According to Bloomberg, Discord has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters reports: The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Discord, which was founded in 2015, offers voice, video and text chatting capabilities aimed at gamers and streamers. According to a statement in December, the platform has more than 200 million monthly users.

Google will begin releasing Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code only twice a year starting in 2026. "In the past, Google would release the source code for every quarterly Android release, of which there are four each year," notes Android Authority. From the report: Google told Android Authority that, effective 2026, Google will publish new source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. The reason is to ensure platform stability for the Android ecosystem and better align with Android's trunk-stable development model.

Developers navigating to source.android.com today will see a banner confirming the change that reads as follows: "Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk-stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release instead of aosp-main. The aosp-latest-release manifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP. For more information, see Changes to AOSP."

A spokesperson for Google offered some additional context on this decision, stating that it helps simplify development, eliminates the complexity of managing multiple code branches, and allows them to deliver more stable and secure code to Android platform developers. The spokesperson also reiterated that Google's commitment to AOSP is unchanged and that this new release schedule helps the company build a more robust and secure foundation for the Android ecosystem. Finally, Google told us that its process for security patch releases will not change and that the company will keep publishing security patches each month on a dedicated security-only branch for relevant OS releases just as it does today.

The "talent is everywhere" approach that U.S. employers adopted during the white-hot pandemic job market is quietly giving way to something much older and more familiar: recruiting almost exclusively from a small set of elite and nearby universities. A 2025 survey of more than 150 companies by Veris Insights found that 26% were exclusively recruiting from a shortlist of schools, up from 17% in 2022.

Diversity as a priority for school recruiting selection dropped to 31% of employers surveyed in 2025, down from nearly 60% in 2022. GE Appliances once sent recruiters on one or two passes through 45 to 50 schools each year; now the company attends four or five events per semester at just 15 universities, including Purdue and Auburn. McKinsey, the consulting firm that expanded recruitment well beyond the Ivy League after George Floyd's murder, recently removed language from its career page that said "We hire people, not degrees." The firm now hosts in-person events at a shortlist of about 20 core schools, including Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.

Most companies now recruit at up to 30 American colleges out of about 4,000, said William Chichester III, who has directed entry-level recruiting at Target and Peloton. For students outside elite schools or those located near company headquarters? "God help you," he said.

Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. 404Media: Publisher's Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone) -- an anti-AI activist group of French translators -- HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they're being replaced with machines in 2026.

The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to "reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions."

A survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents conducted by the New York Times found that many high schools have stopped assigning full novels to students, opting instead for excerpts that are often read on school-issued laptops rather than in print. The shift stems from multiple factors: a belief that students have shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, and the influence of Common Core standards adopted by many U.S. states more than a decade ago.

Schools increasingly rely on curriculum products like StudySync, which takes an anthology approach to literature rather than requiring complete books. Teachers acknowledge that teens now read far fewer full novels than previous generations, though some educators push back against the trend. "Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books," said Heather McGuire, a New Mexico English teacher who responded to the survey.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Open Rights Group is warning politicians that the UK is leaning far too heavily on US tech companies to run critical systems, and wants the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill to force a rethink.

The digital rights outfit says the bill, which is due to receive its second reading in the House of Commons today, represents a rare opportunity to force the government to confront what it sees as a strategic blind spot: the UK's reliance on companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and data analytics biz Palantir for everything from cloud hosting to sensitive public sector systems.

"Just as relying on one country for the UK's energy needs would be risky and irresponsible, so is overreliance on US companies to supply the bulk of our digital infrastructure," said James Baker, platform power programme manager at Open Rights Group. He argued that digital infrastructure has become an extension of geopolitical power, and the UK is increasingly vulnerable to decisions taken far beyond Westminster's control.