Nicki Minaj Floated As Press Secretary Replacement By White House Staffers tmz.com/2026/10/25/nicki-min…

Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…

The reason there is so little racism in Japan is simple: Japanese people basically dislike everyone. Race has nothing to do with it. We just do not want to deal with other human beings. That is why we carefully follow manners and social rules, so we can avoid bothering one another and keep interaction to a minimum. This is who Japanese people really are, and it is the complete opposite of Americans. Forget hugs and handshakes. We do not even want to make eye contact. Ideally, nobody would come within 15 feet of us. We are already crammed together on this tiny island. Everyone has had enough. Understanding this is the single biggest key to understanding Japanese people.

.@patrickc on how Stripe got its name: "We just couldn't come up with a good name... We were literally reduced to picking random words late at night." "One of the folks at Stripe had the bright idea of, 'Why don't we just assemble a big list of words and email all of the owners of the dot com domains?'" "And then we also continued our own creative process. We came up with memorable names like PayDemon... We thought it was super clever because we could have this awesome mascot." "The owner of stripe.com generously responded to us and had an offer that was at least within our plausible budgetary range." "But we couldn't decide between PayDemon and Stripe. I swear I'm not making this up... If we could not settle on a name by December 20th, 2010, we would just default to Stripe. And we couldn't think of a more compelling name, and so Stripe it became." Patrick Collison w/ John Lilly at Stanford University (2015)

So long, America🫡🇺🇸 49 days ago we landed in the USA to follow our country at the World Cup. We had no idea it would turn into the trip of a lifetime. Thank you to everyone who followed along, and to all the people we met who made this journey even more special. We honestly don’t have the words to express how grateful we are for everything you did for us. This trip exceeded every expectation we had. We came here with an open mind, wanting to experience as much of the country as possible. I still remember telling my friends on the flight to Atlanta that I hoped we’d get to meet a few locals on this trip. Now we’re flying home with friends all across the USA. Before we came, we heard so many stereotypes and warnings about America. People told us about safety concerns, that they might check our social media at the border, and all kinds of other things. None of it matched our experience. This was probably the most welcoming country we’ve ever visited. So if you have the chance to travel, do it. The world isn’t nearly as bad as the media often makes it seem. 99% of people are awesome! I heard this quote somewhere during the World Cup, and I think it sums up our experience perfectly: “If you want to hate the world, watch the news. If you want to love it, travel it.” Thank you, America ❤️🇺🇸

Amazon Supply Chain Services—our freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping network—can now be used by any business. Was built over nearly three decades to move, store, and deliver products across land, air, and sea. All one network, so no need to piece together different providers at every stage. Same reliability and speed our customers rely on. P&G, 3M, Lands' End, and American Eagle already on board. Gonna help a lot of businesses move faster, save money, and simplify things. aboutamazon.com/news/retail/…

The MacBook Neo is such an interesting machine that it coaxed a thousand-word-essay out of me

prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.

Agile Has Broken Your Company The Agile Manifesto was signed in 2001 by 17 developers trying to fix broken software projects. It worked…until it didn't. Twenty-five years later, Agile has become a $20B+ industry, and the software it produces is getting worse. The Four Principles The Manifesto prioritized: - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Working software over comprehensive documentation - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - Responding to change over following a plan These aren't wrong in isolation but the problem is what they became in practice. "Responding to change" became an excuse to never finish anything. Stanford researchers found scope creep was institutionalized and rebranded as "sprint replanning," one of the top drivers of cost overruns. "Working software over documentation" quietly gutted institutional knowledge. A 2023 GitLab survey found only 12% of developers felt their codebase was well-documented. In other words, technical debt became structural. "Velocity" replaced quality. Story points. Burn-down charts. Throughput. None of these measure whether the software is any good. The Manifesto said build software that works, and a focus on velocity forgot that. The Numbers Are Damning McKinsey found technical debt now consumes 20–40% of engineering capacity in most large organizations. The Consortium for Information & Software Quality estimated poor software quality cost U.S. companies $2.41 trillion in 2022, with $1.52 trillion from operational failures alone. Agile has been the dominant methodology for most of that period. The Standish Group's CHAOS Report found that in 2020, only 31% of software projects were considered successful. What You Don't Notice Until It's Too Late Current software development best practices have killed systems thinking. When your planning horizon is two weeks, you don't design systems anymore, you assemble features. The result is a mess of fragmented architectures, microservices sprawl, and codebases no single engineer fully understands. The "Product Owner" role that was supposed to represent the customer became a bureaucratic proxy. A layer between engineers and business outcomes, distorting requirements at every handoff. The Alternative: Software Factory The best engineers have always known what actually works. They write specs. They think in systems. They document decisions. They go slow to go fast. At 8090, we call this approach Software Factory. We look at software delivery like a production system with defined inputs, quality gates, and measurable outputs. Architecture is a first-class citizen from day one, not something you refactor into after 40 sprints. Documentation is built in, not bolted on. Quality Is Speed Every hour spent on rework, incident response, and technical debt is an hour that could have gone into upfront design or testing. Speed and quality don’t need to be in tension - it’s a false choice in modern mythology. If your team still measures success in story points and sprint velocity, ask yourself: What's your defect rate? Your documentation coverage? Your time to onboard a new engineer? Your incident frequency? If you don't like the answers, it's probably time for a different model. Try Software Factory at 8090.ai

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. paulgraham.com/taste.html