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Techmeme
February 17, 2025, 5:20 PM

Top News

Matt Binder / disruptionist:
X shows error messages when trying to share Signal's Signal.me links in DMs, posts, and profile pages, and a warning page if users click on already posted links  —  Signal has been a primary method of communication for federal workers looking to blow the whistle on DOGE.
Max Tani / Semafor:
Documents: the NYT greenlights using select internal and external AI tools for editorial and product staff, including from OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft  —  The Scoop  —  The New York Times is greenlighting the use of AI for its product and editorial staff, saying that internal tools …
Namanyay Goel / N's Blog:
New junior developers are reliant on Copilot, Claude, and other AI tools, meaning foundational coding knowledge is missing, potentially creating future problems  —  100k+ views 70+ votes 50+ votes  —  Something's been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it.
David Barnett / The Guardian:
An interview with Nadia Odunayo on building Goodreads alternative The StoryGraph, remaining bootstrapped, reaching 3.8M active users, not allowing DMs, and more  —  Software engineer and developer Nadia Odunayo created the social media readers' platform StoryGraph and its popularity has rocketed
Reuters:
South Korea's data protection authority says DeepSeek app downloads have been suspended in the country after DeepSeek failed to follow its personal data rules  —  South Korea's data protection authority on Monday said it had temporarily suspended the domestic service of Chinese AI app DeepSeek since Saturday.
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Chase plans to stop users making Zelle payments deemed “as originating from contact through social media”; the CFPB had claimed Zelle lacked adequate safeguards  —  JPMorgan Chase Bank (Chase) will soon start blocking Zelle payments to social media contacts to combat a significant rise …
Bloomberg:
President Xi meets Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and others, signaling Beijing's support for the long-marginalized private sector  —  - Meeting signals a more supportive stance toward private firms  — Xi promises relief from excessive fines, level playing field
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
Mistral debuts Mistral Saba, a 24B-parameter custom-trained model for Arabic language and culture, via its API; Saba bests Mistral Small 3 for Arabic content  —  The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical.
Politico:
X challenges a German court ordering it to share metrics such as likes and shares with researchers before the February 23 election, in a test of the EU's DSA  —  Elon Musk's X has challenged a German court decision that instructed the platform to share data with researchers, the court confirmed to POLITICO.
Kate Clark / Bloomberg:
Source: Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence is raising $1B+ led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, which plans to invest $500M, at a valuation of $30B+  —  - SSI raising more than $1 billion, including from Greenoaks  — Former OpenAI chief scientist left the company last year

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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Earlier Picks

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Gian Volpicelli / Bloomberg: