Vol. I · No. 115WED, AUG 12, 2026
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Search the full wire by company, model, lab, or keyword. Every story we have ever aggregated.

Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees

STK095 Microsoft | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge A year after cutting around 9,100 employees, Microsoft is making further layoffs today as it begins its new financial year. The software maker is laying off around 4,800 employees today, approximately 2.1 percent of its workforce. Most of the employees affected by today's cuts are in Microsoft's commercial sales business or the company's Xbox division. In an internal memo to employees, Amy Coleman, executive vice president and Microsoft's chief people officer, blamed the job losses on a changing technology industry and the "need to adjust re...

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sqlite-utils 4.0rc3

sqlite-utils 4.0rc3 adds compound foreign key introspection and case-insensitive column handling with breaking changes.

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Some of the nation’s rich are letting AI teach their kids

Most Americans don't trust AI. It's proven that it doesn't know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don't even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America's wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools. Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha School are charging families tens of thousands of dollars to turn their kids into beta testers for AI tutors and "interactive project-based workshops." Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley have been major adopters of this new model. Shaun Johnson, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist, told ...

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Infuriating Google commercial imagines the founding fathers embracing AI

I call BS: the founding fathers definitely would have been Microsoft Teams users. | Image: Google "Group project, but make it 1776." That's how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google's collaboration tools and Gemini to help them draft the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson to check on the status of a draft, who takes a photo and uses AI to transcribe it into a Google Doc. Franklin and Adams hop in to make edits in suggestion mode, Gemini...

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sqlite-utils 4.0rc2

sqlite-utils 4.0rc2 released; Claude Fable assisted development at ~$149.25 cost.

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Better Models: Worse Tools

Claude Opus 4.8 degrades tool-use reliability by inventing extra fields in nested JSON, breaking schema validation despite correct edit logic.

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The fanfiction community is at war with AI — and itself

Fanfiction communities are trying to hunt down writers who haven’t written works with their own hands. | Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge Over the past week, a new fanworks movement has kicked off, with the aim to root out authors using generative AI. But the detection methods being implemented are questionable, and any fanfic writer could be caught in the crossfire. Broad distaste around the use of Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools has long been a thing in creative communities, including the world of fanfiction. Readers and writers have passed around tips for spotting supposedly AI-generat...

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