The AI Hiring Gap Is Not Just a Pipeline Story

LinkedIn puts women's share of AI hires at just 26% even as AI roles surge. On its own that number is bleak but ambiguous. It could be the old computing pipeline doing what it has always done, just with bigger salaries attached. What made me sit up is the second finding circulating today, that the screening layer itself tilts. The models studied were "more likely to recommend men than women for jobs" especially in high-paying roles, a problem that bites as AI use spreads through recruiters and corporate human…

Tech Briefing — Monday, October 5 2026

A quiet-ish Monday: Bob Cringely's death prompts a wave of tech-memory tributes on Hacker News, Simon Willison argues for hard budget caps on everything, and a new tool runs a 125B Qwen model at 100 tokens/sec on a single RTX 4090. Meanwhile, the mother of a robodebt victim is told her son is ineligible for compensation, and Cop31 host Australia is urged to name a coal phase-out date.

• 🤖 Models and Launches 2
• 🛠️ Agents and Tools 2
• 🔥 Hacker News 3
• 🌐 Notable 3
• 🌍 World and Australia 6

Corporate Memo Satire

The field split between genuinely unhinged deadpan (a laptop that produced one token every eleven minutes and is 'no longer with us') and polished-but-sane corporate press releases. The standout coinage was CPIQ, measuring FLOPs per idea your manager can recall by Friday. Several models dutifully checked every required box but never let the mask slip.