I’ll get to the good and bad news of the week, but first I want to note the big story - Donald Trump’s conviction by a jury in New York - and a little story with big implications - the Federal Bureau of Investigation raiding a corporate landlord in cahoots with a nation-wide rent-fixing cartel that affects up to 16…
IBM is buying HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. That's four months after HashiCorp rugpulled their entire development community and ditched open source for the 'Business Source License.' As someone on Hacker News pointed out so eloquently: IBM is like a juicer that takes all the delicious flavor out of a fruit skywhopper…
Book review of the autobiography of Morris Chang.
uglify the UI for non-paying consumers
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
Dorothy Bishop has the story about “a chemistry lab in CNRS-Université Sorbonne Paris Nord”:
Ever wondered about what happens when banks are closed or why some apps have operating hours? It's fascinating.
And how YOU can too!
Well-run payment systems are developed by engineers who understand what is the best use of their time: to catch unknown unknowns, and to do it fast.
What will be the end of Windows? Microsoft.
Where do we go from here?
No. Not anymore. Because we have the data, if we are trading secondaries, people will always worry that we are using the data, even if we…
I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two. It’s partly AI’s fault, but not mostly. Nonetheless I’m mostly going to write about AI, because it intersects the technosphere, where I’ve lived for decades.
I got something wrong; introducing Airship Industries
I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work fir…
At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making.
I came across this recent video from Vicky Zhao last week and loved her brief summary of how she grew in her ability to clearly articulate ideas on the spot by getting to the point, using story str…
A Cautionary Tale about Too Much Siloing and Not Enough Trust
Check cashing, as a business, is a poorly understood "alternative" financial service.
Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the…
Notion sat down on the curb, crushed his cigarette into the pavement, put his face into his hands, and sobbed. It felt good to finally let i...
"It was a complete overreaction on their part to not only fire everyone who was and wasn't involved, but then also threaten everyone else in the company who would dare think to stand up against this...it feels like a very fascist environment."
I’m at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco, and I’m trying something new: a live blog, where this entry will be updated with new notes during the event. See OpenAI DevDay: …
The Black–Scholes formula is the crown jewel of quantitative finance. The formula gives the fair price of a European-style option, and its success can ultimately be measured by its impact on option markets. Before the formula’s publication in 1973 (Black & Scholes, 1973; Merton, 1973) , option markets were relatively…
In 2010, Congress capped fees for debit card networks so merchants don't get gouged by Visa and Mastercard. But the Fed stuck in a loophole for Discover. And that is leading Capital One to buy it.
Transport for London (TfL) has seen a drop in the sale of paper tickets after it made a small change to the ticket machines in London Underground stations.
When we started Segment , we knew nothing about business finance. My background was in aerospace engineering, and my co-founders came from computer science and design. Beyond the hilariously overcomplicated spreadsheet we used to manage grocery bills as roommates, we really had no experience in finance when we started…
Exactly 15 years ago on November 9th, 2009, I got my first MacBook and started learning how to build apps. I was fascinated with the idea that you can build something that other people will find useful and enjoy using. I also heard about those "indie developers" on Twitter who
