Scoop: Gov. Pritzker today will call for a 2-year pause in tax incentives for data centers. "It is clear the governor recognizes these facilities are increasingly politically unpopular and should not lead to higher utilities bills for families." www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

"Roughly 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume goes toward wagers on sports, while roughly half of Polymarket’s trading is tied to sports" apnews.com/article/kals...

"Athenahealth spent the last six months publishing 250,000 words of 'highly targeted, highly calibrated content' aimed at 'educating' the A.I. chatbots, Ms. Simpson said. The result: The company is more likely to be cited in relevant queries than it was a year ago." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/t...

post-Presidents Day sale on software stocks (YTD): 50% - Atlassian 38% - HubSpot 33% - Workday 31% - ServiceNow 31% - Salesforce

you wonder if public software companies will provide early assurance that results should be in line with guidance www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

wrote about funding for Render, which offers cloud infrastructure that's abstracted away from the underlying servers. (it runs on Amazon and Google, and it's testing the use of its own bare metal.) the startup has gotten more inbound because of that Heroku announcement www.cnbc.com/2026/02/17/r...

hmmm

"AI PC accounted for more than 30% of all Lenovo PC shipments in the first quarter, according to Yang." www.reuters.com/world/china/...

Scoop: A report published last week outlined what Palo Alto researchers believed was a China-linked hacking campaign. But after an intervention from execs, the report's language was changed to refer more vaguely to "a state-aligned group that operates out of Asia." www.reuters.com/world/china/...

"Legal challenges are certain for an action that repeals all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks, and could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities, experts say." apnews.com/article/trum...

"A number of companies in Thoma Bravo’s portfolio plan to start hosting quarterly calls with their lenders when they report earnings, according to people briefed on the matter, with one person saying the firm hopes the calls will 'calm down' antsy creditors" www.ft.com/content/954e...

"The policy prompted criticism across internal Amazon forums. In one discussion thread, roughly 1,500 Amazon employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code, according to the messages." www.businessinsider.com/amazon-engin...

"Across our portfolio, we are seeing this firsthand: retention rates are holding, the vast majority of our companies are experiencing no meaningful churn from AI-native alternatives, and demand for our mission-critical software continues to grow" -Robert Smith, Vista www.linkedin.com/posts/robert...

German word for the impulse to eat lunch hours before lunchtime

Read 'em and weep:

"Negotiations with Samsung include access to memory chip supplies that are in exceptionally short supply amid the global AI infrastructure build-out, making the deal particularly attractive, one of the sources said." www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

data center accounting treatment as critical audit matter www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

now that's a fumble

Berkeley, California

oh this one has movie potential www.sfchronicle.com/crime/articl...

right on time for the big game

where the marketing dollars are going, other than Super Bowl ads

"There's this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline, and will be replaced by AI .... It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself." -Jensen Huang www.reuters.com/business/nvi...

the CIA says today that the World Factbook was a "high-profile site" that "garnered millions of views each year." then why would the agency take the publication offline? www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

the company is looking at $175 billion to $185 billion in 2026 capex

Charlie Bell was once a candidate to be AWS CEO. he joined Microsoft to run security in 2021, and now is becoming an individual contributor working on engineering quality www.cnbc.com/2026/02/04/m...

four people made EVP under Judson Althoff at Microsoft today www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/m...

"As companies transition to more AI code writing with human supervision, humans may not possess the necessary skills to validate and debug AI-written code if their skill formation was inhibited by using AI in the first place."

"Court records suggest that the companies didn’t see it as practical to gain direct permission from publishers and authors to use their work. Instead, Anthropic, Meta and other companies found ways to acquire books in bulk without the authors’ knowledge ..., including by downloading pirated copies."

can you take me higher

"Morgan Stanley estimates that hyperscalers and their adjacent companies will raise $400bn from the US high-grade market in 2026, a dramatic increase from $170bn last year and just $44bn in 2024." www.ft.com/content/8264...

indicator www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/b...

"Many data centers and manufacturing plants have tens of industrial diesel generators on hand in case power goes out and they need to generate their own electricity. The administration’s idea is to take advantage of that power capacity during demand spikes." www.wsj.com/business/ene...

Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost writes in memo to employees on cutting 7% of company's workforce: "I want to be clear that this will not become an annual process at Autodesk and these changes are not driven by the external environment or an effort to replace people with AI." www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

"Two-thirds of nonmanagement staffers said they saved less than two hours a week or no time at all with AI. More than 40% of executives, in contrast, said the technology saved them more than eight hours of work a week." www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...

"Written by humans for humans"

overheard on MUNI: "I'm already old, so. I'm 24."

PSA i have no connection to Novee Cyber Security Ltd

big win for Cerebras today after Nvidia picked team Groq www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/c...

"The California-based company is planning a 1.2-gigawatt power campus in Ohio, a site chosen in part for the availability of workers, Chief Executive Officer Jacob DeWitte said Wednesday" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

NEW: I have exclusive new data on whether local resistance is slowing down the data center buildout. Heatmap’s comprehensive review finds that 25 data centers were cancelled last year after sustained local opposition. That’s quadruple the number from a year prior. heatmap.news/politics/dat...

"Crucially, Google still avoids AI Overviews for all but 3% hard news queries. AI answers are much more likely to appear on queries related to science (22%), health (20%), or people and society (19%)." www.inma.org/blogs/reader...

you're either dancing yourself clean at the show or you're afraid to move for fear of becoming a meme www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

someone poked me on Facebook what do i do

boomer grants fortune.com/2026/01/08/p...

Here's the recent-ish @thebaffler.com piece on the strike, which was just ended in November when the Supreme Court didn't take up the owners' case begging to keep screwing its union. An oversimplification, perhaps, but well.

dispatch from the front line of the War on Protein

"We are ending the war on protein" realfood.gov

DELL EXEC: Consumers are “not buying based on AI. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome." @pcgamer.com #CES www.pcgamer.com/hardware/del...

you never do know how long is "temporary" SEC