Reading List

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

Cybercriminals, spies, researchers, and corporate defenders are increasingly using AI, feeding into an escalating cat-and-mouse game of finding software flaws (Kevin Collier/NBC News)

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An interview with Trent Brunson, R&D director at cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits, which won $3M and second in DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge, behind Team Atlanta (Patrick Howell O'Neill/Bloomberg)

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How Chinese streaming giants iQiyi and Tencent are gaining on Netflix in Southeast Asia through original productions and free, ad-supported services (Nikkei Asia)

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NYC-based Protege, which prepares and sells real-world datasets like lab results and sports footage for AI training, raised a $25M Series A led by Footwork (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)

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Sources: Meta may debut "Hypernova" smart glasses with display for ~$800 in Sept.; Apple slow-walks releasing immersive video it shot around Vision Pro's debut (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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A look at the "Palantir Mafia", a group of Palantir alumni who have started or are leading 350+ tech companies, including at least a dozen valued at $1B+ (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

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PitchBook: 15.9% of VC-backed deals in 2025 so far have been down rounds, a 10-year high, with AI and ML startups accounting for 29.3% of the down rounds (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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India's blueprint to displace China as the world's electronics workshop relies heavily on Chinese companies' technical expertise and manufacturing know-how (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

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Cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, whose books helped shape the philosophical conversation about human intelligence and AI, died on July 18 at age 88 (Michael S. Rosenwald/New York Times)

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Big Tech's reverse acquihires for AI talent are hollowing out startups and eroding the culture that has made Silicon Valley an unparalleled source of innovation (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)

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Ex-Intel engineer Varun Gupta was sentenced to two years' probation and fined $34K+ for stealing trade secrets and sharing them with his new employer Microsoft (Maxine Bernstein/Oregonian)

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XOPS, which uses AI and knowledge graphs to automate enterprise IT tasks, emerges from stealth with $40M in funding led by Activant Capital and FPV Ventures (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

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A look at the problems at Uber Freight, which has posted operating losses every year since it was founded in 2017, except for 2022, and just appointed a new CEO (Thomas Black/Bloomberg)

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Barbour ABI: the UK's data center count, currently 477, is set to jump by ~100 over the next five years, with more than half in London and neighboring counties (BBC)

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A new Artificial Analysis benchmark, focusing on OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b, shows how open-weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across hosting providers (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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GPT-5's underwhelming performance on benchmarks suggests that the current approach of scaling LLMs is starting to reach the limits of available resources (Financial Times)

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How an editor uncovered the "largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history" that promoted obscure composer David Woodard with entries in 335 languages (Nate Anderson/Ars Technica)

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Global smart glasses shipments grew 110% YoY in H1; Meta's share of the market rose to 73%; AI smart glasses accounted for 78% of shipments, up from 46% YoY (Counterpoint Research)

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Anthropic enables Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 to end conversations in "cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions"; users can still start new chats (Anthropic)

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A look at AI-powered stuffed animals like Grem, Grok, and Gabbo, which are being promoted as an alternative to screen time for children as young as 3 (New York Times)

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