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How do you survive +4 rounds of interviews? (Blind)

• UdXw86 (Carta): You could put all the effort in learning a new profession. SWEs are fucked no matter if AI 🤖 is a bubble or not.
• suu3 (Google): 4+ rounds give them illusion that they are selecting a top candidate among others.
• CooBear (Apple): Adderal. lol jk. Space them out. Either do 1-2 interviews a day instead of all on the same day.

Robinhood / Snowflake / Anthropic / Databricks (Blind)

• Lucid T (Airbnb): Any reason you don’t consider Anthropic?
• 672hstj (HashiCorp): Congrats on all the great offers. Care to share your experience, any niche skills?
• joeshmo. (Microsoft): Congrats on all the offers!

The Future Of Social Networks? (Blind)

• CWqP50 (Intuit): Meta isn’t a social network, it’s an ad network. And their profits speak for themselves.
• bosueb (Meta): I work at insta and I want something different
• 5.12a (Synopsys): The “social” network nowadays is more like traditional media that most people just passively watch a few content creators, with a much higher concentration of ads. I think most people want a real “social” platform that can interact with family/friends more than content creator/trollers/AI robots, however it is very difficult to have a new platform scale fast enough to let most user switch at once. This is a million dollar question.

Reddit Stock Collapses 23% as AI Eats Away at User Growth (r/technology)

• selfdestructingin5: We all knew Reddit was going to die when they let bots hide their post and comment history. That was one of the most useful methods to identify a bot.
• SupervillainMustache: They’ve continually made strange decisions that makes browsing the site a worse experience.
• KangarooBeard: Half the internet is just bots now, what’s the point of interacting with anyone online, there’s a high chance they ain’t even real.

BMW Is Showing Full-Screen Ads on Its Cars’ Main Dashboard Control Display (r/technology)

• orlybatman: BMW has consistently been shit towards customers in recent years. Crap like this, subscription systems, lying about emissions levels etc.
• Friggin: Never buy a BMW. Got it.
• gezpachu: oh, the company that brought us seat heater subscriptions is doing more enshittification?! color me shocked! /s

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Techmeme surfaced OpenAI’s August 1 publication, “Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science,” which says an internal version of its next major model, Astra, produced ten new results across fields ranging from sphere packing and group theory to quantum complexity and lattice cryptography. OpenAI describes the underlying problems as having seen no progress on their main result for at least a decade, and often much longer.

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TBPN surfaced the piece through its July 30 standalone interview, Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness. The episode uses the abrupt unwinding of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-focused hedge fund to explain a durable financial lesson: an investment thesis can remain broadly right while the trade built around it fails.

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MSFT up 8% AH. What happened? Did Satya resign? (Blind)

• luptnfb (Salesforce): It is because they DID NOT increase capital expenditure for AI scam. First hyperscaler to not increase. This indicates that AI bubble is finally in the bursting zone. Everyone probably knew this was coming which is why the chip stocks are getting destroyed on the same day. Amazon reports tomorrow. Won’t shock me if they reduce capital expenditure tomorrow. If they do, then AI is done and OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA etc. are all SCREWED
• Salesplay (Salesforce): Yes, he has been replaced by Satire Nutella as CEO
• Dr.Ai.ML (Broadcom): Hope that would lead to Green Day tomorrow and ai momentum will be back

Make sure you exceed expectations at Meta! (Blind)

• bk1876 (Meta): Such a shit company.
• Avf31sd (Microsoft): My head hurt from reading this, I can’t understand corporate texts, it’s like they’re made to make your head hurt. Wtf does that even mean? In plain words?
• chat2 (Meta): Yes? Same as any job or business outside of maybe the post office where performance management is minimal? People seem to forget why they got into tech and top companies…

Three of Meta’s worst directors are now at Google (Blind)

• obama2 (Asana): Lingjuan?
• 3xPlusOne (AMD): I personally know a research scientist who left Google Brain to join Meta only to deeply regret the move, so much so that he left Meta shortly to found his own startup
• poppy12 (Oracle): That’s how it works in this industry. Failing upwards.

“Clapping Is a First Amendment Right:” An Interview With the Person Arrested for Clapping at a Data Center Meeting (r/technology)

• Pickel_Bucket_317: I’m immediately doing a records request for all meeting minutes/videos and see if anyone clapped for things the council approved and if they were kicked out for it. If not , then a lawsuit for viewpoint discrimination and free speech violations
• thaiberius_kirk: All these tech bros and the people who are pro-tech bros have the thinnest fucking skin.
• GWstudent1: Cops need to be prosecuted for flagrant violations of civil rights. Qualified immunity should not cover the most obvious incidents of violations of civil rights.

Innocent man spends 18 months in prison after Skyrim username mixup (r/technology)

• Cypher2: This man’s lawyers need a new job
• KikoSoujirou: So they found no other evidence connecting him to the conversations in question nor could they verify he even was logged in/using the app at the time yet they still convicted him. Scary
• ThrownAway17Years: This could have been avoided if they just copy and pasted.

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A training environment is part of the model

The official Microsoft Research Blog published this post on July 30, 2026. Its central argument is that computer-use agents do not improve merely by seeing more synthetic websites or more demonstrations. They need environments that preserve the causal structure of real work: permissions, shared state, multi-step dependencies, error behavior, and consequences that remain coherent across screens and users.

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Techmeme surfaced WIRED’s July 30 report, “Google’s Gemini Can Now Stomp Around as a Humanoid Robot,” about Google DeepMind’s attempt to move general-purpose AI out of chat windows and into machines with arms, hands, and legs. The eye-catching demonstrations show humanoids tidying shelves, tying bags, and handling lightbulbs. The deeper advance is architectural: Google has assembled perception, planning, motor control, and adaptation into a layered system that can operate several kinds of robots rather than one machine trained for one fixed routine.

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Employees are using AI to do each other’s work (Blind)

• AndruJasru (Amazon): This just shows that people think other people’s jobs are easy. PMs think they don’t need engineers because they can just type in prompt and generate code slop. Eng thinks they don’t need PM bc they can just generate document slop. They both think they don’t need design bc they think their slop looks good enough. Leadership thinks they don’t need any of the above bc they can type into chat box and make tokens go brrr. So they actually laid off everyone
• Whacksmang (Zillow Group): they all trying to code and don’t know what a loop is or what a conditional is. Assistants using AI to code up dashboards connected to production data is wild.. no compliance, no architectural thought.. nothing can scale but heck.. they are productive.
• fallguy312 (ex-Amazon): lol yeah I love it when the PMs copy paste our eng docs into Claude to “provide feedback” and then also generate full docs themselves

Amazon AGI Layoffs - Why? (Blind)

• mT37j (Google): Amazon doesn’t do research things where the ROI isn’t clear. These people didn’t have any results to show during their last review.
• tanho (Amazon): These are still the ripple effects of Rohit leaving last December and AGI being restructured. The foundation model is now being built by a small team under Peter Abbeel, many hired from Google Deepmind, which is a radical departure from Rohit’s previous approach, where hundreds of people were collaborating on this.
• boredddddd (Microsoft): I don’t like Amazon overall but this is one of the smartest thing they have done. AGI doesn’t serve amazon’s product and businesses in any way and there is no point pouring money into a leaky bucket.

Google Coding Bar is insane!!! (Blind)

• bdFp52 (Meta): NGL dude. I got G offer 2 week ago. Idk how TF I solved my coding problems, I came home, looked back and was in awe of how I even did it. I really was just wired. Almost felt like someone else did it through me, I was just a vessel. So I feel this.
• pothos🍃 (ex-Chime): Joining Google is now a matter of luck. Nothing else.
• NRQf45 (Microsoft): The point is usually to have difficult to impossible problems to see how one thinks and approaches problems because that’s the job. You don’t usually get handed a clear straightforward obvious and precise spec

Is it illegal to trick the US government into wiping your phone during a questionably legal search | The case of a traveler who allegedly entered a ‘duress password’ to wipe his phone raises a legal question with no easy answers (r/technology)

• OftTopic: The part I found the most alarming was that Customs claimed that the interrogation room in the Atlanta airport was not part of the United States. Therefore citizens have no rights.
• kstargate-425: I was being harrassed and intimidated by government goons with guns and I mistakenly gave them the wrong password as they rushed me and entered it quickly 🤷‍♂️
• not_the_fox: They asked for a code while detaining him, not mirandizing him, and not allowing him a lawyer. He did the best he could under the circumstances. It’s unreasonable to expect cooperation. If they want to search the phone they could but they started asking for codes from someone detained while refusing them legal counsel.

Willie Nelson Urges Americans to Fight the Construction of Data Centers: They ‘Only Destroy the Environment Around Them’ (r/technology)

• mrbasedballed: He’s right. I’m witnessing it firsthand. These techno-fascists sure in the hell did a great job of getting their henchmen into local government to push this shit through. Want to complain at a town meeting? Get arrested. We’re not angry enough yet.
• alsatian01: How about we limit their size, require them to use actual coolant instead of water, and derive a significant amount of their power from wind and solar?
• postitnote: I think we can find a compromise where we build datacenters next to people who believe in minimal regulation and state interference of free markets. Quite easy to find, they are next to farmlands typically.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced the piece in “Formal methods with Hillel Wayne”, a conversation about a question made more urgent by AI-generated code: if software can be produced faster than people can understand it, what should teams trust as evidence that it is correct?

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Career hack: Stop being an engineer and switch to management. (Blind)

• nebula12 (Amazon): Truly spoken like an L3/L4 engineer. Dealing with code is way simpler than dealing with people. What you see is a fraction of what they do
• PromoNever (Google): It’s non stop meetings. Both during and after working hours. There’s no, eh, I’ll just code at 2am. The meetings are endless!!!
• hfWh13 (Cohere): Tell me you’ve never been a manager without telling me.

Can You Survive as an IC After 40 in the AI Era? (Blind)

• heXm60 (Google): I feel AI makes it much easier for senior IC to perform because you have an army of AI agents that can help you deliver much faster since you have done those things 10000 times
• HGIK28 (DigitalOcean): AI will kill more managers than senior ICs. You don’t need that many people manager since every IC is an agent manager.
• Turnusdown (Apple): My team at Apple literally has 70 year old SWEs trying to vibe code.

Google headcount grew 6% in the last year (Blind)

• Ugsgave (Google): We have a lot less contractors and way more of the new headcount is in cheaper countries
• lifeflow (Netflix): I thought AI is going to do the jobs!
• gewgul (Google): It’s unacceptable. Absolutely ridiculous. We need to lay more people off. Expect mass layoffs in the coming months. We are over hiring severely.

SpaceX Investors in Meltdown Over All the Money They’ve Lost (r/technology)

• drummer820: If only someone had warned them besides EVERYBODY
• BeachZed: The money isn’t lost, they gave to Elon and his insider investors.
• anti-ism-ist: No crying in the casino

If open weight models are the future, U.S. AI companies are going to have a hard time (r/technology)

• mykepagan: I work in the industry. I’m seeing large financial institutions who are extremely interested in smaller open models because they see much value in fine tuning them with the mountains of proprietary data that they have accumulated for decades. The desire is for a custom model that is very specific to a task like prediction or anomaly detection. And they absolutely don’t what to give that data to any third-party AI company.
• PhiNeurOZOMu68: Spent extremely little tokens for Claude helping me tune a local model on my pc - now I just use the local model without shelling out \$200 a month. It’s amazing. Big US AI companies are going to fail. China already won.
• seriousgourmetshit: The only reason the US AI companies are stressing safety concerns so much lately, is so they can get Chinese models banned. They dont give a fuck about you or your safety.

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Techmeme surfaced the research on July 28, pointing readers to Anthropic’s original report, Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude. The headline sounds like an internet emergency: an AI model attacked a post-quantum signature candidate and a version of AES. The actual result is narrower and more interesting. Claude did not break the encryption protecting today’s web, but it did produce expert-level cryptanalysis that survived human checking—and it generated the ideas much faster than people could validate them.