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According to a Wired report relayed by TechCrunch on September 19, surveillance technology company Flock Safety on Friday unveiled a voluntary buyout package it called the most generous severance in its history, expecting a significant portion of its 1,500-person workforce to express interest and saying it will grant a majority of those requests. The company's internal announcement said that without buyouts, it would "almost certainly" need to lay off staff.

The backdrop: in August, The Washington Post identified 46 cases of police officers accused of misusing Flock's license plate recognition technology, Florida and Texas said they would stop using it, and an anti-surveillance group counted 90 cities dropping Flock in August alone — four times the previous month.

The size and financial impact of the buyouts were not disclosed, and Flock has not responded to a request for comment.

A New York Times poll released in mid-September found that more than 60 percent of Americans oppose data center construction in their area, including 47 percent of Republicans.

Citing the poll, a WIRED column notes that Trump has kept publicly championing data centers and AI, writing that communities refusing them want to be "backwards and poor"; internal memos from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and strategist Tony Fabrizio have both warned that unqualified support for data centers is a losing electoral position.

The same poll also shows AI and data centers rank far down voters' priorities, with about 20 percent unsure which party would handle the issue better, limiting near-term impact. The poll figures are cited via WIRED; the original report was not directly verified.

Tencent's Yingyongbao team announced on September 20 that a new Marvis version launches September 24, repositioning the product from an AI assistant to an AI butler.

The first release bundles four butlers — PC, files, software and browser — covering system maintenance, file organization, app invocation and web tasks; customized versions for NAS and the Kylin and UOS Xinchuang platforms are teased for October, while gaming and lifestyle butlers remain future promises.

All of this is vendor announcement material: the features are not yet live, Zhidongxi only received beta access, and there is no independent testing — actual performance can only be judged after the September 24 launch.

This is Berkshire Hathaway's 1999 shareholder letter, a letter Buffett wrote to shareholders explaining that year's underperformance. In a year when internet stocks soared and Berkshire's share price fell sharply, he admitted he couldn't understand technology companies, and admitted that this caused him to miss the big rally, but he insisted on buying only companies whose cash flows ten years out could be calculated.

Today, whenever markets go crazy over new stories no one understands, and someone uses "even Buffett missed the internet" to mock the conservatives, this letter is the original source. What it offers is not a prediction but a record of trade-offs: admitting the miss while refusing to abandon one's own algorithm to keep up with the market. Later value investors have almost all made tweaks on top of this set of trade-offs.

If a company you could have researched but couldn't be bothered to, don't use "if you can't understand it, don't buy it" as an excuse — it only protects giving up on things outside your circle of competence; it does not endorse laziness within it. Nor does it provide answers if used to judge the rightness or wrongness of price moves after the fact.

Berkshire Hathaway 1999 Shareholder Letter (2000) | Next review 2027-09-20