Reading List

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

Sources: Shein plans to file confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO; filing confidentially remains relatively rare in Hong Kong (Reuters)

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Sources: executives in Meta's AI division discussed "de-investing" in Llama and also discussed using models from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic (New York Times)

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Q&A with Peter Thiel on economic and technological stagnation, US growth and dynamism, supporting President Trump in 2016, the future and risks of AI, and more (Ross Douthat/New York Times)

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Germany's DPC says DeepSeek's app illegally transfers user data to China and asks Apple and Google to block it from their app stores in the country (Reuters)

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European Commission says Meta has proposed limited changes to its pay-or-consent ad model, and Meta faces daily fines if it determines they are not sufficient (Reuters)

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At a "couples retreat" for human-AI pairs, users of services like Replika and Nomi grapple with the virtual reality and emotional limits of their partners (Sam Apple/Wired)

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Brazil's supreme court rules that platforms like Facebook and X can be held liable for user posts, requiring them to remove content even without a court order (Michael Pooler/Financial Times)

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Battery recycler Redwood Materials and Project Stargate member Crusoe launch a 2,000-GPU data center in Nevada powered by repurposed EV batteries (Michelle Ma/Bloomberg)

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At an all-hands, Andrew Bosworth says Sam Altman is not happy about Meta getting OpenAI talent and is "being dishonest" about Meta offering $100M bonuses (Alex Heath/The Verge)

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Google has been banned from selling the Pixel 7 in Japan due to a patent dispute related to 4G connectivity; further bans against the Pixel 8 and 9 are possible (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

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Elon Musk says X will charge for ads "based on vertical size", with an ad taking up the whole screen costing more than one that takes up a quarter of the screen (Matt Swider/The Shortcut)

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Dinari, which offers blockchain-based US stocks, secures a broker-dealer registration to become the first tokenized equity platform to secure approval in the US (Hannah Lang/Reuters)

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Palantir signs a deal with The Nuclear Company under which the startup will pay Palantir $100M over five years to develop AI software for the nuclear industry (Miquela Thornton/Bloomberg)

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Google launches Doppl, an experimental AI app to let users virtually try on outfits by generating videos from photos, available on iOS and Android in the US (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Google fully releases Gemma 3n, an open weights, multimodal AI model that can run on as little as 2GB of memory; the model was previously available as a preview (David Uzondu/Neowin)

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Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE staffer known as "Big Balls" online, has joined the Social Security Administration days after resigning from the GSA (Wired)

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Sources: UK mobile bank Starling is looking to buy a nationally chartered bank with ~$2B of assets in the US as it seeks to expand in the country (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

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New Zealand-based Halter, which provides smart collars and geofencing software for the dairy industry, raised a $100M Series D led by Bond at a $1B valuation (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

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A look at The Browser Company's AI-first browser Dia, which merges AI models and hides that complexity for end users, pointing to the future of web browsing (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

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Swift, a coding language developed by Apple, is working to add Android support; Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

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