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BYD up, Tesla struggles, long recipe blogs and the 'schizophrenic file'

Plus: the one thing you don’t want to happen to your start-up

Author

Cam Wilson
July 04, 2025

Edition 2367

The News

EV wrap: BYD up, Tesla meh, truck challenges and some swagged up people movers

There’s been a bunch of EV news that I haven’t had a chance to Sizzle on — until now. Even before Australia’s new efficiency standards kicked in this week, EV sales have spiked to an all-time high of 10% of new vehicles bought last month (The Driven). BYD sales hit an all-time high (SMH, $) and hit the top five brands by sales —  the first ever Chinese brand to rank that high (LinkedIn). Tesla sales rebounded from a slump but are still down from this time last year (Drive). Meanwhile, it does seem like Tesla’s self-driving in Austin is not going that well (The Guardian). Back here, an inquiry heard that electric trucks still face some big challenges in Australia (The Driven).

Bonus: here are two neat new big EVs: Volkswagen’s ID Buzz (Ars Technica) and the Zeekr 9X (CarExpert).

It’s cute, right?

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Long recipe blog stories and a defence of online advertisements

Google will stop showing full recipes that have been extracted from external websites in its search results (Economic Times). It’s ending its “Recipe Quick View” feature which were like the snippets of info about people, places, sports scores, etc that you already see in Google Search. The long stories preceding the cooking instructions is so common that it’s a meme (Reddit), so I’m sure people liked being able to skip it. But it’s deeply ironic because this format only came about because of Google and how its search rankings favoured longer, more in-depth web pages. Google made a problem, then “solved” it! And yes, these blogs are usually filled with advertisements which are annoying but, hey, that’s why it’s free to see.

Zooming out, this is part of the growing tension between Google and publishers laid bare by the release of its AI summaries: Google is doing things that its users probably like but, increasingly, are hurting the people who make the internet alive. (For more, see Dries Buytaert’s vlog The web’s broken deal with AI companies)

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Meet the ‘schizophrenic file’

This is cool/scary: it’s possible to create a .zip file that contains two different sets of files depending on what’s used to open it (Hackarcana). Dubbed a “schizophrenic file”, this exploit, made possible by the design of the ZIP format, means that you could send the same file to people and its contents will seem different to each of them. This has nefarious possibilities — like being sent an invoice that morphs into a different one once you approve it and forward it to your accounting department.

Here’s a diagram from the article that honestly means nothing to me but it does look cool

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

  • NSW tackles AI real estate pics (Information Age) 

  • After Louis lost $109k to scammers, banks are finally combatting the 'flaw' the scammers used (ABC News) 

  • Defence commits to five more years of Azure worth $495m (IT News) 

  • Costs of Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Australia: An Initial Review (ICMEC) 

  • Musk’s ‘Priority #1’ Disaster: CSAM Problem Worsens While ExTwitter Stiffs Detection Provider (TechDirt)

  • Military leaders aghast as Meta founder Zuckerberg crashes classified Oval Office meeting on fighter jets: report (The Independent)

  • Leaked docs show how Meta is training its chatbots to message you first, remember your chats, and keep you talking (Business Insider) 

  • CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs (WSJ, gift link) 

  • Provider of covert surveillance app spills passwords for 62,000 users (Ars Technica) 

  • The Men Behind Deepfake Pornography (Der Spiegel) 

  • Adding calendar events with a screenshot is AI at its finest (The Verge) 

  • Apple's Upcoming Macs Listed in New Report (MacRumors)

  • Apple CarPlay Ultra hands-on: more continuity, less disruption (The Verge)

  • 'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers (Nikkei) 

  • ChatGPT creates phisher’s paradise by recommending the wrong URLs for major companies (The Register) 

  • Stop Killing Games consumer movement hits some major milestones (GamingOnLinux) 

  • China’s giant new gamble with digital IDs (The Economist)

  • Nothing Headphone (1) Unboxing And Early Thoughts (Alex Kidman on YouTube)  

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

This is the one thing you don’t want to happen to your start-up

Startups in Silicon Valley keep having this problem: They’re hiring for a new engineer. They find a candidate. The engineer interviews well, he’s extremely technically capable, he’s got a hot GitHub account. The company makes an offer, and he accepts. Once he starts, he’s a little hard to get a hold of. He misses meetings, seems to go AWOL. Or perhaps he delays starting all together.

This is a widespread problem, but it’s not a lot of people doing it. It’s one guy. Soham Parekh is an engineer from India who apparently has tricked dozens of companies into hiring him — unbeknownst to them — simultaneously (The Verge). This started coming out over the past few days after one founder went public, prompting a flood of others to say the same thing happened to them. Oh, and one company who said he was working for them and they were happy with his performance lol.

Honestly, as someone who already juggles two jobs, this sounds like a nightmare to me. I hope you take the opposite of this energy and do absolutely zero work this weekend. TGIF!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.

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