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But, wait! Just as the plot thickens, Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer (because yes, that’s a job title now), squashed the rumor like an unwelcome bug on a touchscreen. He boldly declared, “Any reporting to the contrary is clearly mistaken,” as if Meta hadn’t just sent out invitations to every AI genius in the hemisphere. So, take a deep breath, folks-Meta is not retreating. In fact, it’s doubling down, and the AI rollercoaster is just getting started.

After the curtain fell on Thursday’s trading, Argan unveiled its second-quarter ledger: a fiscal period that ended on July 31, a date that now glimmers with the sheen of irony. The energy-industrial hybrid reported earnings that outpaced Wall Street’s modest ambitions, yet its revenue-a number that should have been a sonnet of prosperity-stumbled, faltering against the bar set by analysts’ calculations. The dissonance between these two numbers is not mere noise; it is the discordant chord of a symphony played on a broken instrument.

In the world of social media, growth is the currency of success, and Snap, despite its once-vibrant history of explosive user numbers, now finds itself facing a more difficult terrain. The company projects 476 million daily active users (DAU) for the third quarter, marking a 7.4% increase from the same time last year. While this is, in itself, a healthy number, it is also a stark contrast to the double-digit growth that once seemed commonplace. The growth is still there, but it is slowing, and there lies the subtle tragedy: the relentless march of progress becomes a crawl. The days when Snap’s user base expanded with such eager vitality now seem like a distant dream, one that we cannot quite remember clearly, yet know was once bright and full of promise.

Here’s the thing about Q2: UiPath coughed up $362 million in revenue, a 14.4% bump that’d make most SaaS zombies weep with joy. Adjusted EPS tripled from $0.04 to $0.15 – which sounds impressive until you realize we’re talking about financial progress from “living in a van” to “studio apartment with roaches.” The real kicker? Annualized recurring revenue’s up 11%, and management’s projecting $1.834B midpoint ARR by year-end. That’s 10.2% growth when you squint right.

First, the analysts spoke. Seaport Research, that modern-day oracle of market sentiment, downgraded AMD from “buy” to “neutral,” citing whispers from supply chain gossips about slowing AI chip growth. It’s the investing equivalent of a doctor murmuring, “Hmm, your vital signs look fine, but that new diet might be… questionable.”

The company’s fortunes have been buoyed, curiously, by the U.S. jobs report-a document so routinely misinterpreted by markets that it now reads like a sacred text to the financially unmoored. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its infinite wisdom, reported 22,000 non-farm jobs added in August, a figure so far below the 75,000 forecast that it might as well have been a eulogy for economic optimism. Yet here we are, celebrating the apocalypse as a catalyst.

This decline wasn’t entirely random, mind you. No, it was fueled by two major forces: jobs data so weak it could barely hold up its own trousers, and insider sales that made investors wonder whether they were being sold snake oil-or perhaps something even less useful, like enchanted toads’ eyeballs.^[1]