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Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On July 6, 2016, Niantic launched Pokémon GO on iOS and Android in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, sending millions of people outside to catch virtual creatures using their phone's GPS and camera. Sensor Tower estimated it passed 10 million downloads in seven days and more than $200 million in its first month, and Nintendo's market value jumped about $9 billion within five days of the release. Pokémon GO turns 10 today, and in March 2025 Niantic sold its games business, including the app, to Scopely for $3.5 billion.
What’s happening:
🎮 Microsoft lays off 4,800, hitting Xbox hardest
🍉 Meta says it’s AI model now matches GPT-5.5
📱 Lenovo launches $44 AI phone for students
🤖 Reddit is fighting AI slop with its own AI
📉 Trump memecoin buyers have lost $3.8 billion
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
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Hand-picked news:
🎮 Microsoft lays off 4,800, hitting Xbox hardest ↗️LINK
Microsoft cut about 4,800 jobs on Monday, roughly 2.1% of its workforce, hitting commercial sales and Xbox hardest. Xbox lost 1,600 staff today and faces about 3,200 cuts through fiscal 2027.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called it the biggest restructure in Xbox history, saying margins run 3 to 10x below rivals. She is flattening 14 management layers to five and refocusing on Minecraft and Candy Crush.
Coleman insists AI is not replacing these roles, only changing how the work happens. Yet Microsoft just backed a new AI deployment unit with $2.5 billion, so workers may not feel the difference.
🍉 Meta says it’s AI model now matches GPT-5.5 ↗️LINK
Meta superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang told an internal town hall that Watermelon, the company's next model, has caught up with OpenAI's GPT-5.5, though he did not name the benchmarks.
Wang said Watermelon is still in training and uses roughly 10x the compute of Muse Spark, Meta's April model codenamed Avocado, showing raw scaling stays Meta's main lever.
At the same town hall Zuckerberg admitted agent progress has not accelerated as leadership expected, and OpenAI has already previewed GPT-5.6, so Watermelon may reach yesterday's frontier.
📱 Lenovo launches $44 AI phone for students ↗️LINK
Lenovo launched its AI Student Phone in China for 299 yuan, about $44, stripping out games, browsers, and social media in favor of homework help, GPS tracking, and parental controls.
A physical AI button anchors the device. Kids press and hold it to ask questions by voice, and a built-in library of English vocabulary and math formulas answers them without needing internet.
Classroom mode strips the screen down to a clock and SOS dialing during school hours. Lenovo built an AI phone whose main pitch is keeping kids off phones.
🤖 Reddit is fighting AI slop with its own AI ↗️LINK
Reddit says its own AI tools now block 23 million spam views a day, catch about 25,000 posts and comments, and revoke close to 2 million fake votes daily, cutting spam exposure 20%.
The systems use large language models to flag suspicious behavior the moment an account signs up, spotting coordinated fake hype. Reddit says it also cut detection-to-enforcement time to under five seconds.
Reddit has a rocky AI history. Last year University of Zurich researchers secretly ran AI-generated comments in r/changemyview, so the platform now fights machine content with more machines.
📉 Trump memecoin buyers have lost $3.8 billion ↗️LINK
Analytics firm Nansen found that 988,905 wallets, about 2/3 of $TRUMP buyers, have lost a combined $3.8 billion on the memecoin through the end of June, based on public blockchain data.
The token traded near $1.69 on Sunday, down almost 98% from its $75.35 peak. Trump launched it three days before his 2025 inauguration, and it pays him royalties on every trade.
Trump's financial disclosure lists $636 million from the coin, roughly half his $1.4 billion in 2025 crypto income. Because he earns on trades, he profited whether buyers won or lost.
Today’s Poll:
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think Hollywood studios are secretly using AI the same way they're suing Midjourney for?
A) Yes - 87% 🏆
B) No - 13%
Reader’s opinion:
“It reduces cost and increases efficiency. No doubt they are using ai”
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