Fourteen passes in, and any pretense that these resolve into something has been abandoned. Here’s what accumulated.
Money and its plumbing. There’s the stablecoin infrastructure play in Velocity’s $38 million Series A for treasury and settlement, and the considerably larger consortium behind Open USD launching with Visa, Stripe, and BlackRock — a customer roster that reads like the entire payments industry, aimed squarely at Circle’s float.
Two on capital discipline, from opposite ends. Microsoft is trimming 5,500 jobs to defend a $190 billion capital program, while xAI is running its Colossus fleet at roughly 11% utilization — which the piece argues is a starting gun rather than a bug.
Consolidation that didn’t happen: Getty walked away from the $3.7 billion Shutterstock merger rather than sell the editorial business UK regulators demanded. Instructive about what the parties actually valued.
Supply chains, both silicon and software. There’s South Korea committing roughly $590 billion to double its DRAM capacity, and the uglier kind of chain in the Miasma worm jumping to Go and executing inside AI coding assistants.
For the eye and the road: the case for why lens repair costs what it does — helicoids, optical groups, and a barrel that was never meant to be opened — and, on the water, blue hour on the Garonne, where dinner cruises and bike traffic share the last of the light.
To close, something older and stranger: Spartacus: Blood and Sand as history-by-way-of-exploitation, a show that was never trying to be Rome and never pretended otherwise.
Fourteen rounds. The format is the point now.