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Addiction Markets
Corporate gambling is economic coercion, a way to shift tax burdens away from the wealthy to the poor. It's been here since the 1970s, and now it's corrupting sports and young men. Abolish it.
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Apple vs the Law
Apple & Google at the EU DMA compliance workshops, June 2025.
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Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
The X account of a Turkish opposition leader with 9.7M followers is restricted in Turkey. Although his new account is not restricted, many users say they don't see his posts on their homepages.
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Seeing like a software company
The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by maximising “legibility”: by…
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The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
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GLP-1 drugs: An economic disruptor? (2024)
While Silicon Valley obsesses over AI, a weight-loss drug is quietly becoming the biggest economic disruptor since the internet. Here's why your job, investments, and future depend on understanding it
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LLM Year in Review
2025 Year in Review of LLM paradigm changes
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A year of funded FreeBSD development
For several years leading up to this point I had been talking to Amazonians on and off about the possibility of Amazon sponsoring my FreeBSD/EC2 work; rather predictably, most of those conversation ended up with my contacts at Amazon rhyming with "Amazon should definitely sponsor the work you're doing... but I don't…
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The RAM shortage comes for us all
Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650! Just in the past week, we found out Raspberry Pi's…
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I don't think AGI is right around the corner
Continual learning is a huge bottleneck
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I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
“Bye bye bye.” It took some time, and a serious amount of research, but I have finally crossed the finish line. I have officially migrated my digital life to pure, EU-hosted solutions.
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The Generative AI Con
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built
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YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
Yesterday I saw this Bluesky post from Adrian Black. He runs Adrian’s Digital Basement, a retro computer repair channel I really enjoy. In the post, he points out a trend I didn’t know about: YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently.
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The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood
Together, the Bitter Lesson and Scaling Laws reveal that the god of Compute we worship is yoked to an even greater one — the god of Data.
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Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job
In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they comm…
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AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics
AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom
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How to be a leader when the vibes are off
...and the vibes are definitely off It feels different in tech right now. We’re coming off a long era where optimism carried the industry. Something has curdled. AI hype, return-to-office mandates, and continued layoffs have shifted the mood. Managers are quicker to fire, existential dread has replaced
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Tokens are getting more expensive
"language models will get cheaper by 10x" will not save ai subscriptions from the short squeeze
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A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read.
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The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
Wealth inequality is driving the economy.
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How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…
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Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
From chatbots to agents
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Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people
A big nerd debate with bigger implications for the future of work, technology, and the economy
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The side hustle from hell
11 months in The Side Hustle From Hell
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Goodbye, Slopify
There’s no way I’m going to continue a subscription to a streaming service that suggests AI-generated music with AI-generated album covers. A bloated, Electron-based desktop application with a terrible UI is only going to add up.
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Waymos crash less than human drivers
Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos that aren't even moving.
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Business co-founders in tech startups are less valuable than they think
This is Verdi's personal website. He writes about interesting ideas or projects.
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LLMs are cheap
A lot of people think LLMs are expensive to operate. That was true a couple of years ago, but these people haven't updated their views after an approximately 1000x reduction in prices over two years.
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BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)
Silent changes in payment methods on big creator funding platforms raise some unpleasant questions.