GM! It’s Brett again. No one asked, but here are some cool food history facts I learned recently.

Anyway, let's get to it.

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🏠 Tech

CrowdStrike Microsoft Mayhem

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity heavyweight, pushed out a faulty update on July 19, that basically KO'd Windows machines globally. There were blue screens of death everywhere.

This wasn't just your average "oops" moment. This thing took down airlines, banks, hospitals, government agencies – you name it. Flights grounded, financial services disrupted, even some emergency services went dark. It was a proper Charlie Foxtrot.

People were getting hand written boarding passes.

And of course, Twitter went wild with the news.

Meanwhile, CrowdStrike's stock took an 11% drop, wiping out over $9 billion in market value.

Oh, and because the universe has a twisted sense of humor, Microsoft had its own separate issue with Azure cloud services around the same time. Because why not, right?

Now, here's the thing that's got everyone buzzing: This whole fiasco exposed how fragile our tech ecosystem really is.

The big picture: Maybe relying so heavily on a handful of software vendors isn't the smartest play.

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🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• Elon’s moving SpaceX & X HQs from California to Texas.

• Netflix's crackdown on password sharing is paying off big time.

• Microsoft’s fix for the Blue Screen of Death was to reboot computers 15 times.

• Tesla will have robots working for them by next year.

AI

• OpenAI and Broadcom might be developing a new AI chip.

• Artists are fighting back against AI to protect their craft.

• Samsung to acquire British startup Oxford Semantic.

• OpenAI dropped GPT-4o mini.

SCIENCE

• NASA's Curiosity rover cracked open a rock and found sulfur crystals on Mars.

• Boeing's Starliner is keeping astronauts stuck in space all summer.

• Plants may not store carbon as long as we believed.

• Magic mushrooms can temporarily mess with your brain's sense of self.

CRYPTO

• Saxony’s offloading bitcoin – not Germany.

• Ex-Coinbase crew raised $21M for a web3 gaming startup NPC Labs.

• WazirX hacker swaps $230M haul into ether.

• Trump's charging $844k for a Bitcoin roundtable at the conference.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Exa, an AI search engine startup, raised $17M in a Series A funding round to basically build a Google for AIs.

Stat: $220M. That's the fine imposed on Meta by Nigeria for repeated violations of its data protection and consumer rights laws.

Rabbit Hole: Private Equity for the Masses (Marc Rubinstein)

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

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The best resources we recently came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

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❓️ AI GENERATED OR NOT

Last week’s answer: If you guessed AI-generated… you were technically right.

This story is pretty interesting: Jos Avery bamboozled Instagram with AI-generated portraits he passed off as photos. He used Midjourney to create base images, then retouched them in Photoshop.

His account blew up with most fans clueless about the AI angle. Feeling guilty, he reached out to Ars Technica (news platform) to come clean about his viral deception.

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