Edition #59

The One Thing

• Trump signals shift to economic pressure as Iran hardens stance over Strait of Hormuz

Signals

• CBP has paid $100B in IEEPA tariff refunds
• Borderlands Mexico: USMCA gives Mexico an edge as global trade barriers rise
• Embattled hedge fund Situational Awareness invests $400M in chip startup Source Foundry
• AI Is Learning to Hack. Faster Than We Expected.
• OpenAI is coming for SMB advertisers
• Atlassian Just Deleted Loom’s Free Creator Seats. They Were Also Loom’s Distribution.
• World's biggest chipmaker TSMC's sales surge 45% amid buoyant AI demand
• Intel plans to sell $15 billion worth of stock after it has risen 400% in a year
• KFF: Insurers want to hike small businesses’ premiums by 14% next year
• July sees job losses, portending a potential rough patch for employers

Watch Your Back

• Valve notifies Steam hardware customers of a data breach
• Critical Progress LoadMaster flaw now actively exploited in attacks

Antics

• Nielsen acquires DoubleVerify to link ad verification, audience measurement
• Strategy sells 1,690 bitcoin, raises $653 million from MSTR shares
• Berger Montague PC Investigating Claims on Behalf of Capricor Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: CAPR) Investors After Class Action Filing

What's Being Built

• Portfolio Lab — AI investing, done responsibly
• oqoqo — Build evals and custom benchmarks for real-world tasks
• Paritok — Spend up to 85% less and run 3× longer coding agent sessions