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Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to

Instagram’s wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn’t look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn’t even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instag

Off the Wire Press Releases MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 14, 2026 — Lightmatter has announced the launch of the Open Silicon Photonics for AI Systems initiative as an official workstream within the Open Compute Project (OCP), in collaboration with an expanded coalition that now in

Updated August 14, 2026: Initial publication; pricing claims verified against vendor configurators August 14, 2026. Desktop workstations are ranked here on SPECworkstation, SPECviewperf, rendering, and compute results; several of these towers are ranked separately on our Best Des

Financing the AI Boom 3 Nvidia, Guarantor of Last Resort Last November, in Bubble Trouble 2, we looked at AI chips as the font of a new asset class. At the time, their prices weren’t going up, hence the cautionary title. But nine months is a long time in AI and as demand for comp

A group that includes Jeff Bezos has struck a deal with Fenway Sports Group to become minority owners in Liverpool Football Club, FSG said Friday. The deal is the Amazon founder's first investment in a sports property. The consortium will buy roughly one-third of the Premier Leag

Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update, you can toggle off a new “Media watermark” setting in Gemini and Google’s AI video generator, Flow. You can now turn off Google Gemini’s visible watermar

Alphabet's early bet on SpaceX has multiplied more than 100-fold, with the Google parent disclosing a stake worth about $94 billion at the end of June compared with the $900 million investment it said it made in Elon Musk's rocket company in 2015. Alphabet has emerged as by far t

A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it’s only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year. As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible

Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro told CNBC's Julia Boorstin on Friday that the company's parks division was a "big surprise" last quarter and that he feels confident about the company's trajectory during his first few months at the top of the media giant. "We're delivering on everything t

A court ruling this week in favor of Gilead Sciences could significantly impact a burgeoning class of health programs in the U.S. that federal authorities say are illegally importing medications from overseas. Last year, a CNBC investigation found that these programs — called alt

AWS Compute Blog Implementing dynamic feature flags with AWS AppConfig on AWS Lambda Feature flags (also known as feature toggles) allow you to change application behavior in real time without deploying new code. In serverless applications, where functions are ephemeral, stateles

Marco Arment, the indie developer who created popular apps like Overcast and Instapaper, and who previously served as Tumblr’s chief technology officer, is out today with his latest creation — an alternative to Apple’s Reminders designed for procrastinators, called Unforgetful. T

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is proposing to overhaul its settlement framework, aiming to reduce settlement amounts and speed up enforcement by simplifying how payments are calculated and allowing cases to be resolved earlier. The move follows Sebi’s finding

Gold prices are set to extend their weekly winning run as expectations of a US Federal Reserve rate hike at its upcoming meeting ease following the latest batch of economic data, while a weaker US dollar has made the greenback-priced commodity more attractive to overseas buyers.

Google announced on Friday that it will now allow users to remove a visible watermark from its AI generations, including images, videos, and songs. The company specified that this won’t affect the invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA standard-related metadata. Josh Woodward, the

This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them. Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gami

Insight and analysis on the data center space from industry thought leaders. The Vanishing Value of VMware: A Wake-Up Call The VMware-Broadcom situation illustrates a critical lesson: avoid over-dependence on any one platform by continuously evaluating workload placement, costs,

Episode details Available for over a year Today, Nigel Farage was re-elected as MP for Clacton after his resignation in July triggered a by-election in the seat. Adam and Henry are live onstage at the Edinburgh Fringe to discuss all the results from the by-election, and what coul

Artificial Intelligence Custom reward functions for multi-turn reinforcement learning with Amazon Nova Forge In multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL), your custom reward function decides what the model actually learns. A subtly wrong reward can quietly teach the wrong thing whil

Bezos-backed consortium buys a third of Liverpool - Published Liverpool's owners have agreed to sell about a third of the club to a consortium including billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In a statement, Fenway Sports Group (FSG) confirmed it had entered into a "definitive ag

Artificial Intelligence Building agentic workflows with SageMaker AI and Bedrock AgentCore A common challenge in building agentic workflows is mixing managed foundation models (FMs) with your own cost-optimized or domain-specific models, without rewriting your agent framework to

The FMCG company's revenue from operations stood at Rs 11,337.45 crore, compared with Rs 8,766.03 crore in Q1FY26 and Rs 11,155.60 crore in Q4FY26. This represents a 29.33% YoY growth and a 1.63% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) increase. Operating EBITDA, excluding exceptional items, st

Google began offering third-party app store downloads in the Play Store earlier this week, but US District Judge James Donato says the company isn’t doing enough. After reviewing the process for accessing the first non-Google store, Donato ruled that Google has added unnecessary

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI sh

Michaels is expanding an experiential store model to a third location in Rogers, Arkansas, according to a Thursday press release. The first two locations were opened in Easton, Ohio, and Irving, Texas. The refreshed store experience includes Michaels Knit & Sew Shop — first launc

Lululemon’s chief AI and technology officer has left the company. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission marked his departure date as Thursday. Ranju Das joined the retailer a little less than a year ago, with the aim of improving product innovation and speed.

For investors enthralled by soaring corporate profits, headlines about the painful consequences from climate change are largely just background noise, experts say. "The earnings season has been so strong, and the number one worry in terms of inflation being the situation in Iran,

Tom's Hardware Verdict The Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is the kind of memory kit you pick up if you want the absolute best for an AMD Ryzen processor. Pros - +Unrivaled performance - +Runs at 1.35V - +Backup EXPO profile Cons - -Exorbitant price tag Why you can trust Tom's

The Scoop Phillips 66 and Marathon Petroleum held merger talks earlier this year in a deal that would have created a $180 billion oil-and-gas giant, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks ultimately fizzled out and are unlikely to be resurrected anytime soon, the

According to a regulatory filing with the stock exchanges, the Mauritius-based entity sold 2,00,00,000 (2 crore) equity shares of the company. Prior to the transaction, Accel held 9,47,13,868 shares, representing a 6.14 per cent stake in the firm. Following the sale, its sharehol

The company, which operates a multi-brand luxury fashion omni-channel platform, has filed its updated draft red herring prospectus (UDRHP) with markets regulator Sebi. It received Sebi's approval for the IPO in January this year. Purple Style Labs plans to use the IPO proceeds to

The company had posted net profit of Rs 658 crore in the corresponding period of the last financial year. Consolidated revenue rose 10% to Rs 10,750 crore in the period under review. On a standalone basis, Ashok Leyland reported its highest-ever net profit of Rs 609 crore as agai

Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist running for Wisconsin governor, this week narrowly lost her primary battle against David Crowley, a Milwaukee County executive, but that doesn't mean the sheen has rubbed off the left. With fewer than 90 days remaining before the midterm ele

* The proposal replaces the existing settlement formula with a simplified calculation linked to statutory minimum penalties and factors such as the stage of proceedings, prior regulatory action, gravity of violations, and aggravating and mitigating circumstances. * The regulator

There is a lot of excitement and some trepidation among The X-Files fans about Ryan Coogler’s reboot for Hulu, currently in production. While we’re waiting, Hulu just released Chris Carter’s revamped (and R-rated) director’s cut of the 2008 standalone spinoff film The X-Files: I

Under the proposed framework, intermediaries may undertake video-based customer identification and verification (VIPV) for individual Person Resident Outside India (PROI) clients, including Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), Overseas Citizens of India (OCIs) and foreign nationals resid