Tech
Kalshi demands Netflix take down trailer for ‘Prediction Games’ documentary
Prediction market Kalshi sent Netflix a cease-and-desist letter on Friday demanding that the streaming service take down the trailer for an upcoming documentary. In the letter, Kalshi claimed the trailer is “defamatory” and contains “both fabricated documents and false and misleading statements.”
“Instadocs: The Prediction Games” is a documentary about the rise of prediction markets. According to Netflix, the film — part of the streamer’s “Instadoc” series of fast-turnaround documentaries — features interviews with both Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour.
The trailer, however, focuses on a recent party in Las Vegas, where men who have “made millions of dollars on prediction markets, probably eight figures, just over the course of the World Cup” have gathered to watch the World Cup final. One of the guests declares, “I like betting on Kalshi,” while another shows off an apparent $5,000 bet on their phone.
However, Kalshi is currently banned from operating in Nevada due to a court order. In its cease-and-desist letter, Kalshi said the bet shown on the phone is actually a screenshot of a bet made on May 16, 2025 — long before the ban. But the company argued that in the trailer, Netflix “misled its millions of customers into believing this individual was able to successfully trade sport event contracts in Nevada on July 19, 2026.”
In its letter, Kalshi also said that it recently spoke to a Netflix employee who “agreed not to feature the receipt in the documentary when it is released” on Sunday, July 26.
“However — despite Kalshi demonstrating to this employee that the claims in the video were demonstrably false — Netflix inexplicably refused to remove the receipt from the trailer currently circulating on the homepage of the Netflix app,” the company said.
Netflix doesn’t dispute that the screenshot is of a bet from 2025, but a spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that none of the documentary footage was fabricated.
“The footage was filmed at the Winible World Cup Watch Weekend in Las Vegas on July 17, 2026,” the spokesperson said. “The featured trader with the trade on Spain showed us a screenshot of his bet, that was made in May 2025 prior to any Nevada court order. Any specific trades or bets referenced during that weekend are between the individual and the app in which they placed the trades.”
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Tech
Elon Musk’s Boring Company reportedly raising funding at a $20 billion valuation
Elon Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company is in talks to raise a $4 billion funding round at a valuation of $20 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The deal hasn’t closed and the terms could change, the WSJ says. At $20 billion, the valuation would be a significant increase from The Boring Company’s $5.7 billion valuation in 2022.
The startup has already built a network of tunnels under Las Vegas, through which Teslas shuttle customers to different stations. But tunnel workers have suffered serious injuries, and Nevada regulators said last year that The Boring Company violated environmental regulations nearly 800 times.
The Boring Company has announced plans to build tunnel networks under Nashville and Dubai. The WSJ says the startup has also pitched projects in Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
The startup spun out of SpaceX in 2018. SpaceX recently had the largest IPO ever, but its stock price has taken a significant dip since then.
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Tech
Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech
“Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He’s just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini.
Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that’s outfitted for children – the focal point is the vibrant rug he’s standing on, which reminds us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20-odd adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in this context does not stand for “apple” and “igloo.”
“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.
Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. Then, he walks through all of the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through turning off specific features.
“As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.”

Bailey got the idea for the Avoiding AI workshop from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. He was one of dozens of librarians from around the world who contacted Cyrus after she published a journal article about developing her own workshop.
“This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “Nobody has ever been emailing me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?’”
At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with anything involving technology.
“More and more, I was getting questions about, ‘How do I turn this [AI] stuff off? Why is it trying to write my emails for me? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?’” Cyrus said. “I just decided that with so much media hype out there about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what is happening when you’re using this technology, and then getting into how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it.”
Usually, Cyrus’ classes like Intro to Computers get about a dozen attendees. But so many people expressed interest in her first Avoiding AI workshop that she had to cut off registration at 30 people, open a waitlist, and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, about 70 people attended each of Cyrus’ first two workshops.
When Bailey followed Cyrus’ lead to host a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was similarly unprecedented. The library’s Instagram post about the “Avoiding AI” event got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, whereas most of the library’s posts don’t get more than a few dozen likes. He scheduled a second program because the first got too many registrations.
“As an information professional, it feels good to see people skeptical of AI,” Bailey said. “It felt really good to see how many people share this feeling.”
There’s a sense of camaraderie among the room of strangers during the workshop. When Bailey invites attendees to share their own tips, one person explains that when you append “&udm=14” to a Google Search, it will hide AI results. Bailey writes the string of characters down on a whiteboard next to the log-in credentials for the teen Wi-Fi server.
“You have to go through all the trouble to buy a home in today’s world, and two years from now, there could be a data center next to your house,” one workshop attendee named Johnny says.
“I keep getting AI shoved down my throat at work, and every time I see it, I think about the environment,” another attendee named Gabrielle adds. But she’s also not writing off AI as a technology altogether. “I’m not against AI in terms of medical breakthroughs.”
AI naysayers know that this technology is far broader than just chatbots and deepfake apps. Cyrus mentioned how useful optical character recognition is for scanning old documents at the library. But for her and the people who go to her workshops, the anti-AI movement isn’t about rejecting technology altogether so much as it is about advocating for more control, agency, and freedom in how people use technology.
“I think the forced adoption of AI on people’s devices might be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back in some ways,” she said. “The awareness has been growing for a long time that these products and these companies that make them have an outsized influence over us, and that we’re not really using these products in the way that we would like to.”
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Tech
Poetry for Engineers: A Martian Rover Sends a Postcard Home

Already, I’ve almost forgotten rain;
I know I will never know that again.
I move forward with the powers you gave me
to live up to my name, Curiosity.
This is a land without leaves, fronds, or spines.
If there are plants, they are small and supine,
dust hidden, like light here, filtered and sand
softened, at home in the thin air, thousands
of motes so small they seem to be fluid,
more fog than firmament. Shadows, few and
far from here, I know I must go to them
to see if they hold order or mayhem
or just another common rock or two.
If a machine can miss the Earth, I do.
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