Techmeme
August 16, 2022, 1:50 AM

Top News

Jon Porter / The Verge:
Android 13 begins rolling out today to Google's Pixel phones, earlier in the year than the previous two Android annual updates  —  Google's major OS update is a little early this year  —  This year's major Android update, Android 13, is officially releasing today for Google's Pixel phones, the search giant has announced.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple sets a return-to-office deadline for September 5; employees will come in Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third day determined by individual teams  —  Apple Inc. has set a Sept. 5 deadline for corporate employees to be in the office at least three days a week after delaying …
New York Times:
a16z invests in Adam Neumann's residential real estate management startup Flow, sources say ~$350M at a $1B+ valuation, the firm's largest-ever individual check  —  WeWork's founder is back with a billion-dollar venture.  —  WeWork's founder is going residential
New York Times:
A look at the rise of digital productivity monitoring for white collar jobs in the US, sometimes used to assign workers scores, determine pay, and more  —  Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked.  What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Zoom pushes an update to fix a flaw, found by Patrick Wardle, in its Mac app's auto-update feature that could let attackers run code with root access  —  The flaw could let a hacker take over your system  —  Zoom has issued a patch for a bug on macOS that could allow a hacker to take control …
Reuters:
Walmart partners with Paramount to include the $4.99/month ad-supported tier of the Paramount+ streaming service as part of its Walmart+ subscription  —  U.S. retailer Walmart Inc (WMT.N) on Monday struck a deal with Paramount Global (PARA.O) to offer Paramount+ streaming service to the subscribers …
Sarah Krouse / Wall Street Journal:
Antenna: 19% of US streaming users canceled 3+ subscriptions from June 2020-June 2022; average monthly customer defections were 5.46% in July, up from 4.46% YoY  —  Customer loyalty to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and other services declines amid stiffer competition  —  Netflix Hit a Subscriber Peak, Here's How It Plans to Keep Growing
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple has laid off about 100 recruiter contractors in a rare move in the past week as part of a push to rein in hiring and spending  —  Apple Inc. laid off many of its contract-based recruiters in the past week, part of a push to rein in the tech giant's hiring and spending, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Snap says its Snapchat+ subscription, launched in June, now has 1M+ users globally and adds features, including priority Story replies to celebs  —  It's not going to make much of a dent to offset Snap's stalling ad business, but the company is touting that it has signed up more than 1 million subscribers …
James Vincent / The Verge:
TikTok rolls out a text-to-image “AI greenscreen”, letting users create a basic background for videos from a text prompt  —  The app's ‘AI greenscreen’ filter shows text-to-image has gone mainstream  —  Text-to-image AI systems are booming in both ability and popularity right now …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Equals:
Stop vibe coding analytics  —  Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards.  Build once, iterate for years.
Zoho:
The Zoho Sign app for Microsoft Windows  —  Zoho Sign is a trusted platform for digital signatures, helping businesses of every size send, sign, and manage documents with speed, security, and legal confidence.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Grit:
The Sales Framework Every Founder Needs | Mark Roberge
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI Finally Ships Its Superapp, Meta's AI Price War, ChatGPT Cheating At Brown
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The 'Waymo' Lab For New Materials
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Hard Fork:
Do Social Media Bans Work? + A Conversation About A.I. Consciousness + Tool Time
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

More News

Margaret O'Mara / MIT Technology Review:
Jen Wieczner / New York Magazine:
Reuters:

Earlier Picks

Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Lucy Harley-McKeown / The Block:
Andrew Hill / Financial Times:
Bobby Kent / GameLuster:
Bloomberg: