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Data is the only moat
How different adoption models drive better applications
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If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruitin…
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Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back
On the Strait of Hormuz, fertility research, and the millions of dollars bet on artificial wombs that missed the point
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The IBM-ification of Google?
I used to think Google owning the full vertical stack was a masterstroke. Like TSMC silicon, TPUs, their own data centers, proprietary models, search engine....
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America has a tungsten problem
The US will need a lot more tungsten in the future. Where will it come from?
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The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research. I chose DeepSeek V4 because I know it is cheap, but seeing it’s pricing next to Anthropic and OpenAI ‘frontier’ models is crazy. Nearly a 50x price increase based on tokens alone, let alone how much pondering any of their models might fall into (using…
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The Private Capture of Public Genius
Essay I of Upstream of Everything
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Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back , Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.
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This time is different
3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who…
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Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
When you think Microsoft you probably don't think sense of humor. And yet, I'm convinced that Microsoft is going to do a very specific *very* funny thing within our lifetimes.
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The beginning of scarcity in AI
GPU rental prices surged 48% in 60 days. The AI compute shortage will force startups to compete not on speed of iteration, but on access to infrastructure.
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Without benchmarking LLMs, you're likely overpaying
We benchmarked 100+ models on our actual task and found a much cheaper alternative that works just as well.
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Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make…
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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.
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Poor Deming never stood a chance
This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…
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Two Weeks Until Tapeout
Chronicles of a bad idea. Or how I designed a systolic array with in-silicon debug infrastructure from scratch in under two weeks, and taped it out on Global Foundry 180 nm though a Tiny Tapeout experimental shuttle.
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Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf
A viral TikTok sardine diet and warming oceans have collided to create a real canned-sardine shortage — and it's not ending soon.
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Startup Anti-Patterns
An anti-pattern is a commonly used process, structure, or pattern of action that, despite initially appearing to be an appropriate and effective response to a problem, has more bad consequences than good ones.Simeon Simeonov first wrote an introduction to the value of startup anti-patterns back in 2013. To sum it up…
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Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Graphics for Professionals
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Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
Alt title: The reports of tokenmaxxing’s death are greatly exaggerated.
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The iPhone's Last Stand?
Siri isn’t state of the art, but as long as it works — and it appears it does — it’s good enough for the consumer market.
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Lobbying
Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept?
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The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
The internet made coordination cheap and gave us the Bazaar. Coding agents make code cheap and are giving us sprawling, idiosyncratic software.
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A CVE Dispute
A few years years ago the curl project signed up and became a CNA. This means that we are masters of and can allocate our own CVE identifiers. For any security problems within our territory, it is we who decides if the issue should get a CVE or not. No more bogus CVEs. 57 CVEs … Continue reading a CVE dispute →
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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust
Righty-ho, I’m back from Rust Nation, and busily horrifying my teenage daughter with my (admittedly atrocious) attempts at doing an English accent 1 . It was a great trip with a lot of good conversations and some interesting observations. I am going to try to blog about some of them, starting with some thoughts…
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Vatican Rebukes Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures in Rome
A papal adviser calls Peter Thiel a heretic after his secret Rome lectures on the Antichrist draw global attention and a Vatican rebuke
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The Closing of the Frontier
T he Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly…
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How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
When Japan broke up its national railway in 1987, the new companies agreed on one thing to keep the same.