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The long-awaited Friend Compound laws in California
[X-posted from the Live Near Friends blog]
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Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work
Lessons on maintaining a hobby Android app
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Job mismatch and early career success
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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Voxtral – Frontier open source speech understanding models
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
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Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back
The failure mode that stalls “AI for data” efforts or "AI on my APIs" efforts isn’t psychedelic hallucination—it’s confident inaccuracy: plausible answers that are wrong in subtle and costly ways.
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Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
On making use of large thinking models.
667
The future of solar doesn't track the sun
PV modules are cheap enough today that the simple fixed East-West arrays are cheaper and faster to install than the industry’s darling, the single-axis tracked array. Xavier Dedenbach, Terraform Po…
668
Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership
This tension of what customers are asking for vs what customers really need shows up in areas like resilience. Amazon's "Well-Architected Framework" strongly exhorts customers to avoid building production workloads in a single Availability Zone — but Amazon's cross-AZ bandwidth pricing is painful, and Amazon doesn't…
669
Open Banking and Payments Competition
Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily.
670
Shifting Cyber Norms: Microsoft security POST-ing to you
tl;dr: Microsoft and other email security scanners will visit the links in email you transmit, and run the JavaScript in those links, including calls that lead to POSTs going out. This used to be unacceptable, since POSTs have side effects. Yet here we are. This breaks even somewhat sophisticated single-use sign-on /…
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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
John Giannandrea is retiring, and Amar Subramanya joins as vice president of AI.
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How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you...
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Italian Competition Authority Fines Apple $115M for Abusing Dominant Position
The Authority found the App Tracking Transparency (“ATT”) policy to restrict competition The policy lays down the privacy rules imposed by the company on third-party developers of apps off...
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When private practices merge with hospital systems, costs go up
Private practices are vanishing as more doctors join large hospital systems. This increasing consolidation is reducing competition and raising prices, according to a study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Fiona Scott Morton.
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What happens when housing prices go down?
A reflection on affordability, finance, and the deep contradictions we struggle to face.
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Mag Wealth (2024)
Mag World: an intuitive sense of scale, using orders of magnitude
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How and where will agents ship software?
Beginners are vibe-coding apps and experts are maxing out their LLM subscriptions. What does this mean for how we build software?
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The Profitable Startup
For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambitious or even wrong – something to worry about when you hit scale. Why focus on profits when money and valuations were easy to come by?
679
Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
Could we halve aviation's climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels?
680
Gig Companies Violate Workers Rights
Major digital labor platforms, also known as gig companies, operating in the United States misclassify gig workers as independent contractors, denying them labor rights.
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Announcing Tinker
Introducing Tinker: a flexible API for fine-tuning language models.
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"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired
For other news from February, see my previous grapevine. This report is available free to the public. If you like my writings on genre issues, consider backing my Patreon.
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Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved
The internet has been speculating the past few days on which crypto company spent $65M on Datadog in 2022. I confirmed it was Coinbase, and here are the details of what happened.
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Mistral Agents API
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
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Europe is locking itself in to US LNG
The US energy secretary says the quiet part out loud: the tributary $750 billion in energy purchases the EU has promised in its Trump deal is meant to lock Europe into "long-term" energy dependence.
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On DeepSeek and export controls
A few weeks ago I made the case for stronger US export controls on chips to China. Since then DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has managed to — at least in some respects — come close to the performance of US frontier AI models at lower cost.
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You want microservices, but do you need them?
Before you default to microservices, weigh hidden costs and consider a modular monolith or SOA. Learn when Docker delivers consistency and scale—without sprawl.
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Not Buying American Anymore
I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with the country if you are an average Joe like me.
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The App Store was always authoritarian
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of…
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PlanetScale for Postgres
PlanetScale now supports Postgres