Reading List

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

The EU's DSA probe into Shein is just the latest of the company's problems, which are stacking up in many of its big markets as it seeks to push through an IPO (Financial Times)

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A profile of Neil Shen of HSG, formerly Sequoia China, which raised $9B from US investors before US restrictions and has funded Manus and other Chinese startups (Wall Street Journal)

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Sam Altman says discussions about AI's energy usage are "unfair", as it takes "20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time" to train a human (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

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Turkey launches a review of how social media platforms handle children's data as it prepares new rules that include identity verification and age restrictions (Turkish Minute)

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Tim Cook's increased mentions of Visual Intelligence hint it will be a major part of Apple's new wearables; sources: Apple considers a deep red iPhone 18 Pro (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Analysis: the crypto industry has spent $288M+ on the 2026 US midterms so far, over double the 2024 cycle; crypto PAC Fairshake is the US' fifth most-funded PAC (Molly White/Citation Needed)

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India's AI Summit highlighted the limits of the country's AI ambitions, as the US and its tech companies largely dismissed India's push for global AI governance (Krishn Kaushik/Financial Times)

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Anthropic's data shows software engineering accounts for ~50% of its AI agent tool calls; the remaining verticals are greenfields most founders are overlooking (Garry Tan/Garry's List)

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Source Global: the US consulting market is set to grow 7% in 2026, the fastest pace in the post-COVID era, as companies seek advice on profiting from AI (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)

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Sam Altman says currently "the idea of putting data centers in space is ridiculous" and that it is "not something that's going to matter at scale this decade" (Bijin Jose/The Indian Express)

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Amazon details how a Russian-speaking hacker used generative AI as part of a campaign that breached 600+ FortiGate firewalls across 55 countries in five weeks (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

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Salt Lake City-based Jump, a provider of AI tools for financial advisors to automate meeting prep and more, raised an $80M Series B led by Insight Partners (FinSMEs)

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Sam Altman says Elon Musk's idea of putting data centers in space is 'ridiculous' (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)

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Trump calls on Netflix to fire board member Susan Rice or face "consequences," after she said corporations that "take a knee" to Trump would be held accountable (Sam Kim/Bloomberg)

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Sources: DOJ's review of Netflix's WBD takeover examines whether Netflix wields anticompetitive leverage over creators in violation of Clayton and Sherman Acts (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg)

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Sam Altman says there is some "AI washing", where companies blame AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, alongside "real displacement by AI" of some jobs (AJ Dellinger/Gizmodo)

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Open source projects like VLC and Blender are seeing a decline in the average quality of contributions, likely as AI coding tools lower barriers to entry (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

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Google is ending Gmailify and POP access in Gmail; new users will lose access in Q1 2026, and existing users will keep both features until later in 2026 (David Nield/Wired)

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English-language Wikipedia bans Archive.today after editors discover it was used to direct a DDoS attack and tampered with snapshots; 695K+ links to be removed (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

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Interviews with Cluely's Roy Lee, Donald Boat, and other highly "agentic" young men, as agency becomes more valuable than technical skills in Silicon Valley (Sam Kriss/Harper's)

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