News / tech
-
1 min read
Screen Time
Read more . . . →Someone designed a slot machine cute enough that a kid would carry it to bed. It looks like a toy and it was designed to look like a toy. Spinning reels with stars and hearts, and a coin chute that runs from the nursery floor straight to a man in a suit who has never once met the kid. The app costs nothing. The dopamine schedule is the product, and the product ships to a six-year-old. The mascot on the front is load-bearing. Take it off and you’re looking at a casino with a content rating.
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
Q3 Results
Read more . . . →Growth was strong this quarter. The chart just needed somewhere to stand. The board is delighted. The numbers go up and to the right, and they are drawn in chalk on the one guy who actually made them. The shareholder letter will not mention him. In this picture he is furniture.
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Hiring Process
Read more . . . →Two hundred applied. One had the right last name. The conveyor never stops and the furnace never cools. Everyone in the line did the courses, the unpaid internship and the four rounds of interviews, and their résumés go in face down. The one that gets pulled out has the same signet ring as the hand holding it.
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
Your Laptop Is a National Security Threat Now
Read more . . . →The Trump administration is considering tariffs on every laptop, gaming console, and server that touches a semiconductor, which is all of them. The pitch is that this will bring chip manufacturing back to American soil. The reality is that a chip fab costs $20 billion, takes five years to build, and employs fewer people than a regional hospital. Your next laptop costs 20% more by Christmas. Intel gets a talking point for its investor call. You get the bill. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary who used to run a Wall Street brokerage, is the one designing this. His plan ties...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
How to Tell a Frontier Model From a Fat Kitten
Read more . . . →Before you reshare the next screenshot of a “frontier model,” run it through the Le Chaton Fat test. Is there a real model card or product page, or just a screenshot of a chart? Can you actually call it — open weights to download, or an API key that works? Is the benchmark published and reproducible, or is the “leaderboard” one image somebody made in an afternoon? Le Chaton Fat failed all three: no weights, no API, no model card, and the only leaderboard it ever topped was a parody chart bragging about a croissant context window and 1,000 meows...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
The Fat Kitten That Fooled the Whole Timeline
Read more . . . →In late May, Mistral renamed its chatbot Le Chat — French for “the cat” — to “Vibe.” The fans mourning the cat did what the grieving do online: they built a replacement. Le Chaton Fat. Franglais for “the fat kitten,” an oxymoron with a face. It started in Mistral’s own community, hit X around June 11, and within hours actual machine-learning researchers were asking out loud if it was real. Cody Blakeney posted, dead serious, “Can someone tell me if Le Chaton fat is real or an amazingly elaborate joke?” No weights. No API. No model card. It never hit...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
Salesforce Replaced the Engineers. The Salespeople Are Fine.
Read more . . . →Salesforce didn’t hire a single engineer last year. Not one. Marc Benioff — $145 billion company, personal net worth north of $10 billion — stood up and told the world that AI handles the coding now, so why pay humans to do it? Productivity’s up 30%, he said, clearly pleased with himself. Zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. That’s the headline he volunteered. That’s the thing he thought was worth bragging about. But here’s what he made sure to mention in the same breath: sales is booming. Nearly 20% more salespeople hired. Because someone still needs to walk into...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
Record Profits. Fire the Measurers.
Read more . . . →Cloudflare posted record revenue last quarter — $639.8 million, up 34%, best quarter in the company’s 16-year history — then fired 1,100 people. Twenty percent of the company, out. CEO Matthew Prince needed a word for these people, so he invented one: “measurers.” Accountants, auditors, middle managers, legal. The people who make sure the company doesn’t eat itself from the inside. Gone. Prince and his co-founder insisted this wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It was the “agentic AI era.” They released a statement so thick with future-speak it barely registers as English. The stock dropped 24% after the announcement — Wall...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
Zuckerberg Laid Off 8,000 People to Pay for Servers
Read more . . . →The number is $135 billion. That’s Meta’s AI infrastructure spend this year — Zuckerberg just raised the forecast again because apparently $115B wasn’t enough silicon for the guy who already owns your attention span. To cover the difference, he’s cutting 8,000 employees starting May 20, plus cancelling 6,000 open roles. Fourteen thousand positions, gone. Meta posted record profits last quarter. The budget isn’t tight — the priorities are. He told them at a company town hall. To their faces. “The layoffs are a direct consequence of the AI budget.” The company restructures into AI “pods,” which sounds like a sci-fi...
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.
