La migra moves, gas triples, and the water plants got hacked
The water plants got hacked, gas prices may triple, and TPS shifted under Trump — this is the week la gente actually feels. Meanwhile Apple wants 15% off purchases, Meta patents facial-recognition glasses, and Pocket is shutting down. Breathe. Export your stuff.
The water plants that got hacked — what's known and what isn't
Over the last couple of weeks, hackers broke into the systems of several water plants across the United States. The attacks are being blamed on Iranian actors, but the details are still thin. We know the systems got hit. We don't know yet how deep the intrusion went, what data was taken, or whether anything was actually changed in the water that flowed through the pipes.
Water utilities are not Silicon Valley. Most of them run on legacy control systems that were old before half the people reading this were born, patched together by contractors who've moved on, and monitored by small teams that can't afford a 24/7 security desk. That makes them an easy target — low profile, high impact. The attacks line up with a broader pattern of state-sponsored intrusions into critical infrastructure, but the Iranian connection has not been confirmed by any official agency in the public record yet. The FTC and the Department of Energy are looking into it; the story is still developing.
Why this matters for us: if someone can slip into the controls of a water plant, the threat isn't abstract — it hits the people who show up at the sink in the morning and expect the water to be safe.
Apple wants a 15% cut on purchases made through external links
Apple is asking a federal judge for permission to take up to 15% on transactions that happen outside its App Store — payments made through external links in apps. Right now, Apple's rules require most purchases in apps to go through its own payment system, which takes 30%. That's what's under challenge. But this new proposal pushes the reach further: if the judge approves, purchases linked from inside apps would also feed Apple's cut.
The fight has been going on for years. Epic Games sued Apple over the App Store rules, and the case wound up in the Northern District of California. The original ruling blocked Apple from forcing purchases through its own system, but Apple keeps testing the limits. This latest proposal is another attempt to keep revenue flowing to Cupertino while still claiming compliance with court orders. The 15% figure is lower than the 30% Apple takes on App Store sales, but the reach is wider — it would apply to things like subscription payments, in-app purchases, and any transaction tied to an external link.
Why this matters for us: if Apple wins this, every app — including the ones we use and build — could end up paying Apple a cut on money that never touches the App Store, squeezing margins for the small businesses and creators who already operate on thin lines.
A company that built the world's biggest social network is now trying to build the world's most intimate recorder.
— 404media.co
#meta-patents-facial-recognition-glasses-to-track-who-s-at-your-party-bbd626Memories stick around even when the brain goes dark
A new study shows mice can retrieve memories after hibernation — a state that basically shuts their brains off and trims down synapses. The finding suggests memories aren't locked into a single wiring pattern. They survive across shifting neural systems.
That's the part that…
Agents that remember — meet Kelex
You're building an agent that needs to stick around. Not a one-shot chat that forgets everything the moment it responds. A real tool that remembers the user across months, picks up where it left off, and knows when it's guessing.
Most frameworks don't handle this. They treat every run like a fresh conversation — no memory, no flagging, no tenant model, no audit trail. So you write the substrate yourself. Again.
Kelex is that substrate, productized. It gives you typed memory, tenants and agents as first-class objects, bounded confidence with progressive flagging, and webhooks for human-in-the-loop steering. You tell it when something feels uncertain and it raises a flag instead of lying.
We use Kelex to run Lara and the BFTS content stack ourselves before we sold it. So we know the pain points and we've solved them.
If your agent needs to stay in the room, this is the thing.
https://brownforces.io/solutions
Gas prices could triple — and hyperscalers are sitting on the bill
A new forecast from the Energy Information Administration warns that natural gas prices in parts of the U.S. could triple over the next decade. The numbers aren't predictions — they're scenarios, and the high one is the one everyone's worried about.
The people who bought in…
PayPal is up for sale. Stripe and Advent are circling
PayPal is in active talks to be bought by Stripe and private equity firm Advent, the latest twist in the fintech firm's turnaround under its new CEO. The deal is still being negotiated — nothing is signed — but the market is paying close attention to whether a private owner would do what public markets haven't been able to do: fix the business.
PayPal has been a quiet giant for a decade, but it's lost ground to faster, leaner competitors and the broader shift toward embedded payments and open banking. The stock has lagged, and the new leadership is now looking for a buyer rather than trying to grow organically. Stripe brings the payments infrastructure — the rails, the risk engine, the merchant relationships. Advent brings the PE playbook for restructuring, cost-cutting, and eventual exit. Neither one is a hobby.
What changes if this goes through is who controls the rails for everyday payments. PayPal processes billions in transactions a year — most of them routine purchases, refunds, payouts to small merchants and freelancers. If those accounts get folded into Stripe or spun off as a private subsidiary, the rules around fees, data access, and customer support could shift without a single press release. The people who use PayPal to get paid, to pay vendors, to send money to family — they'll feel the effects in fees, in app quirks, in how fast a payout hits.
Why this matters for us: if the backbone of our payments gets swallowed by a bigger company, the fees, privacy rules, and customer service will change — and we won't have a vote.
Google DeepMind's reorg and why AI might be a bubble
Google is reshuffling DeepMind under a new head, a move that signals how the company's trying to keep the lab from running off on its own. The reorg comes as the broader AI sector faces mounting pressure: big capital has poured in, valuations have stretched, and now the…
Laptop prices are spiking — here’s how to actually shop smart
Prices on student laptops are out of whack. The memory shortage is real and it’s expected to hold through 2027, so don’t expect the bottom to drop. The Verge’s student buying guide says you can still find a mostly tolerable machine for under $500 and a good one for around $700, but the real advice is to bite the bullet and buy a little more power now — especially for a college student. Spending more on something like a MacBook Air buys build quality and headroom that’ll carry you through four years. Lots of Verge writers are still on M1 MacBook Airs from 2020.
The rule of thumb: go with a Mac running Apple silicon or a Windows laptop with Intel or AMD chips from the last few years (nothing older than 2022). Snapdragon X chips are solid too, unless you need specialized software that won’t run on Windows on Arm or you want to game. Aim for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage if you can — eight gigs works on macOS with the MacBook Neo, but Windows machines struggle with it. For the tightest budgets or younger kids, a quality Chromebook is still the play.
The top pick is the 9/10 MacBook Neo — sharp performance for the price, perfect for middle or high school. It trades off 8GB of RAM, slower storage, and no keyboard backlighting, but the trackpad is the best around and the screen and speakers hold up.
Why this matters for us: a lot of our families are juggling work and tuition, so buying one right now saves a lot of headache down the road.
Kog tightens the screws on GPU inference
The startup Kog is pushing harder on a simple bet: that GPUs aren't a bad fit for agentic workloads, they're just wasteful. The company is now iterating on its inference stack to squeeze more throughput out of the same hardware — less waste, more tokens per dollar.
Agentic…
Pocket is shutting down. Export your stuff before October 8
Pocket, the read-it-later app that's been a quiet workhorse for the past 15 years, is closing. The shutdown was announced today, and users have until October 8, 2025 to export everything — saved articles, lists, archives, favorites, notes, and highlights. After that date, it's gone.
It was one of those tools you forgot was there until it vanished. Built by Mozilla, bought by RSSHub, then by Readwise, Pocket became the default way people hoarded long-form reads on their phones. No algorithm. No ads. Just a place to stash something for later. That's why the shutdown stings — not because it was flashy, but because it was reliable.
There are alternatives. Readwise Reader, Instapaper, and a handful of open-source readers like Miniflux or FreshRSS can pick up the slack. Most of them support importing from Pocket, so the migration is mostly a matter of plugging in the export file. The real work is deciding which one you'll actually use, since the whole point of a read-it-later app is that you don't think about it.
Why this matters for us: Pocket stored a lot of community articles — union pages, immigrant resource guides, neighborhood news — and now those links have an expiration date.
Self-driving trucks get their first DMV permits in California
Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI have been handed permits by the California DMV to test autonomous trucks on state highways. The permits let them run these rigs out on the road — not just on private lots or test tracks.
Both companies have been building this for years. Aurora…
Who's actually funding fusion — and who's getting rich
Fusion has pulled in $7.1 billion so far, but the money isn't spread thin. A small group of companies is eating most of it — and the list of those who've cleared $100 million is shorter than most people think.
The big names on the list are backed by OpenAI, Sam Altman's Founders Fund, and a handful of other well-known Silicon Valley investors. That's the usual crowd: tech billionaires betting on the next energy revolution. The rest of the 40-plus fusion startups are split among smaller rounds, and most haven't reached $100 million yet.
This isn't a story about the future of clean energy — it's a story about capital concentration. A few funds and a few founders are controlling the narrative, the patents, and the headlines. The actual promise — a cleaner grid, cheaper power, energy independence — sits behind a wall of private equity.
Why this matters for us: fusion won't be a public utility we all share; it'll be a private asset owned by a handful of investors, and the benefits won't trickle down to working people unless we push for open access and public oversight from the start.
Tim O'Reilly: Open AI beats the big labs
Tim O'Reilly built the empire that fed his name into the industry — the conferences, the books, the press. Now AI is eating that business. He's not mad about it. He's mad about who's feeding it.
The big AI labs — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic — trained their models on the same…
Generative media is past the model — it's the tools now
Dan's thread on TLDR Product walks through what's actually happening with generative media, and the through line is simple: the model was never the bottleneck. We got past that a while ago. The real work now is building the tools on top — the interfaces, the pipelines, the workflows that let someone actually use these things without needing a PhD in prompt engineering.
The thread covers the current landscape — image generators, video tools, audio — and the pattern is clear. Every category is consolidating around a few players who've figured out how to package the model into something usable. The ones winning aren't the ones with the best model; they're the ones with the best UX. A good interface turns a $20/month subscription into a real workflow. A bad one turns the same model into a novelty.
This matters because the people building for our communities — the folks making content for local businesses, the creators running side hustles, the auntie starting a home-based food business — they need tools that work, not research papers. The tools that land are the ones that feel like they were built by someone who actually uses them.
Why this matters for us: the tools that win will be the ones that let our people make money without needing a tech degree, and that's the kind of build we should be cheering for.
Para la comunidad
Tech affecting the Hispanic community
The stories below land different for our gente — immigration tech, language access, the unbanked, kids of color, gig-worker rights.
TPS has shifted under Trump — what the numbers show
Pew Research published its weekly roundup today, and the big one is how Temporary Protected Status has changed under Trump. The piece walks through the data on TPS — who has it, who lost it, and how the policy has shifted since he took office.
TPS is the program that lets people from countries with armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions stay in the US temporarily. It's not a path to citizenship — it's a shield while conditions at home make it unsafe to go back. Families with kids, folks working side jobs, the auntie running a bakery — they're the ones who depend on it. The article lays out the specifics of what changed under the second Trump term.
Why this matters for us: If your family is covered by TPS or thinking about applying, the ground has moved — and knowing exactly what shifted is the difference between staying put and losing everything.