SED News: Meta’s AI Gambit, Windsurf Shake‑Up, and the UK VPN Surge

Hello and welcome to SED News. I'm Gregor Van. And I'm Sean Faulkner. And welcome to the August edition. So this is for just a quick reminder, a slightly different format of SEDaily podcast where we take a spin through the last month's worth of main headlines. We talk about a kind of bigger, chunkier topic in the middle. We then look at Hacker News, just some fun things that have been going on there. And then we make a few predictions as to what we might be seeing in tech across the following month. So talking of predictions, I believe last time, Sean, we made one prediction which was that July was gonna be a quiet month and I think we've seen that not to be the case. But Yeah. I mean, that's a in retrospect, quite a bold prediction to make. Yes. It was. Anything right now in tech is gonna be, like, a quiet month. Maybe I haven't run the math on it. Maybe relative to, I don't know, June, it was quiet. But I think relative to probably any other time in technology, there was a ton of stuff going on. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Which is good for us because if nothing happened, we wouldn't have anything they could talk about. Right. Exactly. And the thing is I think this is where it is summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, so a lot of people are kind of like taking their weeks away but yet there is still so much to catch up on. It looks like when people get back. Speaking of, how was your July, Sean? It was pretty good. I mean, I went I think I mentioned I was going on a personal trip, family to Hawaii Then I spent the July 4 weekend in The United States in a hospital because I was hospitalized for for pneumonia. I wish put a little bit of a damper on things but I'm fully recovered now and Good. Back in full strength. Yeah. Back for SCD news. That's that's what we had to hear. Yeah. Fantastic. How about you? Yeah. I mean, July over here in Singapore. Just speaking of seasons, we don't really have seasons. So it does make this sort of slightly odd thing where people are talking about summer holidays, but nothing really changes here. So it's just sort of another month of being hot, etcetera. But, no, I've been just a heads down on a bunch of start up stuff. And more importantly, I decided to start rewatching Silicon Valley, the TV show. And and it's also my wife's first time watching it, so it's kind of her window into this world. I think what strikes me is that this was made back in, like, 2014 was the first season. And, okay, the tech has all changed, but the storylines are incredibly pertinent, I would say, even here we are ten years later. So nothing seems to change on that front. Yeah. …