Reading List

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

India lacks specific policies or zoning regulations for overseeing quick commerce dark stores, which are projected to hit 5,000 to 5,500 by FY2026 end, per HSBC (The Economic Times)

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Elon Musk says Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14 and will offer it only as a monthly subscription; FSD is already available for $99 per month (Danny Lee/Bloomberg)

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WithCoverage, which replaces traditional insurance brokers with its AI-based flat-fee risk management model, raised a $42M Series B led by Sequoia and Khosla (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

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Sources: Chinese officials told customs agents that Nvidia H200 chips are barred from China and instructed local tech companies not to buy them unless necessary (Reuters)

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An inside look at a Myanmar online scam center that opened in 2024 with 3,500 workers from ~30 countries and closed in November 2025 after rebels captured it (New York Times)

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The US urged UN members to take a tougher stance against North Korea IT worker scams and crypto thefts; an October 2025 report said 40+ countries were affected (Jonathan Greig/The Record)

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Saudi Arabia's PIF transfers ~$12B worth of gaming company shares, including Nintendo, to Savvy Games; PIF transferred 11M Take-Two shares in December 2025 (Bloomberg)

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How smuggled Starlink receivers and customized software let some Iranians evade a near-total internet blackout as the regime brutally cracked down on protesters (Financial Times)

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Caterpillar hits a $300B market cap for the first time, driven by demand for its data center power generation equipment; CAT is up 12% in 2026 to a record ~$640 (Matthew Griffin/Bloomberg)

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Bandcamp bans music and audio that is "generated wholly or in substantial part by AI", hoping to build trust with fans that the music they find was human-made (Maya Perez/WebProNews)

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Z.ai releases GLM-Image, an open-source multimodal AI model trained on Huawei chips that it says is China's first to be fully trained using domestic chips (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

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Checkr, which offers employee background checks, says its revenue grew to $800M, up 14% from 2024, amid a surge in AI-generated CVs and fake financial documents (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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Matthew McConaughey has secured eight trademarks of himself from the USPTO in the past several months to protect his likeness and voice from unauthorized AI use (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

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Survey: 41% of US teens aged 13 to 17 support a ban on middle and high school students from using phones in class while 51% oppose it; 73% oppose a full-day ban (Pew Research Center)

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Sources: Apple and Qualcomm are scrambling to secure glass cloth fiber, used in chip substrates and PCBs, as the AI boom boosts demand for the component (Nikkei Asia)

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Holistic Resilience, a US group that helps Iranians secure internet access, says SpaceX has waived Starlink subscription fees amid a days-long internet blackout (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg)

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Defense Unicorns, which provides open-source air-gapped software to the US DOD, raised a $136M Series B led by Bain Capital, bringing its valuation to $1B+ (Aishwarya Jain/Reuters)

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A source details how Apple's Gemini deal works: new Siri features will launch in spring and at WWDC, Apple can finetune Gemini, no Google branding, and more (The Information)

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Under new licensing requirements, the US Commerce Department says exports of Nvidia's H200 chips and AMD's MI325X chips will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis (Bloomberg)

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Liftoff, which helps companies place ads in mobile apps, files for a US IPO, reporting a $25.6M net loss on $491.6M in revenue in the nine months up to Sept. 30 (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)

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