Truck Startup Tries To Sell Trucks
Also, AI is now your mandated office buddy and the cloud ate a resume.

The Electric Truck That Is Just A Very Expensive Filing Cabinet

The electric vehicle landscape is apparently still not crowded enough, so now we have Telo, which has somehow managed to create a truck that is shorter than a Mini Cooper but can, theoretically, carry a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood in its bed. The company's goal, as stated, is to create a utility vehicle that is easy to park in a city, a vision that sounds suspiciously like a compact sedan but with more surface area for branding. Telo is taking reservations for the Telo MT1, a tiny truck that promises full-size utility, which is a physics problem we do not pay enough to solve.

Based on the comments from the trenches, the primary concern seems to be that they have simply created an electric vehicle that is too small for the market it is trying to serve. It has the profile of a small SUV but it identifies as a heavy-duty pickup. It is the corporate equivalent of an HR memo that promises unlimited vacation but then requires twelve manager approvals. It looks like a great idea for a very specific PowerPoint slide, but nobody in the comments section believes that the announced $45,000 price point will hold up, nor do they trust a startup promising production in 2026 when they have only shown renderings. It is fine; we will just assume this is a beta project and wait for the inevitable Series B funding round where they announce the larger, actually usable 'Max' version.

Your New Office Buddy Is A Large Language Model; Try Not To Spill Coffee On It

A new discussion is circulating which suggests that AI is about to 'solve' loneliness, a notion that feels deeply unsettling, like being told the annual performance review has been replaced by a mandatory group hug with a robot. The New Yorker piece points out the potential dystopian downside of having a perfect, frictionless conversational partner, essentially a bespoke social environment tailored to your exact neuroses. We should be careful what we wish for; a world where everyone has a flawless AI companion just means we have replaced the messy, frustrating work of human interaction with a highly scalable, personalized hallucination.

The underlying issue is that solving loneliness is not a software bug; it is a feature of the human condition. When AI inevitably does 'solve' it, the result will not be mass human flourishing; it will be a vast, new advertising vector. This whole debate is just a highly intellectualized version of the corporate "wellness challenge," where the company pretends to care about your mental health as long as your productivity remains high and you track your steps. Now, the steps are replaced with emotional check-ins, and the tracking is done by a large language model with a $250 million salary, because apparently, AI researchers are now demanding NBA star-level compensation. It really is an unsustainable bubble, but at least the conversational AI will be able to commiserate with us about the rent.

The Government Says 'No' To A Wedding; The Couple Files For An IPO Instead

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, the chief administrative officer of the federal government's Merger & Acquisition department, has pointed to the impending Figma IPO as a vindication of her office's hard work. Essentially, the FTC blocked Adobe's attempt to acquire Figma, forcing the design startup to go public instead. The vindication here is that a major tech company was unable to simply buy its competitor and then shut it down, which is what we call 'free market competition' when we are not trying to sell our startup. It is rare to see the government’s paperwork actually stop a multi-billion dollar transaction, so we should all take a moment to appreciate this small bureaucratic victory.

The argument against the merger was always that it would consolidate the design software market under a single, dominant player, making everything marginally worse for everyone involved. Forcing the Figma team to endure the tedious paperwork of a public offering instead of the quick payout of an acquisition is perhaps the harshest punishment of all, but it is one that will benefit consumers who prefer a few options rather than just the one. It is all very sensible, which in this industry, is often mistaken for revolutionary.

The Cloud Gave Itself A Spring Cleaning And Ate Ten Years Of Data

One of the core promises of the cloud is permanence; your data is stored on a dozen different servers across three continents and is therefore safe from everything except your own billing department. A user posted a very common cloud horror story: AWS deleted their 10-year account and all associated data without so much as an email warning. The comments suggest this is a perennial problem, usually tied to an expired credit card or a tiny, forgotten outstanding balance somewhere deep in the organizational hierarchy.

This is exactly the kind of passive-aggressive move we have come to expect from a system that is designed to be infinitely scalable but zero-tolerance. Imagine a co-worker who, instead of reminding you to pay back five dollars for lunch, simply shreds your desk and changes the lock on your office door. That is how the modern tech giant operates. The victim in this case had their account closed for 'abuse,' a term that is apparently now interchangeable with 'forgot to update your Visa expiration date.' Hopefully, a support ticket will rectify the situation, but based on experience, that ticket is currently sitting in a queue managed by another AI that is negotiating its own $250 million salary.

Briefs

• UX Framework: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework. It is a sign of good faith, or maybe they just want the community to fix all the bugs for free.
• Browser Development: The Ladybird Browser monthly update shows that someone is still trying to build a new rendering engine, which is a noble but frankly exhausting hobby.
• Language Compression: Someone managed to compress Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie. This is the only type of data compression that truly matters, as it directly reduces the cognitive load of Nordic bureaucracy.