not too late to add retro gameboy made from attack drone metal to your christmas wishlist!

Amazon is shaking up its AI leadership: Andy Jassy announced today that Rohit Prasad will leave at the end of the year. He'll be replaced by longtime AWS exec Peter DeSantis, who will oversee a newly expanded AGI unit and report directly to Jassy. www.cnbc.com/2025/12/17/a...

Meta is developing a new frontier AI model called Avocado, but performance problems have delayed it to 2026. The company’s shift from open source to proprietary AI is causing internal confusion. Good scoop by @jonathanvanian.bsky.social www.cnbc.com/2025/12/09/m...

new: people across Wisconsin are increasingly standing up to AI data centers. at the old Foxconn site, citizens are thankful for Microsoft, but they said no to a new Microsoft data center 20 miles away. worries range from a loss of open land to meager tax payments www.cnbc.com/2025/11/25/m...

scoop: An Amazon Prime Air drone snapped an internet cable in Waco, TX last week, prompting the FAA to open a probe into the matter. We obtained video of the incident, which shows the drone shearing a wire line then landing in a customer's yard. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/25/a...

Late night scoop from @anniepalmer.bsky.social: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas www.cnbc.com/2025/11/25/a...

New: Amazon's mass layoffs last month hit engineers the hardest, according to WARN notices. We analyzed docs in WA, CA, NY and NJ and found that 40% of the job cuts in those states were engineering roles. Product managers & program managers were also heavily impacted. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/a...

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week. @wired.com #ICE www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

Amazon staffers tell @anniepalmer.bsky.social they feel like they’re under an “incredible amount of pressure” and “burdened with more work” than before, following waves of mass layoffs. The potential for more layoffs next year has created further anxiety. cnb.cx/47FNeym

Some great nuggets in here about what’s going on inside Amazon right now, from @anniepalmer.bsky.social www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/a...

Palantir's comms chief said she's concerned about its political shift toward the Trump admin, including embracing parts of Trump's agenda and inking a contract with ICE to build "ImmigrantOS" "I think it's going to be challenging," she said. via @jennelias.bsky.social: www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/p...

ICE and Border Patrol agents, while wearing face masks, randomly stop people on the street and demand they submit to facial-recognition technology for a citizenship check. Via @josephcox.bsky.social www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Three times in the past two weeks, editorials at the 'Washington Post' failed to disclose that they focused on matters in which owner Jeff Bezos had a material interest.

Amazon confirmed this morning that it's laying off 14k corporate staffers. The massive cuts are being blamed on AI and bureaucracy bloat. Amazon is also unwinding a pandemic era hiring spree which caused its corporate and warehouse staff to balloon More details here: www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/a...

New: Amazon is preparing to announce sweeping layoffs beginning Tuesday that are expected to represent the largest cuts to its corporate workforce in its history. Amazon has continued to shave its headcount after laying off 27,000+ staffers between 2022 and 2023. www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/a...

Amazon's cloud is under pressure (it's not just Monday's outage). From newly serious competitors, from a homegrown bureaucracy, and from an artificial intelligence wave threatening to upend a market that Amazon Web Services invented. On AWS in the AI era: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and a handful of other major technology companies are among the high-profile donors who are helping to finance Trump's $300 million ballroom, via @spencerkimball.bsky.social www.cnbc.com/2025/10/23/t...

Just two days after Toronto denied the Mariners a World Series appearance, Seattle-based Amazon has announced a new robotics system called... Blue Jay www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/a... by @anniepalmer.bsky.social

On the heels of the NYT report yesterday, Amazon is out with a new warehouse robot today called "Blue Jay" that can pick, sort and consolidate packages in a single assembly line-style system. www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/a...

“.. internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.” @nytimes.com $AMZN www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/t...

As Benioff softens his stance on sending the National Guard to SF - Musk calls to deploy federal troops to the "drug zombie apocalypse" [disclosure: that I call home]... www.cnbc.com/2025/10/13/m...

Migrant laborers at Amazon warehouses in Saudi Arabia say the company hasn't followed through on its promise to reimburse them after extensive investigations found workers paid sham recruiting fees to secure contract jobs www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A book excerpt details the "enshittification" of Amazon, and how its "flywheel" technique now enriches the company at the expense of merchants (Cory Doctorow/The Guardian) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that

🚨NEW🚨 Amazon has been developing drone surveillance tech for American cops, from gun detection to repurposing Twitch's streaming code. It's also pushing all manner of surveillance tools, including Flock car tracking and AI that constantly monitors all prison calls. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

"The rate of election appeals by companies in the time from Wilcox's firing to the end of August was more than double the rate filed during the same time frame last year when the NLRB was fully functional, the Reuters tally showed." www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Am curious what might be considered "high quality" AI slop: "Mr. Sahai, the OpenAI product leader, said a significant amount of content, across the quality spectrum, would be produced with Sora, but that the highest quality work would rise to the top." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/t...

New: Two Amazon delivery drones crashed into a construction crane midflight in Arizona yesterday, prompting the company to suspend the service. The FAA and NTSB are probing the incident: www.cnbc.com/2025/10/02/a...

the torch has officially passed from millenials to zoomers. enjoy your turn in the sun as the whipping boy and freak show of american media, anthropologized as if being visited by aliens www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/s...

"Many of the laws don’t cover generic chatbots like ChatGPT, which are not explicitly marketed for therapy but are used by an untold number of people for it." apnews.com/article/ai-t...

New: I sat down with Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff, who returned to the Amazon-owned unit in April. He explained his decision to restore Ring's original mission to "make neighborhoods safer." Of the scrutiny over tech and policing, he said he "backs the blue" www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/r...

Really important story from @jonathanvanian.bsky.social on the burgeoning online market for AI "nudify" services that allow users to easily create nonconsensual, explicit deepfakes and the shockingly limited legal recourse for victims of this abuse www.cnbc.com/2025/09/27/n...

Docs reveal how deeply embedded Palantir’s tools were in ICE's investigative unit. For example, they used a Palantir app to plan a gang takedown & when a target was not at the expected location they used the same app to find the person at their family's address. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Not doing a renovation because I don’t want the terrorists to win

"Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and will refund $1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers, the agency said..." story by Annie Palmer @cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/09/25/a...

“.. days after President Donald Trump issued a public demand for his Justice Department to act ‘now’ to bring prosecutions against Comey and other political foes ..” abcnews.go.com/US/former-fb...

“The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the ‘fear of missing out,’ few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better.”

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Who the hell would use shit like ChatGPT when Dear Daria on the 2002 Sony Clié PEG-NX80V exists

New: Amazon suspended a Palestinian software engineer on Monday who protested its work with Israel through Slack posts and a letter to executives. It's the latest example of tech companies cracking down on dissent of their work with the Israeli government: www.cnbc.com/2025/09/11/a...

Five years after its splashy $1.3 billion acquisition of Zoox, Amazon is officially entering the robotaxi race by launching public rides in Las Vegas, its first commercial market. It'll take on Google's Waymo, the U.S. robotaxi leader. More here w/ @sal19.bsky.social www.cnbc.com/2025/09/10/a...

According to reports, “Amazon is simultaneously working on two models: one for its own drivers to assist with deliveries, and a sleeker version with color display for customers to order.” Anyway, today in luxury surveillance.

Strong reporting here from ProPublica, which found that three Trump Cabinet members -- at Labor, Transportation and EPA -- call multiple homes their primary residence on mortgages. That's the same move that led Trump to fire Lisa Cook from her job at the Fed. bit.ly/466yMyI

New: Reverse acquihire deals are gaining momentum in Big Tech as they look to keep pace in the AI race. But what happens to execs and staffers who get left behind? @ashleycapoot.cnbc.com, @sal19.bsky.social and I found these deals often turn them into "zombie" startups. www.cnbc.com/2025/08/19/h...

rewarding my microwave by letting it heat up a fork as a treat

Totally normal stuff: Two sections of the Constitution, about due process and foreign gifts, just vanished off the Congressional website, a site that has not changed in many many years www.404media.co/constitution...

NEW: Google dubbed an error from its healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini, a typo. Experts say it demonstrates the risks of AI in medicine. www.theverge.com/health/71804...

New: Google execs are "urgently" pushing employees to use more AI tools in their day-to-day as the company tries to get more productivity out of everyone amid growing AI $$ spending. cnb.cx/44RB5X8

Hey is it bad if google AI search results stop people from leaving google dot com 99% of the time? All our news and information creators can survive just fine with one percent of their previous search traffic right? I’m sure it’s fine. www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...