• Instagram might soon let you remove yourself from someone’s Close Friends list

    January 30, 2026

    Instagram is developing a feature that will allow users to remove themselves from someone’s “Close Friends” list, Meta told TechCrunch on Friday. The company says the feature is still in the early stages and is not being tested publicly yet. The social network’s Close Friends feature lets users share Stories, Reels, and posts with a select group of people, rather than their entire follower base. Since the feature’s launch in 2018, users haven’t been able to remove themselves from someone else’s Close Friends list. The internal prototype was first spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who specializes in finding unreleased…

  • Australians neglecting car repairs due to spiralling living costs – study

    January 30, 2026

    The increasing cost of living in Australia is forcing a majority of car owners to push back or decrease vehicle maintenance – with some abandoning vital repairs entirely. A new study from Canstar reveals 57 per cent of Australian households delayed, reduced, or cancelled their car-related expenses in 2025. Almost half of the 2700 owners surveyed admitted to having either postponed or skipped a schedule car service, while 28 per cent put off buying a brand-new model – and 17 per cent scrapped plans to buy a new car entirely. Worryingly, a quarter said they were neglecting necessary repairs on…

  • Rivian made an electric ambulance for Grey’s Anatomy

    January 30, 2026

    America’s once-promising EV transition may have taken a U-turn, but at least some in Hollywood are trying to do their part. Rivian partnered with Grey’s Anatomy to make a custom electric ambulance for the long-running series. The ambulance is a modified version of Rivian’s Commercial Van. The custom “vanbulance” serves a dual purpose: preventing on-set exhaust fumes (which could harm the cast and crew) and integrating a green storyline. “As an added benefit, the elimination of engine noise brought a welcome quiet while cameras were rolling,” Rivan wrote in a blog post. Among other modifications, it has rear double doors…

  • SpaceX’s IPO could open the floodgates — and secondaries are booming in the meantime

    January 30, 2026

    SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a potential 2026 IPO — a move that could signal the long-awaited reopening of the public markets after a years-long IPO drought. In the meantime, late-stage private companies like SpaceX are finding other ways to create liquidity for employees and early shareholders, largely through a fast-growing secondary market. To unpack what SpaceX’s IPO chatter means, how private liquidity works before a debut, and what investors are looking for in today’s pre-IPO giants, we spoke with Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, a broker-dealer specializing in secondary share transactions…

  • Sundance doc ‘Ghost in the Machine’ draws a damning line between AI and eugenics

    January 30, 2026

    The Sundance documentary Ghost in the Machine boldly declares that the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and Silicon Valley itself, is rooted in eugenics. Director Valerie Veatch makes the case that the rise of techno-fascism from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is a feature, not a bug. That may sound hyperbolic, but Ghost in the Machine, which is built around interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, historians and computer scientists, leaves little room for doubt. If you’ve been following the meteoric rise of AI, or Silicon Valley in general, Veatch’s methodical deconstruction of the technology doesn’t really unearth anything…

  • Anthropic brings agentic plug-ins to Cowork

    January 30, 2026

    Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new agentic tool designed to take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code and transform it into a more general-use tool that non-coders could benefit from. Now Anthropic has launched a new feature within Cowork to make it even more powerful for enterprise users. Behold, the plug-in. The idea behind plug-ins is simple: They are designed to automate “specialized” tasks within a company’s various departments. Whether that function is drafting content for the marketing department, reviewing risks in documents for a firm’s legal team, or drafting responses for customer support, the plug-in…

  • Google’s Project Genie lets you create your own 3D interactive worlds

    January 30, 2026

    This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It’s what’s known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it’s making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie. To start, you’ll need Google’s $250 per month AI Ultra plan to check out Project Genie. You’ll also need to live in the US and be 18 years or older. At launch, Project Genie offers…

  • Bluesky issues its first transparency report, noting rise in user reports and legal demands

    January 30, 2026

    Bluesky released its first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by its Trust & Safety team and the results of other initiatives, like age-assurance compliance, monitoring of influence operations, automated labeling, and more. The social media startup — a rival to X and Threads — grew nearly 60% in 2025, from 25.9 million users to 41.2 million, which includes accounts hosted both on Bluesky’s own infrastructure and those running their own infrastructure as part of the decentralized social network based on Bluesky’s AT Protocol. During the past year, users made 1.41 billion posts on the platform, which represented 61%…

  • The first season of Amazon’s Fallout show is now free on Youtube

    January 30, 2026

    Fallout’s second season is coming to a close, and it’s been well the wait. But if a reluctance to add yet another subscription to your streaming rotation means you haven’t watched Amazon’s surprisingly excellent adaptation yet, you might be interested to know that the company is currently releasing season one for free on the YouTube channel. Whether driven by Amazon wanting even more people to watch what has become one of its biggest TV stories, or a move that speaks to how few people are actually signed up for Prime Video, it’s good news for anyone who hasn’t seen the…

  • The best sales on OLEDs and other smart TVs ahead of kickoff

    January 30, 2026

    Whether you’re having people over to watch the Patriots and the Seahawks battle it out in Super Bowl 2026, or you’re more interested in the Bad Bunny halftime show, your TV will be an important part of the puzzle of putting together an excellent big-game party. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your current TV, now’s a decent time to do it. The weeks leading up to the Super Bowl are typically awash with TV deals to consider. Generally, TV prices steadily decrease after a new model comes out. Some 2026 TV models were announced at CES and are forthcoming…