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Today’s Storystream

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The government’s plan to break up Google

On The Vergecast: what will come of Chrome and Search, AI woes for Amazon, and the Threads / Bluesky battle rages.

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Inside Amazon’s plan to compete with Nvidia’s AI chips.

Bloomberg explores Amazon’s $8 billion partnership with Anthropic that could advance Amazon’s Trainium hardware and software tools enough for the AWS provider to cut into Nvidia’s stranglehold on the $100-billion-plus market for AI chips:

Trainium2 is the company’s third generation of artificial intelligence chip. By industry reckoning, this is a make-or-break moment. Either the third attempt sells in sufficient volume to make the investment worthwhile, or it flops and the company finds a new path.


Threads.com shows something now.

Meta seemed to have bought the domain earlier this year, sometime after it bought the company that owned it prior to the debut of threads.net, where Meta’s Twitter competitor lives.

Previously, visiting the threads.com URL didn’t show anything, but today, it shows... well, an error message. With a “Meta © 2024” and a Facebook logo.


A screenshot showing a message reading, “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,” with a Facebook logo above it and text attributing copyright to Meta.
What’s new?
Screenshot: Threads.com
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Tesla tells court it’s settling with Rivian.

Tesla notified a California judge that it had reached a conditional settlement with Rivian, reports Bloomberg, four years after accusing Rivian in a lawsuit of intentionally poaching Tesla employees and stealing trade secrets.

Conditions of the settlement weren’t revealed in the filing, and Tesla expects that a request to dismiss the suit will be filed by December 24th, Bloomberg notes.


The Bluesky firehose, tunnelized.

Theo Sanderson created a visualizer that sends you through a tunnel of Bluesky posts as they happen. Maybe it’s pointless, like watching users bust cusses in real-time, but it’s also fun that the platform enables this sort of thing to be made.


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The Biden administration may restrict trade with up to 200 more Chinese chip companies.

A US Chamber of Commerce email to members sent on Thursday indicated that the government is preparing to announce the new export restrictions “prior to the Thanksgiving break,” reports Reuters.

That’s not all, the outlet writes:

Another set of rules curbing shipments of high-bandwidth memory chips to China is expected to be unveiled next month as part of a broader artificial intelligence package, the email continues.


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Musk dodged a sanction over skipping an SEC meeting in September.

A federal judge said Friday that sanctioning Musk was unnecessary “because he already agreed to reimburse the SEC $2,923 to cover airfare for the trio of agency lawyers he stood up in Los Angeles in September,” Bloomberg writes.

The agency sought to sanction him after he ditched a testimony over his Twitter acquisition to watch a SpaceX launch.


Strava’s API debacle highlights the messiness of fitness data

There are dozens of fitness apps and wearables, and Strava’s new rules will make it harder to get all that data in one place.

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iFixit’s M4 MacBook Pro teardown shows not much has changed.

Apart from “subtle differences” like a slightly bigger heatsink and rearranged components, the newest MacBook’s internal layout is about the same as the M3 model’s. iFixit summarizes in a blog post supplementing its video:

Parts pairing and calibration issues remain a major obstacle. Batteries and ports are relatively repair-friendly, but swapping displays or logic boards is a minefield of software locks.


Threads has landscape video now.

Saw this news on 9to5Mac. I honestly didn’t know landscape video wasn’t previously possible.


A screenshot of posts confirming that Threads has videos and photos in landscape mode now.
You can see these posts in context here.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
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A hotfix for a hot mess.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has had a pretty rough launch, and now Microsoft has put out a hotfix aimed at addressing some of the performance and stability issues. “We will continue to investigate any issues and keep the community informed,” says game lead Jorg Neumann.


Elon Musk’s new DOGE plans are actually old ideas about mass deregulation

Behind DOGE’s memey name is a plot to dismantle the federal government.

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A ‘banking as a service’ provider collapsed, but where did the money go?

Thousands of people say they’ve collectively been locked out of more than $30 million due to the bankruptcy of fintech middle-man Synapse.

CNBC reports federal agencies like the FDIC don’t cover nonbanks like Synapse, and “the estate of Andreessen Horowitz-backed Synapse doesn’t have the money to hire an outside firm to perform a full reconciliation of its ledgers.”


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Tech companies are laying low at the UN climate summit.

“We don’t have anything there this year,” Meta told the Financial Times.

The annual UN summit is arguably the biggest climate event of the year, and typically an opportunity for tech companies to grandstand. But Big Tech’s obsession with AI has led to growing greenhouse gas emissions, pushing companies further away from climate goals.


Inside Elon Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI

Emails in Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI expose the startup’s rocky origins.

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Texas to advertisers: give Elon Musk your money, or else.

Not spending ad dollars on a website because its owner keeps spouting weird conspiracy theories is a very serious antitrust problem, and as usual, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is on it. Surely the best use of law enforcement’s time and money.


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They’re reaching, your honor.

A federal judge denied OpenAI’s bid to force The New York Times to reveal how its reporters use AI tools, ruling that the discovery request was overly broad. The ruling’s final metaphor gives you a hint of how silly the judge found the whole thing:

“If a copyright holder sued a video game manufacturer for copyright infringement ... the video game manufacturer would not be entitled to wide-ranging discovery concerning the copyright holder’s employees’ gaming history.”