Reading List

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

Paris-based Capgemini plans to acquire US-listed IT outsourcing company WNS for $3.3B in cash, seeking to boost its agentic AI services; WNS serves 600+ clients (Bloomberg)

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On-the-job learning in fields like law and banking faces a double threat: hybrid work limiting juniors' time with seniors and Gen AI cutting many routine tasks (Emma Jacobs/Financial Times)

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Meituan says daily orders on its instant delivery service surpassed 120M on July 5, setting an all-time high, with food orders accounting for 100M, or 83% (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)

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Gates Industrial, Generac, and other US industrial firms are seeking to share of the AI boom by increasing efforts to supply specialized data center equipment (Financial Times)

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Hangzhou, home to DeepSeek and Alibaba, has become a Chinese AI startup hub, and the suburb Liangzhu has emerged as a hot spot for coders in their 20s and 30s (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

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How the US government debuted a revamped online system in September 2024 that simplifies passport renewal; the system is already handling nearly 50% of renewals (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

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After Elon Musk unveiled the America Party, a new US political party, President Trump called Musk a "TRAIN WRECK" fueled by discontent over EV subsidies ending (The Guardian)

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Tokyo-based Sakana AI details a new Monte Carlo Tree Search-based technique that lets multiple LLMs cooperate on a single task, outperforming individual LLMs (Ben Dickson/VentureBeat)

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A look at the US Secret Service's GIOC, which sources say has seized nearly $400M in digital assets over the past decade via crypto scam investigations globally (Myles Miller/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with British Library CEO Rebecca Lawrence on dealing with the aftermath of a major October 2023 cyberattack, AI scraping, AI for text analysis, and more (Mishal Husain/Bloomberg)

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Gemini referencing real-life moments when prompted to write a birthday letter shows how effectively Google is leveraging user data to craft personalized content (Lila Shroff/The Atlantic)

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Former Google staffers and others detail why Google's 2013 effort to build Motorola smartphones in Texas failed, as Trump pushes Apple to make iPhones in the US (Verne Kopytoff/Fortune)

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Sources: TikTok plans to launch a new version of its app in the US on September 5, ahead of the US' September 17 deadline to enforce the divest-or-ban law (The Information)

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The GSA says Oracle is giving the US government a 75% discount on its license-based software and a "substantial" discount on its cloud service through November (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

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Adalytics finds 9,000+ pirated movies, including summer blockbusters, TV shows, and live sports, on YouTube, amassing a collective 250M+ views from July to May (New York Times)

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Velvet Sundown, an AI‑created band with ~850,000 monthly Spotify listeners and two recent albums, shows how some listeners are turning to anodyne AI music (Ian Bogost/The Atlantic)

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DefiLlama: monthly DeFi fees have risen to $577M from an April low of $366M, with major protocols generating $275M through automated market-making services (The Block)

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A profile of Steam developer Valve, which has a flat corporate structure and high profit per head; Ampere: Steam hit 170M MAUs in May, versus 153M a year prior (Louis Ashworth/Financial Times)

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How Shein is leveraging its Reliance Retail partnership in its return to India, as fashion now accounts for 27% of India's online sales, up from 16% in 2020 (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

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A look at DeepSeek's impact on the AI model race and market share landscape, roughly 150 days after DeepSeek R1 shook stock markets and the Western AI world (SemiAnalysis)

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