TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Kanishka Sonthalia / Bloomberg / Getty Images

1. Homegrown digital payments: India's digital payments strategy, which involves leveraging the wild success of the Unified Payments Interface system, is reducing the market share of Visa and Mastercard in the country. TC's Manish Singh has the numbers. Read More

2. Just a cog in a machine: Wildfires are devastating Los Angeles, but TikTok's LA-based employees have been told they can either work from home or use up one of their 10 personal/sick days if they have to, say, flee for their lives. Classy. Read More

3. Okay, bestie: OpenAI looks like it has a new way for users to customize interactions with ChatGPT. Users have been reporting that they can now specify a preferred name or nickname for themselves, tell the chatbot what to remember about them, and assign personality traits to the bot, like "Gen Z" or "chatty." Read More

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Morning must-reads

Image Credits: Tasia Wells / Getty Images

😵‍💫 Dude, where's my data? Los Angeles-based cannabis firm Stiiizy confirmed that hackers accessed troves of sensitive customer data, including government-issued documents and medical cannabis cards. Read More

🤖 Say hello to Apollo: CES was a mixed bag for humanoid robots, per TC's Brian Heater, but he says Apptronik's Apollo stood out for being refreshingly friendly and bright, with smooth movements and a fun, demonstration-ready personality. Read More

👀 How am I supposed to work when you're staring at me? TC's Max Zeff tested out Nvidia's latest prototype AI avatar, a humanoid character that hangs out in the corner of your PC's desktop and helps you navigate apps. It's not ready for primetime yet, but check out his preview to see what it can do today. Read More

🏠 From unicorn to job cuts: ICON, a startup that builds homes with 3D printers, is laying off 25% of staff, or about 114 people. The company, last valued at $2 billion, now has to downsize as it refocuses on investing in "growth opportunities." Read More

🥸 Someone do an Adrian Dittmann one: X said it is rolling out labels for parody or satire profiles so they can be differentiated from other accounts. It's likely intended to prevent people mistakenly quoting posts from fake accounts as authentic, but I'm not betting on that. Read More

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Around the web

😡 Rules are for you, not me: According to Meta's new policies on hate speech, the company will "remove dehumanizing speech." But as Platformer and others have pointed out, it will now allow people to post stuff like, "A trans person isn't a he or a she, it's an it," or refer to women as "household objects." Read More

🐦 Still taking lessons from Mother Nature: A doctoral student at EPFL has explored why birds jump to take off, and how that can be used by fixed-wing drones that require runways or catapults to get off the ground, reports IEEE Spectrum. He built RAVEN, which is about the size of a crow, and it's remarkably realistic. Read More

👫 Hack for a better world: Know any teens interested in the social aspect of coding and hacking? Hack Club is a group of teen hackers from around the world who can learn together, build open source learning tools, and meet up IRL. Read More

Before you go

Image Credits: Brian Heater

🔫 Pew pew! Slovenian startup Eve came to CES with a connected security system that does more than send you phone notifications: it shoots intruders with paintballs! Read More