Distributed Thoughts

In June, the European Commission unveiled its Technology Sovereignty Package, a stack of proposals built around a Cloud and AI Development Act and a second Chips Act, and the people selling it were unusually honest about the fear underneath.

IBM's biggest quantum chemistry result depended on a conversation between very different machines.

At ten to three in the morning on July 8, 2026, Telstra's network forgot what time it was.

A bankruptcy court has finally put a price on losing your genome.

A wooden barrel built from unequal staves (I love this term, by the way; I've never heard it!)

On July 1, Bloomberg reported that Meta is building a cloud business to sell access to its spare AI compute, an initiative reportedly called Meta Compute.

An inventory system goes wrong before the coffee rush.

I think our language models are too big.

In August, OpenAI published a post with a title I did not expect to read from a frontier lab this year: "Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities."

Imagine you spend a year on the hardest open problem in your field.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3, and there is a piece of the launch I think deserves attention alongside the benchmarks.

In 2025, Gartner issued a poll that said it expects more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027.

Nvidia reported $96.22 billion in revenue this week for its second quarter, against analyst consensus of $92.11 billion, and guided to $108 billion for the third.

IBM published its 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report at the end of July.

On July 14, Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order making New York the first state in the country to pause new hyperscale data centers.

The Insurance Services Office (ISO) has three endorsements in circulation right now carrying a 01 26 edition date: CG 40 47, CG 40 48, and CG 35 08.

On Thursday, July 9: S&P cut Oracle's issuer credit rating from BBB to BBB-.

On Monday, Nvidia announced memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital so that hyperscalers, frontier labs, and enterprises can borrow again…

On June 9 the public comment window closed on the anti-money-laundering rules that will put teeth in the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law signed last July, whose full implementing rules take effect on July 18.

On June 17, a coalition of the biggest names in enterprise software published a new open standard called Agentic Resource Discovery, ARD for short.

The phrase "open source" has a birthday.

Starcloud closed $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation this month, the fastest company in Y Combinator's history to reach a billion.

In 1948 the Supreme Court told the movie studios they could not own the theaters.

On June 29, the Supreme Court decided Trump v.