A week of news surrounding Windsurf and Google (and now Cognition), why the Silicon Valley ecosystem as we've known it appears to be coming to an end, and why the hiring and acquisiton conventions emerging now are a clear win for big tech. From there: A counterfactual on the founding of OpenAI, and various reactions to Cloudflare's plans to block AI crawlers by default and offer a pay-per-crawl model to LLMs and websites. At the end: An email about having a second child spawns a discussion about parenting.

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Google and Windsurf, Stinky Deals, Chesterton’s Fence and the Silicon Valley Ecosystem — Stratechery Update

Cognition Buys Windsurf, Nvidia Can Sell to China, Grok 4 and Kimi — Stratechery Update

Cloudflare on the Edge — Stratechery

OpenAI, Artificial Intelligence and Data, Data and Recruiting — Stratechery Update

Cloudflare’s Content Independence Day, Google’s Advantage, Monetizing AI — Stratechery Update

Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers — New York Times

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