Reading List

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

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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PitchBook: VC exits through public listings, acquisitions, and buyouts reached $67.7B in Q2 2025, up from $38.5B a year ago and the strongest showing since 2021 (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act expands Qualified Small Business Stock benefits for VCs, founders, and startup staff, raising tax-free gains from $10M to $15M (Robert Frank/CNBC)

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Analysts estimate AI services within Microsoft Azure generated $11.5B in revenue in the just-ended fiscal year, up 100%+ YoY but only ~4% of Microsoft's revenue (Wall Street Journal)

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Savvy Wealth, a digital wealth management service for financial advisors, raised a $72M Series B led by Industry Ventures, taking its total funding to $100M+ (Davis Janowski/Wealth Management)

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An interview with Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost on settling the proxy fight with Starboard Value, serving the "design and make" workforce, US reshoring, and more (Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson/Semafor)

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How Clorox is using generative AI for ad creation, brainstorming new products, and analyzing consumer reviews, as part of a five-year, $580M digital overhaul (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

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The Colombian navy says it has seized an unmanned narco-submarine that was equipped with a Starlink terminal, enabling the sub to be controlled remotely (France 24)

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A developer details how he shipped Context, a native macOS app that was almost 100% built using Claude Code (Indragie Karunaratne/My Portfolio)

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Sources: Google told publishers it is hiring new staff to market its ad tech to big advertisers and ad agencies, signaling a renewed focus on publisher ad tech (Catherine Perloff/The Information)

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A look at India's push to compete in the global AI race, as the country's vast linguistic diversity poses a core challenge to building foundational AI models (Shadma Shaikh/MIT Technology Review)

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Investigation: preprint research papers on arXiv from 14 academic institutions in eight countries had hidden prompts telling AI tools to give positive reviews (Nikkei Asia)

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Cluely says its ARR hit $7M after signing a public company; a startup called Pickle says it built Glass, an open source, free product similar to Cluely (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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