My LinkedIn is full of posts by former Microsoft colleagues who accepted the voluntary retirement offer. I counted at least 9 posts from people I worked with in the past.

For some reason, it felt even sadder than layoff posts. It was hard to put into words until this post from a now ex-Microsoftie.

If you work in tech, it’s been explicitly stated by multiple CEOs that their goal is to replace employees with AI agents.

If you’re talented (or lucky) enough you will be one of those left behind to supervise these agents.

The question is what does career planning look like in this world? Do you plot an exit or get really good at managing a fleet of Claude and OpenClaw agents?

The Iran War has been good for Tesla as rising gas prices have led to a resurgence in buying their EVs with deliveries up 25% year over year.

It handily beat Wall Street expectations of 406K deliveries with a significant beat of 480K.

The stock dropped -7.5% on the news but is still +6% this week.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/07/02/tesla-tsla-q2-2026-vehicle-delivery-production.html

“The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.

America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.” - Zohran Mamdani
—
MAGA should rejoice he can’t run for president.

QTS data centers, owned by Blackstone, has walked away from plans to build a 2,100 acre data center in Virginia following years of local opposition.

The developers estimate about $100 billion in spending has been lost.

If AI demand can’t be met with new data centers, token prices go up. This is good news for locals and bad news for AI adoption.

https://www.reuters.com/business/blackstones-qts-terminates-digital-gateway-data-center-project-virginia-2026-07-02/

Trump supporter lost $32,000 on $TRUMP coin and blames Democrats.

He made $1.4 billion pumping & dumping crypto on these rubes and they don’t even blame him.

I have been using hooks in Claude Code to address hallucinations. My approach

1. PreToolUse hook which runs a verifier subagent to fact check all claims and stats before writing to a document.

2. Stop hook which does the above for standalone responses over 100 words.

Way more effective than rules in CLAUDE .md files

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks

Anthropic is making a strong case against closed source AI models. First they were caught silently degrading Claude’s output if it thinks you’re building a competing product.

Now Anthropic admitted having spyware like code that tries to identify Chinese users.

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/anthropic-backtracks-spyware-targeting-chinese-users-controversy

A typical afternoon trying to get Claude to follow instructions.

Claude Code’s lead developer interviewed Spotify’s VP of Engineering, Niklas Gustavsson, about how they use Claude.

He said Spotify does 4,500 production deployments a day and 73% of PRs are now AI-assisted.

After a point stats are meaningless. I can’t recall 4 features Spotify has shipped this year

Americans have lost the right to call any country corrupt ever again.

At least the suit wasn’t tan.