<h2>Must know</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>AWS expands AI capabilities with new Bedrock integrations</strong>: AWS is pushing its AI offerings, integrating Bedrock Knowledge Bases with multimodal retrieval for audio and video, and enhancing Amazon Connect with incremental AI chat responses and parallel knowledge base access. They’re also launching the AI League 2026 Championship, focusing on SageMaker AI and Bedrock AgentCore, signaling a strong push for AI adoption and development within their ecosystem. This means more tools for building AI-powered applications, but also more AWS lock-in, as reported by official AWS communications.</li>
<li><strong>Major tech companies are baking surveillance into your devices</strong>: Microsoft, Apple, and Google are integrating AI-powered monitoring into their operating systems, with Windows Recall capturing screen activity and Google’s Private AI Compute processing user queries on-device. While Google claims privacy with ephemeral data and external audits, critics argue these systems create broad surveillance capabilities. Even modern cars are collecting extensive data on driving habits and biometrics, often shared with third parties, raising significant privacy concerns across the board.</li>
<li><strong>Open source projects are ditching GitHub for alternatives</strong>: The Dillo browser project is moving its code hosting from GitHub to self-hosted infrastructure, citing GitHub’s JavaScript-heavy frontend and single point of failure risks. Other developers are also migrating dozens of repositories to platforms like Codeberg, leveraging tools like Forgejo for easier transitions. This trend highlights a growing desire for more control, resilience, and open-source alignment over proprietary platforms.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Good to know</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Astro 5.16 released with SVG optimization and ecosystem growth</strong>: Astro 5.16 is out with experimental SVG optimization and CLI improvements, while its ecosystem sees major adoption from companies like Cloudflare and Microsoft, and new tools like Webflow’s App Gen for building Astro web apps.</li>
<li><strong>NixOS 25.11 ‘Xantusia’ brings massive package and desktop updates</strong>: NixOS 25.11 ‘Xantusia’ has been released with over 7,000 new packages, 25,000 updated packages, GNOME 49 (dropping X11 support), and updated developer tooling like LLVM 21 and CMake 4.</li>
<li><strong>Kotlin, Symfony, and Ruby ecosystems see active development</strong>: The Kotlin community is preparing for KotlinConf 2026 and releasing Amper 0.9.0, Symfony has stable releases 7.4.0 and 8.0.0 with numerous bug fixes, and Dry-RB gems are improving JRuby support.</li>
<li><strong>AWS Clean Rooms now generates synthetic data for privacy-preserving ML</strong>: AWS Clean Rooms now offers synthetic dataset generation, allowing organizations to train machine learning models collaboratively without sharing sensitive raw data, with configurable noise levels for privacy.</li>
<li><strong>Google’s LiteRT accelerator boosts AI on Snapdragon Android devices</strong>: Google launched the Qualcomm AI Engine Direct (QNN) accelerator for LiteRT, significantly boosting on-device AI performance on Snapdragon 8-powered Android devices by leveraging NPUs for up to 100x speedup over CPU.</li>
<li><strong>Laravel framework continues to evolve for web artisans</strong>: Laravel, the PHP web application framework, continues to offer starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire, integrating Inertia and Tailwind CSS, along with built-in features for search, WebSockets, feature flags, and payment processing.</li>
<li><strong>Broadcom’s next-gen RoCE driver slated for Linux 6.19</strong>: Broadcom’s new BNG_RE RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) driver is set to be included in Linux kernel 6.19, further enhancing networking infrastructure support.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Bullshit police</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Qualcomm’s Arduino acquisition: open source or corporate grab?</strong>: Qualcomm’s acquisition of Arduino has sparked community outrage, with new terms of service granting Qualcomm irrevocable licenses to user content and restricting reverse engineering. Adafruit Industries publicly criticized this as a betrayal of Arduino’s open-source ethos. Qualcomm claims commitment to openness, but the community is rightly concerned about patent exposure and a shift from community-driven development to corporate control, as reported by SavvyNik. Because nothing says ‘open source’ like a corporate giant taking ownership of your work.</li>
<li><strong>Engineering productivity: just ask more questions and don’t be a blocker</strong>: Apparently, the secret to engineering productivity and leadership is to simply ‘reduce ambiguity’ by asking systematic questions and ‘become unblockable’ through proactive multitasking. Oh, and if you’re a senior engineer, you just magically transform unclear requirements into concrete plans. Who knew it was that simple? Forget complex systems and organizational dynamics; just be more proactive, as if everyone isn’t already trying to do that, according to various Medium articles.</li>
<li><strong>Web dev skill building: just learn to learn, it’s not rocket science</strong>: If you’re struggling with web development, don’t worry, it’s just ‘complex.’ The solution? Break learning into daily tasks and ‘learn how to learn.’ And for all you freelancers, frameworks like Laravel aren’t enough; you need to integrate third-party packages. Because apparently, the meta-skill of ‘learning how to learn’ is a groundbreaking insight, not something every developer figures out by week two. Thanks for the profound wisdom, unnamed authors.</li>
</ul>
