Reading List

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

Google Home Speaker review: the $100 speaker, the company's first such device in six years, works for Gemini power users but has underwhelming music playback (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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Amazon plans to expand Amazon Now to 300+ Indian cities and towns, up from 100 at present, as CEO Andy Jassy visits India; a source says he is set to meet Modi (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg)

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Qualcomm says it will acquire Modular, which builds a chip software platform and has a proprietary coding language, in a nearly $4B deal set to close in H2 2026 (Lauren Goode/Wired)

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Rockstar says physical GTA 6 copies will contain a download code, not a disc; physical copies will be available from November 12, before the November 19 launch (Tom Phillips/IGN)

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The US FDA drops an enforcement complaint against Whoop over its blood pressure tracking tool, reversing a July 2025 warning letter; Whoop is modifying the tool (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

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An analysis of GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.3, Gab's Arya, and other AI models: most chatbots frequently provide left-leaning responses to political prompts (Kevin Schaul/Washington Post)

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How Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park, home to TSMC, became especially wealthy; one neighborhood reported 2023 average household incomes of $146K+, ~5x the average (New York Times)

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Rockstar sets the release date for GTA VI for November 19 and says it will cost $79.99, or $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition; preorders start at midnight tonight (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

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How Chicago is betting on quantum computing, including turning the site of its former US Steel mill into a campus, after largely missing the digital revolution (Jeanne Whalen/Wall Street Journal)

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Q&A with AWS CEO Matt Garman on the parallels between early AWS and AI, Quick, AI coding, Amazon's $200B capex in 2026, entry-level jobs changing, and more (Casey Newton/Platformer)

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Humanoid robot maker Agility plans to go public via a merger with Michael Klein's SPAC, in a deal valuing Agility at ~$2.5B, listing under ticker symbol AGLT (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

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Filing: SK Hynix is seeking to raise ~$29.4B in a US listing, expects trading to start on July 10, and intends to use the funds to build additional capacity (Bloomberg)

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An interview with Bob Iger on stepping down as Disney's CEO, his legacy, new CEO Josh D'Amaro, Bob Chapek, Apple, Disney+, acquiring Pixar, AI tools, and more (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

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Sources: Qualcomm is in talks to design custom chips for ByteDance, based partly on connectivity tech from Alphawave Semi, which Qualcomm acquired in June 2025 (Reuters)

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SK Hynix overtaking Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company is the culmination of 14 years of bets on HBM, which paid off as the AI boom took off (Reuters)

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Sources: India drives 50%+ of WhatsApp's global revenue, or $1B+ annually, largely via business messaging, which likely helped Kunal Shah get WhatsApp's top job (Moneycontrol)

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London-based Isometric, which develops AI agents that work with human verifiers to automate industrial certification, raised a €34M Series A led by AVP (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)

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New York-based Probook, which is building an AI operating system for home service businesses, raised a $34M Series A led by a16z and a $6M seed led by Sequoia (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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AI creative tools startup Krea, which has raised $83M and claims to have 30M users, releases the open weights for its image model Krea 2 under a custom license (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

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Sources: Zhipu is considering a multibillion-dollar Hong Kong share sale after its stock surged 2,000% since its January IPO, pushing its market cap above $128B (Dong Cao/Bloomberg)

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