musk or Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok US as part of a joint venture that would give the US government 50% ownership (Bloomberg)

Microsoft says it has a new deal with OpenAI that gives Microsoft "right of first refusal", meaning it's no longer OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

MrBeast joins an investor group led by Employer.com founder Jesse Tinsley in an all-cash bid to acquire TikTok US operations; several groups have shown interest (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg)

OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle announce The Stargate Project, a JV to invest in US AI infrastructure, committing $100B now and up to $500B in the next four years (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Nielsen: Netflix captured 8.5% of all US streaming viewership in December 2024, its highest share since July 2023, in part due to NFL games; YouTube had 11.1% (Drew Lerner/Awful Announcing)

Crypto.com launches its institutional exchange service for US customers; it had closed the service in June 2023 due to "limited demand" (MK Manoylov/The Block)

Tencent unveils Hunyuan3D 2.0, an AI system that turns single images or text prompts into 3D models in seconds, and open sources it on HuggingFace and GitHub (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

Netflix raises prices in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina; the standard US plan rises from $15.49 to $17.99, standard with ads jumps a dollar to $7.99 (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

Netflix reports Q4 revenue up 16% YoY to $10.2B and 301.6M global subs, adding 18.9M subs, more than doubling Wall Street estimates; NFLX jumps 13%+ after hours (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Netflix reports Q4 revenue up 16% YoY to $10.2B and 301.6M global subs, adding 18.9M subs, more than doubling Wall Street estimates; NFLX jumps 14%+ after hours (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Perplexity debuts Sonar, an API service to let devs build AI search tools into their apps, with a base tier costing $5/1K searches and a pricier Sonar Pro tier (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

Sources: Meta aims to debut glasses with a built-in display and new Oakley-branded smart glasses for athletes in 2025; it has resumed work on watches, earbuds (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Apple says installing macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3, or iPadOS 18.3 will turn on Apple Intelligence automatically on compatible devices; users can opt out later (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Meta says it will offer eligible TikTok creators free verification, content deals, and up to $5,000 in bonuses to post Reels (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

DeepSeek's new MIT-licensed AI models can be accessed via DeepSeek's API at a fraction of the cost of comparable OpenAI models but there are censorship concerns (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)

The SEC launches a "Crypto 2.0" task force led by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, to create a "comprehensive and clear regulatory framework for crypto assets" (Jeff Cox/CNBC)

Parrot Analytics estimates Severance season 1 earned $200M+, with ~50% coming in the year following the finale; Ted Lasso generated $609.4M from Q3'20 to Q3'24 (Max Goldbart/Deadline)

ByteDance-owned video editing app CapCut is now working in the US, but is still not in app stores, after Trump signed an EO attempting to pause the TikTok ban (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Omdia: by the end of 2024, TikTok generated ~$8B in ad revenue in the US and $63.3B globally, and surpassed 1.9B MAUs globally, including 145M MAUs in the US (Marta Balaga/Variety)

Meta will soon let users link WhatsApp accounts with Instagram and Facebook, allowing cross posts of WhatsApp Statuses as Stories on Instagram and Facebook (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin, acquired Hashnote; rwa.xyz data: Hashnote's USYC token last year become the largest tokenized US Treasury product (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

The UK debuts digital driving licenses and veteran ID cards, launching in 2025 via the GOV.UK Wallet, and AI tools, nicknamed "Humphrey", to help civil servants (Anna Gross/Financial Times)

Grindr debuts two of six features set for 2025, including an opt-in AI chat summary, and says 10K US users are testing its AI-based "Wingman", ahead of schedule (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Amazon's IMDb says founder Col Needham will step down as CEO and move to executive chair, and appoints COO Nikki Santoro as CEO; Needham launched IMDb in 1990 (Todd Spangler/Variety)

MicroStrategy bought 11K bitcoin for ~$1.1B from January 13 to 20, at an average of $101,191 per BTC, taking its holding to 461K, worth $48B+, or 2%+ of supply (James Hunt/The Block)

How purchasing Trump's memecoin, of which he reportedly holds $50B+ at January 19 prices, could be used to buy favors without actually transferring him funds (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)

Chinese smartphone sales fell 3.2% YoY in Q4 2024, the only negative quarter in 2024; Apple fell 18.2% to a 17.1% share and Huawei rose 15.5% to an 18.1% share (Counterpoint Research)

Sources: Elon Musk is likely to get a West Wing office, putting him close to Donald Trump, after Musk had for many days been asking about his level of access (New York Times)

Brendan Carr becomes FCC chair, and plans to focus on tech and media regulation, combating China, spectrum licenses, infrastructure, the space economy, and more (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Legal experts and lawmakers: Trump's EO halting the TikTok ban may not protect companies that host or distribute the app, as Trump cannot overturn Congress' law (Washington Post)

Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance's Nuverse, is back online in the US; developer Second Dinner plans to find a new publisher to avoid future bans (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Huawei seeks to grab AI chip market share in China, challenging Nvidia by positioning its latest Ascend AI processors as the hardware of choice for inference (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

Trump signs an EO renaming the US Digital Service as the US DOGE Service, directing agency heads to form "DOGE Teams" of at least four employees within 30 days (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Donald Trump signs an EO pausing the TikTok ban for 75 days to give ByteDance more time to reach a deal and aims to protect TikTok's providers from liability (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

Source: Meta is offering creators with large TikTok followings bonuses ranging from $10K to $50K per month to post on Instagram Reels before other platforms (The Information)

Donald Trump signs an EO ending "federal censorship" of online platforms, and directs the AG to investigate if the Biden admin censored US citizens' free speech (Cat Zakrzewski/Washington Post)

Trump revokes Biden's 2023 executive order that sought to reduce the risks that AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security, fulfilling a GOP pledge (David Shepardson/Reuters)

During a speech after Donald Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk delivered what many saw as two "Nazi salutes"; Musk posted a three-minute video of his speech to X (Matt Novak/Gizmodo)

The Verge

Trump says he’s open to Musk or Ellison buying TikTok

Microsoft is letting OpenAI get its own AI compute now

OpenAI and Softbank are starting a $500 billion AI data center company

Meta’s next smart glasses may be with Oakley

Sonic 4 comes to theaters in March 2027

Netflix is raising prices again, as the standard plan goes up to $17.99

The Switch 2 has a new trigger for disconnecting Joy-Con controllers

Apple Intelligence is enabled by default in iOS 18.3

Microsoft’s Steam-like browser overlay is now available on Windows 11

ACLU and 18 states sue Trump over his attempt to repeal birthright citizenship

How to mirror your iPhone screen on macOS

Balatro has sold over 1 million copies since December

Microsoft will automatically keep you signed in to your account starting in February

Korg’s first record players are designed for DJs, audiophiles, and archivists

Volvo announces pricing for delayed EX30 compact SUV

WhatsApp will let you share your status on Instagram and Facebook

The UK government is launching a digital ID mobile app

IMDb’s CEO, who founded the site 35 years ago, is stepping down

CapCut is back online in the US

A federal website on reproductive rights has vanished

Infinity Nikki’s new season brings the game’s biggest update yet

Today’s the last day to get $50 in credit when you preorder Samsung’s new Galaxy devices

TikTok isn’t back in the App Store yet

Fujifilm’s new hybrid instant camera features its widest lens yet

Donald Trump rescinds Biden-era executive order on AI safety

Instagram is reportedly trying to attract TikTok creators with large bonuses

A24’s Opus blurs the line between fandom and faith in first trailer

How the future of sports streaming died

What to expect at Samsung’s Galaxy S25 event

Samsung needs to give us a reason to care about new phones every year

TikTok ban: all the news on the app’s shutdown and return in the US

Marvel Snap is back in the US

Trump signs executive order to reverse Biden’s electric vehicle policies

Maginative

SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle Launch $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Initiative

Microsoft is No Longer OpenAI's Exclusive Cloud Provider

TechCrunch

Microsoft is no longer OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider

OpenAI teams up with SoftBank and Oracle on $500B data center project

Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang has published an open letter lobbying Trump to invest in AI

Amperesand targets data centers as the next big customer for its solid-state transformers

Startup founders flooded inauguration parties hopeful for dealmaking

Meta is building Oakley smart glasses for athletes: Report

Perplexity launches Sonar, an API for AI search

Trump targets EV charging funding programs Tesla benefits from

Govtech giant Conduent won’t rule out cyberattack as outage drags on

Spotify introduces educational audio courses, starting in the UK

Spotify’s educational audio courses could be coming to US

Trump moves to sink offshore wind

Meta lures TikTok creators with $5K bonuses, content deals, free verification

Funding to fintechs continues to decline, but at a slower pace

Stripe is laying off 300 people, but says it still plans to hire in 2025

Forum software NodeBB joins the fediverse

Samsung Unpacked 2025: Here’s how to watch and what we expect

Meta will soon let you link your WhatsApp account with Instagram and Facebook

IMDb founder steps down as CEO after 35 years

Anthropic plans to release a ‘two-way’ voice mode for Claude

UK plans ‘digital wallet’ for driver’s licenses and other ID, plus a chatbot powered by OpenAI

Mistral AI plans IPO

Toronto school district says 40 years of student data stolen in PowerSchool breach

Qomodo raises $13.9M to expand BNPL for Italy’s main-street retailers

HPE investigating security breach after hacker claims theft of sensitive data

MoneyHash, which provides single access to payment services in MENA, banks $5.2M

Karmen secures $9.4 million for its revenue-based financing products

President Trump signs exec order to make Musk’s DOGE commission more official

Trump signs exec order delaying TikTok enforcement action for 75 days

President Trump repeals Biden’s AI executive order

UK to unveil ‘Humphrey’ assistant for civil servants with other AI plans to cut bureaucracy

Coral Capital

タームシートからクロージングまで、日米VCのプロセス比較

The Register

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud went down 'hard' today

Patch procrastination leaves 50,000 Fortinet firewalls vulnerable to zero-day

Trump hits undo on Biden AI safety order, EV mandate, emissions standards, and more

Neural interface lets paralyzed person steer virtual quadcopter, opening new doors for gaming

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Meta, X sign up to Euro Commish code of conduct on hate speech

Tariff uncertainty looms large over budget conscious CIOs

HPE probes IntelBroker's bold data theft boasts

Microsoft joins CISPE, the Euro cloud crew that tried to curb its licensing

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

Asda tech divorce from Walmart delays cut-over for 55 stores

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

VMware migrations will be long, expensive, risky, Gartner warns

TSMC pauses production after strong earthquake hits Taiwan

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

China ever-so slightly softens stance on possible US TikTok sale

Hacker News

Hunyuan3D 2.0 – High-Resolution 3D Assets Generation

Announcing The Stargate Project

Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard

HyperDX (YC S22) is hiring engineers to build open source observability

Remembering Nan Shepherd

Sigstore: Making sure your software is what it claims to be

JReleaser: quick and effortless way to release your project

LLMs Demonstrate Behavioral Self-Awareness [pdf]

China won A side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 vs. OpenAI O1 for Finance

Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

Why AI reminds me of cloud computing

Mercator: Extreme

Ask HN: Is wind power financially viable without subsidies?

Show HN: A submarine combat game in the browser

Rafael Araujo's 20 Mesmerizing Geometrical Masterpieces (2024)

Webring

Why do regexes use `$` and `^` as line anchors? (2024)

MIT Unveils New Robot Insect, Paving the Way Toward Rise of Robotic Pollinators

How the strengths of Lisp facilitate complex and flexible applications (2016)

Cab Numbers

Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)

Deploying Rails on Docker: Kamal Alternative

Interesting BiCMOS circuits in the Pentium, reverse-engineered

Motion (YC W20) Is Hiring EMs and Engineers

Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

Show HN: SudokuVariants – play and construct different variants of Sudoku

Guided by the beauty of our test suite

Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories

Concept cells help your brain abstract information and build memories

Stop making moves like a funded startup when you're bootstrapped

How many Alpine packages can you install at once? (2024)

Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)

Show HN: A Product Hunt alternative where products DON'T compete with each other

Show HN: Pica – Rust-based agentic AI infrastructure (open-source)

Calm tech certification "rewards" less distracting tech

0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms

Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

Couriers mystified by the algorithms that control their jobs

Show HN: Amurex – An open source AI meeting copilot

People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research

The Gilded Age novel that helps explain our fascination with Luigi Mangione

Trump's science advisers: how they could influence his second presidency

Show HN: Printercow – Turn any thermal printer into an API endpoint

Why is this "Elon is Naziscum" token hidden?

What I've learned about writing AI apps so far

Open Source Alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku

Poland fumes over US block on AI chips

Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith

Ancient Celtic tribe had women at its social center

Perl Weekly Issue #704 – Perl Podcast

Framework Fatigue: The Real Reason Developers Get Angry About New Tech

Meta Censoring '#Democrat' on Instagram

Statement on planned protests during the upcoming FOSDEM 2025

The QUIC API OpenSSL will not provide (2021)

Kimi K1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs

The most viewed articles of 2024

Some Lessons from the OpenAI FrontierMath Debacle

X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube sign EU code to tackle hate speech

We've lost our respect for complexity

Ask HN: How are you preparing for PEPPOL?

Context should go away for Go 2 (2017)

Ask HN: Can we just admit we want to replace jobs with AI?

More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

Liskov Substitution: The real meaning of inheritance

Liskov Substitution: The Real Meaning of Inheritance

Bambu denies their own documented restrictions [video]

President signs order refusing to enforce TikTok ban for 75 days

Japan Offers Free Daycare to Boost Tokyo's Falling Birth Rate

United States Digital Service Renamed to DOGE

It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI

2025 Daily Surface Air Temperature Looking Bad

Ruff: Python linter and code formatter written in Rust

Jason Liu (YouTube)

First Applied LLM office hour of 2025

Sequoia Capital

Robust Intelligence Spotlight

David Heinemeier Hansson

Waiting on red

Product Hunt

Sonar by Perplexity

Starlight Partner Program

DeepSeek R1

Center Meditation Timer

Fireship (YouTube)

This free Chinese AI just crushed OpenAI's $200 o1 model...

Daring Fireball

★ Let’s Not Mince Words Regarding Trump’s Executive Order to Pause Enforcement of the TikTok Law and Provide Supposed Immunity to Companies That Are in Clear Violation of It

NPR on Trump’s Executive Order to Pause Enforcement of the TikTok Ban and Provide Supposed Immunity to Companies That Are Violating the Clear Letter of the Law

Apple Support: ‘About Availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. Apps in the United States’

Dave Chappelle’s SNL Monologue