The News

EV wrap: BYD up, Tesla meh, truck challenges and some swagged up people movers

There’s been a bunch of EV news that I haven’t had a chance to Sizzle on — until now. Even before Australia’s new efficiency standards kicked in this week, EV sales have spiked to an all-time high of 10% of new vehicles bought last month (The Driven). BYD sales hit an all-time high (SMH, $) and hit the top five brands by sales —  the first ever Chinese brand to rank that high (LinkedIn). Tesla sales rebounded from a slump but are still down from this time last year (Drive). Meanwhile, it does seem like Tesla’s self-driving in Austin is not going that well (The Guardian). Back here, an inquiry heard that electric trucks still face some big challenges in Australia (The Driven).

Bonus: here are two neat new big EVs: Volkswagen’s ID Buzz (Ars Technica) and the Zeekr 9X (CarExpert).

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Long recipe blog stories and a defence of online advertisements

Google will stop showing full recipes that have been extracted from external websites in its search results (Economic Times). It’s ending its “Recipe Quick View” feature which were like the snippets of info about people, places, sports scores, etc that you already see in Google Search. The long stories preceding the cooking instructions is so common that it’s a meme (Reddit), so I’m sure people liked being able to skip it. But it’s deeply ironic because this format only came about because of Google and how its search rankings favoured longer, more in-depth web pages. Google made a problem, then “solved” it! And yes, these blogs are usually filled with advertisements which are annoying but, hey, that’s why it’s free to see.

Zooming out, this is part of the growing tension between Google and publishers laid bare by the release of its AI summaries: Google is doing things that its users probably like but, increasingly, are hurting the people who make the internet alive. (For more, see Dries Buytaert’s vlog The web’s broken deal with AI companies)

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Meet the ‘schizophrenic file’

This is cool/scary: it’s possible to create a .zip file that contains two different sets of files depending on what’s used to open it (Hackarcana). Dubbed a “schizophrenic file”, this exploit, made possible by the design of the ZIP format, means that you could send the same file to people and its contents will seem different to each of them. This has nefarious possibilities — like being sent an invoice that morphs into a different one once you approve it and forward it to your accounting department.

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Leftovers

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Oh, Also

This is the one thing you don’t want to happen to your start-up

Startups in Silicon Valley keep having this problem: They’re hiring for a new engineer. They find a candidate. The engineer interviews well, he’s extremely technically capable, he’s got a hot GitHub account. The company makes an offer, and he accepts. Once he starts, he’s a little hard to get a hold of. He misses meetings, seems to go AWOL. Or perhaps he delays starting all together.

This is a widespread problem, but it’s not a lot of people doing it. It’s one guy. Soham Parekh is an engineer from India who apparently has tricked dozens of companies into hiring him — unbeknownst to them — simultaneously (The Verge). This started coming out over the past few days after one founder went public, prompting a flood of others to say the same thing happened to them. Oh, and one company who said he was working for them and they were happy with his performance lol.

Honestly, as someone who already juggles two jobs, this sounds like a nightmare to me. I hope you take the opposite of this energy and do absolutely zero work this weekend. TGIF!

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Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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