pm90

Ive had the opposite experience with paypal being completely obnoxious and refusing to halt a fraudulent transaction (ultimately my bank made them).

Xbox isn’t doing very well so of course it’s now up to a woman to clean up the mess. I don’t envy the position that Asha has landed in, especially with how much misogyny exists in the gaming subculture.

Ultimately, I believe there will need to be something catastrophic to oust musk/change leadership. And by that point, its questionable if anything worthwhile will be left to salvage.

My current bet is that optimus will fail spectacularly and Tesla gets left far behind as Rivian's R2 replaces it.

One thing I will note: I know folks that work at TSLA. Musk is more of a distraction. If he goes and if competent leadership is brought in, there's still enough people and momentum to make something happen...

My gripe with grpc is that it doesn’t play super well with kubernetes services… you have to take a little bit of care, you need to understand how k8s services work and you have to understand how load balancing in grpc works. Ideally I would want to use protobuf as an interchange format, and a “dumb” http server that understands that.

That being said… once you do configure it properly it can be a powerful tool. The complexity though is usually not worth it unless you’re at a certain scale.

As much as i hate palantir i doubt any of their systems control military hardware. Now Anduril on the other hand…

Its nice to see useful, impactful interchange formats getting the attention and resources they need, and ecosystems converging around them. Optimizing serialization/deserialization might seem like a "trivial" task at first, but when moving petabytes of data they quickly become the bottlenecks. With common interchange formats, the benefits of these optimizations are shared across stacks. Love to see it.

If they've been invisible, they are doing their job right.

NYC is a large city, consisting of 5 boroughs (divisions); each of which is larger in population than many US states. Its also the financial capital of the world. So just going by population alone, the NYC City Government represents more people than several state Governments. The economy of the city is also very high tech, high income etc. Although the Mayor does not have the same powers as Governor (e.g. they can't pass tax laws), he still has a lot of impact.

I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.

People have wanted to do the same with abortion and medicare for all as well (both of which poll very highly) and yet neither of these popular policies are law.

> There also seems to be a common belief that just because the laws are unfair, stupid, counterproductive or destructive that they can be ignored and that isn't how laws work. If the law is terrible it is still the law. If it doesn't let you do what you want to do then that desired course of action is not a legal option.

Well then explain to me how the US Marijuana industry exists despite it being a schedule 1 controlled substance.

Laws are a social construct and their enforcement is based on what society thinks is ok. People don’t want to throw their community members is jail for marijuana. They do want to throw murderers in jail. They don’t want to throw upstanding community members who just don’t have the right immigration status in jail either.

Clubbing all saas products together just means you can’t really have a productive discussion. Saas products are on a spectrum of quality, from amazing (stripe, datadog) to terrible (fivetran, github). Its upto you as a user to make a call as to which will serve you best, what you should focus your limited resources on etc.

Hes committed to building thousands of Optimus robots for a market that does not exist while cutting back on building evs (a market that does).

I think its pretty clear that Musk has lost his goddamn mind. And the American corporate system and Government seem powerless to do anything.

Why does Google need outside investors? Is it a play to get a “serious” valuation since it would be vetted by outside parties?

I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.

And an MBA. He seems like a lot of people I know who skim through their technical degrees just to get the credentials. And my experience is that Masters is often easier to get than a Bachelors.

Anyway what he did makes it abundantly clear that this person should not be head of security for anything.

What do you mean “hiding it”? Are you suggesting Chinas manufacturing capacity is entirely fraudulent or cooking the books? Or that the state is providing subsidies? Because if its the latter… have you seen the brouhaha over Amazon HQ2? Or seen the number of tax credits/incentives doled out by US cities to companies that “promise” jobs but don’t even deliver them? (but keep their subsidies).

tesla is not making robots.

They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.

It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.

stripe bought a stablecoin and its leadership seems to talk about it a lot https://www.pymnts.com/news/ipo/2026/stripe-co-founder-says-...

> Cryptocurrency and stablecoins are also starting to see traction after an extended struggle to gain mainstream adoption, John Collison added, per the report.

> William Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of product and business, referred to agentic commerce and stablecoins as “twin revolutions in intelligence and money” at a company event in 2025, the report said.

Investors will only invest in AI plays. They don’t seem to care for fintech.

You’re buying into Republican propaganda if you believe this.

What are you talking about? GM sold more cars in China until very recently when Chinese buyers started flocking to EVs.

SGTM? :D

in the valley at least its difficult to pursue that unless you’re in a “hot” field. A few years ago, it was cloud, then big data, then crypto and now AI. When startups in those fields can raise hundreds of millions, they can lure away a lot of talent (both tech and non tech).

beginning of the end

While this might sound unusual, I have a cousin that felt incredibly lonely when they came to the US for work and decided to go back just to be closer with the extended family.

That being said, Im not sure if this is actionable advice for people that don’t already live in societies where this is a thing.

One other concern: if you ever have to deploy in another cloud, there are all kinds of issues with authentication and version support. e.g. azure doesn’t support the latest redis version, GCP MemoryStore forbids password only login for Redis Clusters etc. The infrastructure complexity can be high (albeit manageable).

> I could extend that one step further to cloud itself, but that's an argument for another day

Absolutely. OSS platforms like k8s got a long way. Openstack was the dream (deeply flawed in execution). If we want to seriously talk about resilience we can’t accept that almost all major clouds run proprietary systems and we just have to trust them that they’ll be around forever.

I worked at a company with multiple cofounders; one of them became the CEO, the other one was initially CTO, but ultimately his title was just cofounder after a while and someone else was hired to be CTO. This person then went on to just prototype and build whatever he wanted to; the service he built ended up having no OC engineers supporting it, pages went to him but he didn’t bother responding and nobody would tell him he had to respond lol. Ultimately people just didn’t use that thing or delayed using it as they couldn’t really rely on it.

Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to talk/work with whatever at Google interests you most and hand off the gruntwork to minions all the while being treated with deep reverence. It’s not exactly hard to see why he might like it.

One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.