A chip giant eyes the hub of open models, Cloudflare squeezes 100TB from a DNS cache, and a tiny duck brings reinforcement learning to the desktop — while shifts in crowdwork, startup legal tooling, civic links, and transit tech ask how scale and openness shape everyday choice.

An extra dollar at the Amazon checkout, a bankrupt airline’s data sold to train AI, memory prices up fivefold, and a laptop revived with $20 of tools — the day’s stories trace who pays when platforms and markets rewrite the rules.