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This week on Last Week in Tech: a $100M fintech disaster that tricked millions of Americans, Polymarket's fake gambling website exposed by college influencers, and why China's new open-weight AI model is spooking Silicon Valley. Plus, your smart TV might be selling your IP address without you knowing.
What to expect in this episode: Ope and Uma break down the Synapse bankruptcy where $100M vanished from fintech accounts, the hidden residential proxy scandal running through smart TVs, Claude's new government ID requirement, and the escalating AI arms race between the US and China. If you're a software engineer trying to make sense of where tech is heading, this is your weekly must-watch.
📌 Timestamps:
01:14 — Welcome to Last Week in Tech
01:40 — The $100M Fintech Scam: What Happened to Synapse & Yotta
11:47 — Smart TVs Are Selling Your IP Address (Residential Proxies)
18:26 — Polymarket's Fake Gambling Website Exposed
23:46 — GLM 5.2: China's Open-Weight AI Challenges US Dominance
27:28 — The Identity Verification Trap: AI, Privacy, and Global Regulations
32:56 — Flock Cameras & The Mass Surveillance Ecosystem
39:28 — Meta Tracked Employee Keystrokes to Train Internal AI
41:59 — OpenAI Codex Record & Replay Feature
43:38 — Why "The Optimal Amount of Slop Is Nonzero" in Software
45:48 — Inside OpenAI's Delayed IPO
48:18 — Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Massive AI Distillation Attack
51:38 — Web Dev Update: HTTP Introduces the New "QUERY" Method
52:37 — Outro & Upcoming Live Show Announcements
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🎙️ Beyond The Build Podcast — real, unfiltered conversations about being a software engineer. New episodes every week.
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💬 Drop a comment: Which story hit hardest for you this week; the Synapse scam, the smart TV proxies, or Claude asking for your ID?
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