Reading List

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

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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Sources: Instagram and TikTok are working on versions of their apps customized to run on TV screens, following YouTube's success in attracting a TV audience (The Information)

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Apple overhauls EU App Store to comply with DMA: developers can push offers and alt payments, and the Core Technology Fee will be swapped for tiered commission (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

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Sources: Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick to help fund his acquisition of Pony.ai's US arm; Pony.ai has permits to operate robo taxis in the US and China (Mike Isaac/New York Times)

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Apple announces App Store changes to satisfy Brussels regulators (Anupriya Datta/Euractiv)

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Sources: Senate Parliamentarian raised concerns that the tax bill's ban on states from enforcing AI regulations may violate Senate rules, advising a rewrite (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Meta is in advanced talks to buy PlayAI, which uses AI to replicate voices for interfaces that are as "responsive as a conversation between two people" (Bloomberg)

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Internal emails: ICE is using Mobile Fortify, an app that uses facial recognition and fingerprint scanning via phone cameras to identify people in the field (Joseph Cox/404 Media)

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Microsoft plans to replace the Blue Screen of Death in Windows 11 with a simplified black screen "providing better information" in an update "later this summer" (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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A federal judge rejects a joint motion by Ripple Labs and the US SEC to approve a reduced $50M fine to settle a lawsuit over XRP sales, and chastises both sides (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

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Source: Meta has hired highly influential OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal to work on its AI reasoning models under the company's new AI superintelligence unit (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

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Sources: CoreWeave is in talks to acquire bitcoin miner Core Scientific, which has a market value of ~$3.7B; Core Scientific rejected CoreWeave's bid in 2024 (Wall Street Journal)

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Amazon's VP of Generative AI Vasi Philomin left for another company; VP of Amazon Elastic Block Store Rajesh Sheth assumed some of Philomin's responsibilities (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

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As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall, a Google Ad Manager tool to help publishers generate revenue beyond ads, including via micropayments (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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UAE-based Aqua 1 Foundation buys $100M worth of tokens from Trump's World Liberty Financial, becoming its largest individual investor ahead of Justin Sun (Muyao Shen/Bloomberg)

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YouTube launches an AI Overviews-like carousel for searches related to shopping, places, and things to do in a specific place, for Premium users in the US (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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