// Friday Five

October 16, 2026

This Week's Five

This week's lesson is that concentration is the vulnerability: when control collapses into one vendor, one platform or one database, a single failure stops being local. One IoT flaw put 700 French supermarket refrigeration systems in an attacker's hands.

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// Today's Brief

October 20, 2026

The Adjacent Brief

Microsoft withdrew from a £2bn data center project in Loughton, UK, after the local grid could not supply enough power, pushing the site’s timeline into the 2030s. In China, more than 150 apps blocked Xiaomi’s AI assistant from operating inside them.

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// Latest Scan

Compute, Chips, and Code, Borders, Battles, and Barrels, Shopping Carts and Sticker Shock

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// This Weekend

This week: the ethics of building AI chatbots of the dead, an experiment in handing two weeks of daily life to AI agents, and a reflection on what a mental health system never thought to ask the people inside it.

2 min read · Oct 18

Adjacent Weekend

This week: a robot-housekeeper test drive, a 3D-printed brick phone built to be boring, the stories behind a Bangladeshi rug factory and a Chennai community centre, and a photographer’s tour of the discotheque as architecture.

2 min read · Oct 17

Five signals worth watching this week

// Latest Signals

Microsoft Warns AI Agents Pose Insider Threat Risks Europe's Solar Factories Need 1-3 GW Capacity to Compete European Tourism Dispersal Plans Collide With AI Search Bias Why AI-Generated Emotional Ads Feel Wrong Experience economy replaces influencer marketing as creator business model Commerce Publishers Fight Back Against Google's Search Dominance Nuclear Plants Reawaken to Feed America's Data Center Appetite Enterprise AI Requires Multicloud Strategy to Avoid Vendor Lock-In

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