Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

YouTube plans a premium lite tier in the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand, offering podcasts and how-to clips without ads; music videos will have ads (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

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Elon Musk says he will "fix" Community Notes as they are "increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media", after disagreeing with notes about Ukraine (Matt Novak/Gizmodo)

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Sources: the Trump administration targets officials fighting foreign interference in US elections, including those focused on cybersecurity and false content (New York Times)

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Sources: X's financials showing a ~$1.4B profit given to investors fall outside corporate accounting norms; the 2023 figures were audited, but 2024 was not (Bloomberg)

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Kuo: all iPhone 17 models will use Apple's in-house Wi-Fi chips, enhancing connectivity and cutting costs; only the slim iPhone 17 will use the C1 modem chip (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

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The US SEC announces the Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit to protect investors from bad actors in crypto and AI, replacing the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit (Sarah Wynn/The Block)

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Twitch plans to implement a 100-hour storage cap for Highlights and Uploads from April 19, automatically deleting content from streamers who exceed the limit (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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Spotify begins accepting AI-narrated audiobooks recorded using ElevenLabs software; Spotify already allows AI-recorded audiobooks, with several restrictions (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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Nvidia launches Signs, a new AI platform to teach American Sign Language and create a validated dataset for sign language learners and ASL app developers (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

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AI hiring startup Mercor, founded by 21-year-old Thiel fellow Brendan Foody, raised $100M led by Felicis at a $2B valuation, up from $250M in September 2024 (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

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Amazon plans to discontinue its Appstore for Android and its Coins digital currency, used to purchase games and apps, on August 20, 2025 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap says the company hit 400M weekly active users in February 2025, up from 300M in December 2024, and 2M paying enterprise customers (Kate Rooney/CNBC)

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Investigation: Google's Display & Video 360 ad platform lets users target Americans' sensitive personal data, despite Google's rules against such practices (Wired)

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Together AI, which provides users access to AI computing, raised $305M co-led by General Catalyst and Saudi Arabia's Prosperity7 at a $3.3B valuation (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

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Sources: a US grand jury is investigating criminal misconduct at fintech Synapse, where up to $96M in user funds went missing, and has questioned an executive (Alexander Saeedy/Wall Street Journal)

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The European Commission approves €920M in German state aid to Infineon to build a new chip plant in Dresden, set to reach full capacity in 2031 (Reuters)

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US survey: views of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk tilt negative; Democrats and Republicans view Zuckerberg unfavorably; Musk is polarizing along party lines (Pew Research Center)

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Oppo launches the Find N5, the world's thinnest foldable at 8.93mm closed and 4.21mm open, with IPX6, X8, and X9 ratings, in Europe and Asia for ~$1,870 (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

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Tokyo-based Sakana AI details its AI CUDA Engineer, which it says can speed up AI training and inference by 10x to 100x by "breeding" efficient instructions (Nikkei Asia)

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Meta says Mark Zuckerberg went to the US Capitol on February 19 to lobby Senators on AI and talk about issues like US tech leadership (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)

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