Somewhere around the third week of June I stopped believing “the deal is close.” Today Iran hit a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, again, and threatened to walk from talks over Trump’s threats, while Tehran wrapped up a six-day funeral procession for a Supreme Leader that drew crowds chanting for revenge. I’ve read some version of this headline — strikes, then a lull, then “signed within 24 hours,” then strikes again — probably fifteen times this month. At some point “deal is close” stops describing progress and starts describing a genre, like “coming soon” on a poster for a movie nobody expects to actually open. I don’t say that to be glib about the people who keep dying in the gaps between the announcements. Just that a month of daily headlines teaches you what a stalled negotiation sounds like from the outside, and it sounds exactly like this.

Meanwhile: Microsoft laid off 4,800 people a few days ago, a third of them from Xbox, and today word is that roughly half of id Software — the studio that built Doom, that more or less invented the first-person shooter as a commercial category — got cut loose too. The same week, Microsoft is standing up a 6,000-person unit to sell AI consulting. I keep circling back to that pairing. Not a conspiracy, just a company being extremely clear, in headcount, about which kind of software it thinks has a future.

Smaller thing that stuck with me: a study out today found Cloudflare serves more European company websites than any domestic ISP, in every single country measured. Infrastructure you never think about until someone actually goes and counts it.

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