AI turns smart TVs dumb again, Amazon funds 12 small reactors, Zoom adds proof of human, stablecoin payments jump 45%, and how people really work with AI
Hello, dear TEA-mates! Here is what you need to know today.
1. 📺 People Are Using AI to Make Their Smart TVs Dumb Again
Developers and vibe coders are sharing ways to use AI agents to strip sponsored ads, tracking, and bloatware from smart TVs. The "cleanyourtv" project started when its creator, Gathin T., had Claude Code clean up his parents' TV over Wi-Fi; he says a few thousand people repeated it within two days on Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Fire TV, and LG sets, without root access and with factory reset still possible. A second project, "dumbtv," built by Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5, has been tested on Fire TV and Android/Google TV sets from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, and Xiaomi. One user reported disabling 25 bloat apps and swapping a 192 MB launcher for an 83 MB one. Results are mixed: some users bricked a TV or got stuck halfway. If the hacks spread, they could hurt the smart TV ad business, which profits from viewing data collected through automatic content recognition. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "The business model where companies compete for people's attention to make money (aka ads) might need to be transformed in the AI era, but I don't know. I think entertainment still has its place. People want to find ways to kill time, so I'm not sure. This is a very interesting case study."
2. ⚛️ Amazon to Fund 12 Small Nuclear Reactors at a Former Indiana Coal Plant
Amazon is funding a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer for its power, the companies announced Monday. The plant would use 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors from X-energy, sit on the site of a demolished coal plant just south of Terre Haute, and be operated by American Electric Power. It is Amazon and X-energy's second commercial deal and three times larger than the first, announced two years ago. Unlike many new plants, it would connect to the public grid while also serving Amazon's data centers. The two companies aim to build 5 gigawatts of new U.S. nuclear capacity by 2039, but the timeline depends on X-energy delivering its first plant at Dow's Seadrift site in Texas, where it has yet to break ground. X-energy shares, priced at $23 in an April IPO, have fallen nearly two-thirds since. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Small modular reactors are the future of energy."
3. 👁️ Zoom Adds a "Proof of Human" Badge to Fight Deepfakes
World, the iris-scanning identity company cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced Sunday that Zoom and several financial firms, including Bain Capital and VanEck Funds, are adopting its World ID verification. On Zoom calls, verified participants get a small blue badge confirming they are real humans and who they claim to be, and companies decide which calls require it. Verification ties back to World's football-sized Orb, which scans irises and stores an encrypted record rather than a central database; users later confirm with a phone selfie. World ID offers three tiers: "Proof of Attributes" (government documents), "Proof of Presence" (selfie), and "Proof of Human" (selfie checked against the Orb record). The financial firms will keep Orbs in their offices to enroll employees. World is also letting verified users delegate their status to a single trusted AI agent for shopping, as Cloudflare launched its own agent ID tool in August. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "It just shows how far ahead Sam Altman has been planning for the future…"
4. 💵 Stablecoin Supply Stalls, but Payments Jump 45%
Stablecoin payments reached $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 45% from a year earlier, according to a report from blockchain analytics firm Allium, while the number of payments rose 71% to over 1 billion. Total stablecoin supply, by contrast, sat at about $305 billion at the end of September, up just 0.4% this year. Stablecoin-linked card spending hit $3.9 billion, ten times the prior year, with purchases under $50 driving 84% of the increase. This week Mastercard launched a Global Money Platform with BVNK combining fiat and stablecoin accounts, Stripe partnered with Plasma on multi-currency cards across 30-plus countries, and Visa said Inyo Global is the first to use its USDC prefunding service for cross-border payouts. Caveats remain: Allium counted only $2.4 trillion of $97.9 trillion in raw transfers as end-user activity, and stablecoin cards equal just 0.03% of Visa's quarterly volume. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Wait. Just wait until the bridge between wages and AI agents is in place, and agents are making payments on our behalf on the blockchain. It's going to go up even more."
5. 🤝 Stanford: People Treat AI as a Collaborator, Not a Shortcut
A Stanford study supported by the Institute for Human-Centered AI analyzed a quarter-million anonymized conversations with Anthropic's Claude and found most users engage with AI in substantial ways rather than passively offloading work. Well over half (56%) of collaborations were rated "consequential" or higher, and conversations nearly doubled in length as stakes rose. About half involved "friction," where users and AI challenge each other, and in two-thirds of interactions people asked the AI to explain rather than just produce content. When friction turned negative, users tried to recover in almost 80% of cases. AI teaching helped most in high-consequence fields such as law, software engineering, home improvement, and health. Lead author Diyi Yang warned of a widening gap between people who use AI to build skills and those who let it replace their judgment. The paper has been accepted by Nature Human Behavior. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Push back and ask more."
🛠️ Skill of the Day
The Second-Look Check: Pressure-tests an AI answer before you act on it in a decision that really matters.
Act as a careful second reviewer. I am about to act on an answer an AI gave me, and the stakes are real.
The topic: [LEGAL, HEALTH, MONEY, WORK, OR HOME DECISION].
What I asked: [PASTE MY QUESTION].
The answer I got: [PASTE THE AI ANSWER].
What I plan to do with it: [ONE OR TWO LINES].
Then do the following:
1. Stakes: rate how costly or hard to reverse a mistake would be (low, medium, or high) and say why in one line.
2. Weak spots: list the claims in the answer that most need checking, riskiest first.
3. Missing context: list the questions about my situation the answer should have asked me but did not.
4. Push back: give the strongest reason my plan could be wrong.
5. Verify: for each weak spot, name who or what can confirm it (a professional, an official source, or a document).
Rules: do not just agree with me. Use plain language. If the stakes are high, tell me clearly to confirm with a qualified person before acting.Paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or your tool of choice. Replace the bracketed bits with your own question, answer, and plan.
TEAHEE Moment
Stay sharp, stay informed. See you tomorrow.
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