phildub retweeted
Want your own Slack for $0? I open-sourced Ember. It deploys to @Cloudflare’s free tier in about a minute, works with Slack-compatible payloads, and includes an AI assistant and media attachments.
phildub retweeted
97% of US homeowners with a mortgage now have a rate below today’s market rate, per the Economist.
In 2022, it was just 54%.
That’s why the housing market is frozen: almost no one wants to sell and give up a cheap mortgage for one above 7%.
phildub retweeted
has this been you? it's been me.
but it doesn't have to be this way.
I wrote about it in @colossusmag
The people of Silicon Valley are unwell.
If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn, you’ve got it bad. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, invites from friends to hang out are waning, even weddings are on hold. This is the time to make your mark and make your money, after all.
If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100M on the table, you fucking idiot. Being an underdog isn't as fun as you thought.
If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death.
"Too many of my friends are spiraling," Brie Wolfson writes. "I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this."
It’s all too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. Every month, a new frontier model is released. Every day, a new unicorn is minted. Seriously. 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far.
So what’s left for the sane ones? Brie went looking for teams playing a different game. She found one in Ottawa: a search infrastructure company that many of the AI darlings rely on.
It's growing fast, and its people are well.
Read @zebriez’s latest company dispatch from inside the sane asylum of turbopuffer.
colossus.com/article/sane-as…
phildub retweeted
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…
phildub retweeted
a brand new model paradigm! introducing 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚒𝚌: a system one model for extracting, computing, estimating, and predicting values from unstructured inputs.
blog.cloudflare.com/clairic-…
phildub retweeted
Another one bites the dust in our War on Expensive Software. 😵
Zapier.
An old friend. We’ve used it for 10 years.
We paid for 123 automations. 63 hadn’t run in a month. 2 did 88% of the work.
The rest was form-to-Slack and HubSpot-to-Sheets plumbing.
Claude rebuilt 1 of them. Everything else moved into tools we already pay for.
Zapier: $4,788 a year → $0.
Steal the audit. Export your Zapier task history and give Claude or ChatGPT this:
“List every automation, its owner, and runs in the last 30 days. Flag anything that hasn’t run. Show which few do most of the work. For each one, name a tool we already pay for that could replace it. Give me a cancel plan with dates.”
Bye bye, old friend. 👋
phildub retweeted
NEW: Highlight reel of all the stunts performed at the Tesla Roadster event. INSANE 🔥🔥🔥
phildub retweeted
Bot detection & human verification will be one of the most urgent demands for businesses over the coming years. Agent swarms will suffocate every website and form; small companies and government websites are most vulnerable.
There is a huge gap in the market for this right now. When we looked at what offerings were in the market to use at X, there was not a single company that brought together all the latest technologies so we had to do it all in-house.
phildub retweeted
JUST IN: Dating startup Ditto launches AI agents that go on “simulated dates” with hundreds of other users’ agents to find compatibility before recommending real-life matches.
phildub retweeted
Starting on Sept 15th, SpaceXAI team members will build a company from the ground up using Grok @Bot and livestream it. Link to register for the stream is below.
Agenda:
"Starting with an idea and a blank slate, they’ll work through a business plan, feature decisions, and real engineering work to turn a concept into a reality. Over the course of this three-day livestream, you’ll be able to follow their building in real time and will see how Grok Bot fits into each stage of the development process.
Throughout the livestream, we’ll also hand off to teammates for department-specific deep dives. From the first line of code to setting customers up for success, you’ll learn how to use Grok Bot for real workflows across every stage of your business, and will walk away with actionable use cases for your function.
The livestream runs from 8:30 AM - 6:00 PM every day, with the following guest sessions:
Day 1: September 15
• 9:00 - 10:00 AM: Grok Bot 101
• 12:30 - 2:00 PM: Grok Bot for Engineering
• 2:30 - 4:00 PM: Grok Bot for Product Managers
• 4:30 - 5:30 PM: Grok Bot for Founders
Day 2: September 16
• 9:00 - 10:30 AM: Grok Bot for Sales Engineering
• 12:30 - 2:00 PM: Grok Bot for Sales
• 2:30 - 3:30 PM: Grok Bot for SDRs
• 4:00 - 5:00 PM: Grok Bot for Customer Support
Day 3: September 17
• 9:00 - 10:30 AM: Grok Bot for Marketing Operations
• 12:30 - 1:30 PM: Grok Bot for Post-Sales
• 2:30 - 4:00 PM: Grok Bot for Marketing"
Link to register for livestream: luma.com/3ifrgttw
phildub retweeted
We need a bit more shame.
People used to avoid certain self-interested behaviors to avoid shame, private and public. Law and customs assumed this.
Now, 38% of Stanford students claim to be disabled. 40% of young women (under 35) claim mental illness, and SSI disability payments have gone up 400% in a single generation.
It isn't good for anyone, least of all people who are actually disabled, when everyone looks the other way as friends and family and peers con the system with a level of shamelessness no architect of our safety net ever imagined could be possible in America. When everyone is disabled, nobody is.
phildub retweeted
my friends and i bought a foreclosed alley in san francisco. it's an actual road that cars drive down!
we're letting the entire internet design a mural on it. submit a drawing, vote on them, and the top 1,280 get painted on the pavement permanently ⬇️
phildub retweeted
holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer
- polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded
- the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit
- then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max
- temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges
hyperstitions.
