A library of snippets
xxx
Amazon’s Treadwell wrote that the company’s new code guardrails will combine AI-driven, “agentic” tools with more predictable, rules-based “deterministic” systems.
From: Amazon Tightens Code Guardrails After Outages Rock Retail Business – Business Insider.
xxx
xxx
McKinsey & Company — the world’s most prestigious consulting firm — built an internal AI platform called Lilli for its 43,000+ employees. Lilli is a purpose-built system: chat, document analysis, RAG over decades of proprietary research, AI-powered search across 100,000+ internal documents. Launched in 2023, named after the first professional woman hired by the firm in 1945, adopted by over 70% of McKinsey, processing 500,000+ prompts a month.
So we decided to point our autonomous offensive agent at it. No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream.
Within 2 hours, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database.
xxx
xxx
Unlike humans who visit shopping sites, AI bots bypass ads and sponsored search results, a high-margin revenue driver for big retailers. Advertisers are expected to spend $71 billion on so-called “retail media” in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer.
Amazon has built a massive advertising business over the past decade and brought in $68 billion from ads last year. It has made efforts to keep the entire shopping process within its walls to maximize the amount of time shoppers spend on the site, which in turn can boost ad revenue.
From: Amazon’s Win Against Perplexity Kicks AI Shopping Wars Into High Gear – WSJ.
xxx
xxx
What if we treated a set of core digital systems—such as digital IDs, payments, data exchange platforms, credentials, and other shared services that drive core functions across government and the economy—the same way we treat roads or power grids? As essential, long-term, shared systems designed for repeated use.
From: Digital Infrastructure.
xxx
xxx
The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City approved a limited-purpose master account for Kraken Financial, granting the cryptocurrency exchange direct access to the central bank’s payment network.
The milestone makes Kraken “the first digital asset bank in U.S. history to gain direct access to the Federal Reserve’s payment infrastructure,” according to a Wednesday press release from the company.
From: Kraken first crypto bank to get Fed master account | American Banker.
xxx
xxx
Getting chatbot shopping to work on a large scale has been tough for OpenAI and other AI firms. Merchants’ product information, like pricing and in-stock availability, needs to be standardized and constantly updated for chatbots to access accurate information, while commerce and payment firms need safeguards against AI initiating fraudulent or erroneous transactions.
From: OpenAI Scales Back Shopping Plans for ChatGPT — The Information.
xxx
xxx
IF YOU PICKED Seattle to win Super Bowl LX, there were multiple means to turn your hunch into cash. You could place a wager on a betting site like FanDuel or DraftKings. Or you might risk the same amount of money by taking a position in the prediction market known as Kalshi. In both cases you would have been rewarded.
But according to Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s cofounder and CEO, those two acts are completely different. Kalshi is not a gambling site, Mansour says. It’s a marketplace, one regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It’s also a startup, and securing that regulatory approval might be its most impressive innovation. Kalshi is allowed to operate in all 50 states, 20 more than allow online sports betting, and it offers markets not only on sports and election results (its most popular categories) but also on a dog’s breakfast of events including tomorrow’s temperature in Philadelphia, Taylor Swift’s wedding date, and whether Elon Musk will start a Bluesky account before 2027. One might note that some of those categories are, well, prone to manipulation by inside players.
xxx
xxx
Feng is among a small cohort of savvy early adopters turning China’s OpenClaw craze into cash. As users with little technical background want in, a cottage industry of people offering installation services and preconfigured hardware has sprung up to meet them. The sudden rise of these tinkerers and impromptu consultants shows just how eager the general public in China is to adopt cutting-edge AI—even when there are huge security risks.
From: Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze | MIT Technology Review.
xxx
xxx
Kraken Financial, a Wyoming-chartered bank owned by crypto platform Kraken, has been granted the first Federal Reserve master account awarded to a digital asset bank.
This will enable it to hold reserves at the US central bank and connect directly to core US payment rails without relying on intermediary banks.
xxx
xxx
International payments are arguably the least efficient part of most financial systems and are thus ripe for disruption. Before 2025 central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) appeared to be the most likely vehicle for such disruption, given monetary systems are best built on the settlement finality of central bank money. This changed in 2025 with the support of the Trump Administration for stablecoins. There is now a contest between stablecoins, CBDCs and tokenized bank deposits to underpin international payments in the future. This article analyses the three different architectures and argues that tokenized deposits are the most likely to prevail longer term.
xxx
Snippings