Alvaro Lopez Ortega / 2026-08-13 Briefing

Created Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:09:37 +0000 Modified Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:11:00 +0000
3924 Words

Brazil ordered Discord to block live streams nationally after a teenager’s death linked to criminal incitement. CXMT overtook Tencent as China’s most valuable firm ($524B vs $510B) after shares surged 460% post-IPO. JD.com posted its first revenue drop (down 2.9% to $51.4B) while SMIC’s profit tripled on mature-node demand. Anthropic reportedly targets a $2T October IPO, and Hassabis pitched an IAEA-style AI safety body to Trump officials.

🤖 AI & Machine Learning

DeepSeek launches V4-Pro, rivals Kimi K3 on some benchmarks, priced much lower: $0.435/$0.87 per 1M

After AI agent startup Warmly was acquired by HubSpot, its CEO received offers from companies like Mercor to buy or license Warmly’s code, records, and staff communications for up to $300,000. The startup fielded four such approaches shortly after the deal, highlighting growing demand for old startup data to train AI models.

Indian workers paid extra to wear devices capturing first-person video of work for AI robot training

Workers in India are being paid extra to wear head-mounted cameras that capture first-person video of their tasks, such as stitching shoes, welding steel, and sorting plastic waste. This footage is used by robotics companies as training data to teach AI-powered robots new skills, often without the workers fully understanding the purpose. For some, like Sunita Rathore, the extra pay is helping them save for their children’s education.

If I own Claude’s outputs why can’t I train my own model on them?

Anthropic prohibits using Claude’s outputs to train AI models without written permission, especially competitive models like general-purpose chatbots or open-ended text generators. Users may use outputs for non-competitive purposes such as specialized classifiers, content tools, and internal workflows. These restrictions are meant to preserve safety controls and prevent customers from using Anthropic’s investment to build direct competitors.

💼 Business & Deals

Accelerant, a data analytics firm for insurance, to go private with Thoma Bravo in $4.4B deal

Accelerant agreed to be taken private by Thoma Bravo in a deal valued at over $4 billion. Under the terms, shareholders will receive $20.25 per share in cash, a 49% premium to the company’s Aug. 12 closing price. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

JD.com Q2 revenue falls 2.9% YoY to $51.4B; net income $1.1B beats estimates

JD.com reported its first quarterly revenue decline since its 2014 listing, with Q2 sales falling 2.9% to about $51.4 billion, reflecting weakened Chinese consumer sentiment. Despite the revenue drop, net income jumped 15% to roughly $1.1 billion, beating estimates, after the retailer pulled back from price wars. Shares fell over 2% in pre-market trading.

SMIC Q2 revenue up 36% to ~$3B; profit up 3x+ to ~$479M, gross margin 25.3%, on mature-node orders

SMIC reported Q2 revenue of about $3 billion, up 36% year over year, with net profit surging over threefold to roughly $479.2 million, beating estimates, and a gross margin of 25.3%. The strong results were driven by robust demand for legacy and specialty chips, as AI-driven capacity constraints led both international and domestic clients to shift mature-node orders to China.

CXMT overtakes Tencent as most valuable Chinese firm, $524B cap vs $510B; IPO shares surged 460%

CXMT Corp., a Shanghai-listed memory-chip maker, has overtaken Tencent Holdings to become the world’s most valuable Chinese company, with a market capitalization of $524 billion versus Tencent’s $510 billion. The surge, driven by AI-fueled demand for memory chips, saw CXMT’s shares jump over 460% at its IPO last month, while Tencent’s valuation slipped amid concerns over its AI investments.

Adyen H1 2026 revenue up 19% to €1.3B, processed volumes up 24%, shares rise 12%

Adyen reported first-half 2026 net revenue of €1.3 billion, up 19% year-over-year, with processed volumes rising 24% to €803.8 billion and EBITDA of €641.5 million. Shares jumped 9.3% to €995.2 in morning trading, though the stock remains down nearly 28% year-to-date.

Anthropic investors see $2T+ Oct IPO, $100-120B revenue by 2026

Anthropic’s investors reportedly expect the AI firm to launch an initial public offering in October at a valuation above $2 trillion, according to the Financial Times. They also anticipate the company reaching $100 billion to $120 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026.

YMTC’s Q2 NAND share: 14%, behind Samsung 25% and SK Hynix 22%, ahead of Micron and Kioxia

YMTC broke into the global top three NAND flash suppliers by shipment volume in Q2, capturing 14% of bit shipments, behind Samsung’s 25% and SK Hynix’s 22%. However, it ranked only fifth by revenue due to heavy exposure to lower-value consumer products and a smaller share of high-priced enterprise SSDs.

Tencent says it could make instant profits on $53B hardware splurge by renting it for AI workloads

Tencent’s $53 billion hardware investment could yield immediate profits if rented for AI workloads, but the company plans to use it to build AI models instead, betting that selling tokens will be more lucrative in the long term.

OpenAI ad service can bill customers for up to one day after they pause campaigns

OpenAI’s ad service can continue billing customers for up to one day after they pause their campaigns. This means users may face charges for ads they believed were stopped. The issue has drawn attention as a potential drawback of the platform.

Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

China has authorized Deutsche Bank to become the first foreign institution in Europe to clear renminbi transactions, operating from Frankfurt. The move expands China’s overseas yuan network and gives European companies another route for direct yuan settlement, though it does not immediately challenge the dollar’s or euro’s dominance.

Nvidia doubles RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell’s MSRP to a staggering $16,000

Nvidia has increased the price of its RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell workstation GPU to $16,000 on its US store, up from $13,250 and a significant jump from its initial ~$8,565 launch price. The hikes are attributed to the ongoing component and memory crisis, given the card’s 96GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Third-party retailers currently list the same card for less, ranging from $13,998 to $15,499.

Anthropic in Talks to Buy World Model AI Startup Decart for $6B

Anthropic is in talks to acquire AI startup Decart for approximately $6 billion. Decart develops world models and software that improves chip efficiency to reduce AI training costs, a technology that could help Anthropic expand its infrastructure capacity to meet rising demand.

Video game lawyer says all her clients have anti-AI contracts

Video game lawyer Haley MacLean says anti-generative AI clauses have become standard in nearly all her clients’ game development and publishing contracts, driven by gamer backlash and copyright risks. She advises studios to avoid generative AI entirely, calling it a legal liability and predicting lawsuits.

☁️ Cloud & Infrastructure

Q2 2026: server eSSDs 48% of NAND shipments, AI inference shift drives 5x YoY growth (Counterpoint)

In Q2 2026, AI inference workloads drove enterprise SSDs to 48% of global NAND shipments, nearly double the 26% share a year earlier, while industry revenue grew fivefold year over year. Samsung led with 25% shipment share, followed by SK hynix at 22%, and YMTC entered the top three at 14%, though it remained fifth in revenue due to a consumer-focused product mix.

Ryanair adds Google Cloud to its dual-cloud flight plan

Ryanair is adding Google Cloud to its existing cloud infrastructure, creating a dual-cloud setup alongside AWS. Google’s Gemini AI will be used for tasks such as crew management, forecasting, and maintenance, while AWS retains its role.

Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects

celld is a self-hosted Durable Objects runtime that uses a storage bucket as its sole coordinator, granting ownership through atomic compare-and-swap leases. It replicates each cell’s SQLite state as LTX segments to that bucket, allowing quick node replacement while keeping all records, files, and logs on your own infrastructure. This removes the vendor-managed scheduler, giving full visibility, operational control, and tenancy isolation.

🛠️ Dev & DIY

SQLite: How it works, by Richard Hipp (2024)

Richard Hipp’s 2024 talk explains the internal architecture and design of SQLite, covering its modular components, the query processing pipeline, and the B-tree storage engine. The presentation details how SQLite achieves reliability and performance through its unique design, including the use of a virtual machine and efficient transaction handling.

A “secure-ish” Pi setup with permission, sandbox, and auto-review

The article describes a host-based security setup for Pi that combines three extensions: a permission system for deterministic allow/deny rules, an OS-level sandbox for isolating Bash commands, and an auto-reviewer for handling contextual network and host-execution requests. It explains how to configure these layers to protect sensitive files, block external paths and sudo, and enable narrowly scoped, reviewed execution of specific host commands like Docker Compose.

Digitizing super 8 film yourself

A hobbyist built a DIY super 8 film digitizer using a Raspberry Pi, stepper motor, and a cheap microscope lens to avoid costly commercial digitization. They rewrote the project’s code to reduce processing time from nine hours to one hour per reel and applied custom stabilization software to archive the films.

What’s new in Flutter 3.47

Flutter 3.47 introduces standalone 1.0 versions of the material_ui and cupertino_ui packages, decoupling design systems from the core SDK for independent updates. It also enables Impeller on desktop by default, prepares for iOS/macOS and Xcode 27, and graduates Flutter Widget Previews to stable, with migration tools provided and legacy SDK libraries slated for November deprecation.

Why vibe code in Lisp?

The author prefers Common Lisp for AI code generation because its homoiconicity lets models operate directly at the AST level, and its macros compress the context window by hiding boilerplate. Its REPL, condition system, and abstraction capabilities also support interactive debugging and high-level architectural focus. Despite being a niche language, Lisp’s expressiveness makes it superior for supervising AI-generated code.

On Hacking

Hacking is defined as playfully clever exploration of limits, not necessarily practical, as illustrated by the author learning to eat with six chopsticks. Such activities have “hack value” and include jokes, explorations, and clever creations, though wit and art alone do not qualify. The concept originated with the MIT hacking community of the 1960s–70s.

python’s pre-declared constants are kinda weird

Python’s six constants behave differently: True, False, and None are lexical keywords, while Ellipsis and NotImplemented are ordinary shadowable builtins. The special identifier debug cannot be assigned or deleted, though it can be shadowed in builtins via setattr, and assigning to it raises SyntaxError despite being syntactically valid. Similarly, using yield or await outside functions raises SyntaxError even though such expressions are syntactically valid.

Everything is better with pickles… except Windows

A chicken sandwich advertisement triggered a Windows malfunction, described as “operating system indigestion.” The incident inspired the headline that while pickles improve many things, Windows is an exception.

ChatGPT Desktop (Codex Desktop) for Linux

Codex is an AI-powered coding agent built on OpenAI’s frontier models that handles engineering tasks end-to-end, from routine pull requests to complex refactors. It supports multi-agent workflows, cloud-based parallel work, customizable team standards via Skills, and scheduled background tasks such as issue triage and CI/CD, while raising code quality and review standards. Available in ChatGPT, an IDE extension, and CLI, it is trusted by teams to accelerate development and reduce manual work.

UTC Time - live clock, ISO 8601, Unix timestamp

This page describes a UTC time tool that displays the current time in multiple formats (ISO 8601, Unix timestamp, RFC 2822, etc.) with one-click copying and a free JSON API. It also resolves city names, airport codes, and timezone identifiers to offsets and DST changes, and provides code examples in several programming languages for getting UTC time.

Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API

Ballet is a workflow-automation platform that connects multi-system processes—such as lead routing, attribution, and renewal plays—by generating inspectable, version-controlled code against any API. It combines deterministic logic for accuracy-critical steps with agentic reasoning where flexibility is needed, and can enrich, dedupe, and score inbound leads in real time without batch jobs. Built by the Brainfish team, Ballet is SOC2 Type II compliant and runs either standalone or integrated with Brainfish.

🔒 Security & Privacy

Crypto firms: AI safety guardrails hinder legitimate security work, attackers use stronger tools

More than three dozen bitcoin and crypto firms, including Coinbase and Block, urged top AI labs to give open-source security researchers early access to their most powerful models, arguing that safety guardrails leave defenders with weaker tools than attackers. The Bitcoin Policy Institute-organized letter requests early model access, computing resources, secure testing environments, and direct channels to lab security teams. The call follows recent exploits against BTCPay Server and Lightning nodes, which highlighted the imbalance between AI-equipped attackers and constrained defenders.

AWS key exposed in JavaScript may have lit way to Beacon’s charity data

An exposed AWS key found in JavaScript may have allowed access to charity organization Beacon’s data. The CRM provider confirmed that a customer database was copied and likely downloaded in readable form.

Twitch feeds your streams to Amazon’s AI unless you tell it to stop

Twitch has turned on a setting by default that allows Amazon to use your streams for AI training. Users must manually opt out to stop their content from being used. The decision has drawn criticism for not asking users beforehand.

Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results

A developer discovered that passwords stored in a public Google Doc were exposed through search results. The credentials, including a hostname and credential string, appeared in autocomplete suggestions, highlighting the risk of publicly accessible documents.

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

Cisco CEO believes the “Mythos” transition will effectively end support for older networking hardware, driving customers to rapidly replace legacy equipment. Buyers are reportedly shifting budgets and moving quickly to upgrade their aging infrastructure in response.

Chinese Loongson processors have leaky caches, researchers find

Researchers discovered that Chinese Loongson processors contain cache vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to extract sensitive data. The issue is exploitable even when operating from within a guest virtual machine.

Claude users are mad that Anthropic’s new watermarks will catch them using it

Anthropic began watermarking Claude’s AI-generated text to comply with the EU AI Act’s transparency requirements, sparking backlash from some Reddit users who called it draconian or unethical. However, many other users defended the practice, arguing it is a reasonable way to detect AI-generated content and that opposition often stems from a desire to pass off AI work as one’s own.

Microsoft has begun retiring Manifest V2 extensions in Edge, with the transition expected to finish for consumers by the end of 2026 and for enterprises in early 2027. This shift to Manifest V3 disables many MV2 extensions, notably affecting privacy and content-blocking tools like uBlock Origin due to stricter rules and service worker limitations. Malwarebytes has already adapted its Browser Guard extension to MV3 to maintain protection.

Tech adds phone tracking to license plate readers, associating devices with cars

SignalTrace, a surveillance system by Leonardo, works with license plate readers to detect recurring signals from devices like phones and smartwatches, linking them to vehicles so investigators can track suspects even without knowing their names. While the company says it does not identify people, the system can connect unnamed device signatures to other records, raising privacy concerns under broader definitions of personally identifiable information.

My Homelab Got Hacked – A Postmortem

The author’s Forgejo instance was compromised via CVE-2026-60004, an RCE in Gitea’s diffpatch endpoint, because open sign-ups were accidentally enabled and the server ran outdated Forgejo v13 (EOL). The attacker created a user and repo with a malicious git hook that executed a curl payload from their server. The author shut down the container and analyzed the exploit but regretted not pausing it for deeper investigation.

McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There

A journalist who requested their data from McDonald’s loyalty program received a 515-page file revealing detailed predictive analytics, including estimated future visits, spending, and top product recommendations. The report showed how McDonald’s uses past purchases to algorithmically model customer behavior, a practice privacy experts say is standard for large U.S. loyalty programs.

🌍 Policy & Society

Discord ordered to block live streams after teenager dies in Brazil

Brazil ordered Discord to block live streaming nationwide after a teenager died following alleged incitement by a criminal group on the platform. The data protection agency cited Discord’s lack of safeguards to detect self-harm and violence in private streams, warning of fines exceeding $9 million per incident for non-compliance.

Hassabis pitched IAEA-style AI safety body to Trump officials before leaving DeepMind

Demis Hassabis pitched the creation of an independent industry AI safety entity, modeled on the International Atomic Energy Agency, to Trump administration officials and leaders of other AI labs before stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He discussed the proposal with officials including Scott Bessent, advocating for codified safety guardrails and best practices for developing artificial general intelligence.

Meta removes 750k+ Australian under-16 accounts, including 462k Instagram, for social media ban

Meta removed over 750,000 Australian accounts it believed belonged to under-16s, including 462,000 Instagram accounts, to comply with the country’s social media ban. The removals reflect the company’s enforcement of the age restriction for Australian users.

Record heat is drying up Europe’s major rivers, as these striking images show

Europe has faced unusual heat and drought, causing record-low water levels in its major rivers, especially the Seine, Rhine, and Danube, according to the European Space Programme. The persistent heat domes have turned landscapes dry and brown.

Mistral got a US patent on tool calls in 118 days. Without prior public notice

Mistral AI was granted a US patent for “Code implemented tool calls” in just 118 days, receiving a B1 designation that means no pre-grant publication occurred. The claims are narrow, covering a specific stateless sandbox that re-executes code blocks with recorded results, rather than the broad concept of tool-calling. Because the patent issued before the 18-month publication window, the public never had a chance to file pre-grant challenges.

The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind

A record-breaking El Niño, forecast to peak at 3.6°C in the Niño 3.4 region, is expected to surpass all previous events and disrupt rainfall across major crop regions worldwide. This would trigger failed harvests and severe food shocks, worsening hunger in vulnerable areas such as Southeast Asia, India, and southern Africa—despite clear advance warnings.

Living with Depression: The Part I Never Say Out Loud

The author describes depression as a cyclical, unexplained emptiness and heaviness rather than sadness, feeling like drowning or a trapped soul while appearing fine outwardly. They hide their true suffering, even passing off genuine answers as acting, and simply wait for the episodes to pass.

When Will AI Take My Job?

The article predicts a monetary crisis and the collapse of the dollar reserve system will precede any AI singularity, triggered by an AI investment bust as economic diffusion fails to match hype. This bust will lead to rising unemployment, geopolitical realignment, and the end of traditional passive investing, making active, macro-aware management essential.

California Uber, Lyft drivers win union recognition

California Uber and Lyft drivers, represented by the California Gig Workers Union, have reached the threshold to be certified as their collective bargaining representative after a 30-day waiting period, following the passage of Assembly Bill 1340. Uber and Lyft have pledged to negotiate in good faith with the union, which calls the victory one of the largest new organizing wins in modern labor history.