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Tech Industry & Business
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The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, …
Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)
What my father taught me.
How is Groq raising more money?
Somehow, Palpatine returned.
Domain expertise has always been the real moat
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
EV Stupidity Checklist
Automobiles have been around for well over a century. During that time, we’ve gotten pretty good at designing and building their basic components and controls: seats, doors, pedals, steering wheels, mirrors, etc. But when today’s automakers decide to make an electric vehicle (EV), they seemingly forget much of what…
Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
A few days in Paris for the Mistral AI Now Summit: open models, on-prem deployment, agentic harnesses, and why Mistral wants to be the European full-stack AI partner.
The dead economy theory
We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously
It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12
My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's…
The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there's the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department wants to buy…
Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
The story of the nice!nano; a wireless Pro Micro-compatible microcontroller board I made in my freshman year of college.
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by …
The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of…
Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”
Update: this post generated some interesting discussion on Hacker News. Friendly fraud is the laundered name for something that the payment system is not really able to prevent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way better. Particularly big and sophisticated payment providers like Stripe, with a mountain of…
Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired MediaWiki’s most influential developer and disbanded the team whose entire job…
The real cost of owning a home
Owning a home costs a lot more than just the mortgage. Here are the hidden costs to consider when deciding whether to buy or rent.
The Ballad of TIGIT
2.8k words, 12 minute reading time
Don't Subscribe So Casually
Or, why your AI subscription is worth analyzing
AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
Remember Tarus Balog, the AWS employee who rescued my deleted account when nobody else would? AWS just fired him. His proudest accomplishment in four years was saving my data. Leadership didn't care. The finale of a trilogy nobody asked for.
News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development
On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit. Raspberry Pi 6 One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6. Looking back at previous launches: 2012: Raspberry Pi 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years) 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year) 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years)…
Greg Brockman interview [video]
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI. In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly …
Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
Today marks four years since I joined AWS. My last day will be Friday.\nI have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company.\nThis past year, while I was doing my best to make…
ICE Awards $25M Iris-Scanning Contract to Bi2 Technologies
The no-bid deal is five times the size of the agency's previous contract with the Massachusetts company and could put devices in agents' hands by late June.
The Art of Money Getting
P.T. Barnum was 70 years old when he turned his most popular lecture into this book in 1880. By then, he’d already built America’s most famous museum in New York, introduced General Tom Thumb to audiences, served as mayor of Bridgeport, gone broke from a disastrous investment in a Connecticut clock company, and clawed…
Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability: Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will
Why Japanese companies do so many different things
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations