Reading List

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

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)

Techmeme

Dropout star Jacob Wysocki defends Dragon Ball's most underrated character

Polygon - All

Inside the six-year battle to get a sci-fi cheerleader beat-'em-up off the ground

Polygon - All

Why the former editor of Polygon is making a podcast for old gamers

The Verge - All Posts

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)

Techmeme

Titan Quest 2 early access impressions: Good, but not one of the greats

Polygon - All

Teenage Engineering did it again

The Verge - All Posts

The one feature that keeps me from recommending flip phones

The Verge - All Posts

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)

Techmeme

Gamescom Opening Night Live 2025: What time it starts and how to watch

Polygon - All

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme

Explore the multiverse and encounter sentient pizza in Meow Wolf's TTRPG

Polygon - All

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme

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)

Techmeme