Writing by hand activates brain connectivity patterns that typing on a keyboard does not. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Psychology put electrodes on the heads of university students and found that handwriting triggered widespread neural connectivity across the brain, while typing produced almost none. The study was led by Audrey van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She measured high-density brain waves in 36 students while they wrote words by hand with a digital pen and while they typed the same words on a keyboard. During handwriting, the brain showed increased connectivity between regions involved in movement, vision, and memory. During typing, the connectivity was significantly weaker. The difference comes from the motor demands of each task. Forming a letter by hand requires the brain to plan a unique shape, guide the hand through it, and receive visual feedback as the letter appears. Each letter is slightly different every time, and the brain has to adapt. Pressing a key on a keyboard is a uniform action that requires no shaping, no feedback loop, and no variation. The brain can do it on autopilot, and it does. The connectivity patterns observed during handwriting resembled the patterns seen during learning and memory formation, which is why students who take notes by hand remember more than students who type, even when the typists record more words. The hand is forcing the brain to process the information, while the keyboard lets it pass through unprocessed. Every school that replaced handwriting lessons with keyboard skills did it in the name of progress. The brain data says the thing we gave up was the thing that wired us to learn. The pencil was never just a pencil. It was a brain tool. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3834…

We’ve raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix. Our mission is to run the world's inference. This round accelerates production of our inference clusters. We've opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility 15 minutes from our office to expedite production and prototyping.

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives. stratechery.com/2026/whos-af…

We’re excited to announce that we've raised $30 million in Series A funding, led by @ForerunnerVC, with participation from NEA, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, Prelude, and ParaFi. Thanks to our team, users, and investors for believing in our vision. This is just the beginning! 🚀

Consumer is back. We did many more consumer investments in 2024, which was a surprise, because the consumer startup technology window had been closed for 11 years. But the energy shifted due to AI. What it takes to win: nfx.com/post/consumer-is-bac… 🧵 w/ resources below

Bridge is joining forces with Stripe! I’m incredibly excited We started 2.5 years ago and we’ve done a lot since then :) We’re going to do a whole lot more in the years ahead. This is an important milestone, but we’re still at the very beginning of the Bridge journey. We started Bridge because we thought stablecoins could become a core, global, regulated payment platform. Our first year was hard. The digital asset space was in turmoil. We struggled to find partners / customers. We launched with our APIs in March 2023. After launch, we quickly saw inbound interest from cross-border payments companies. People talked about stablecoins for x-border money movement, but we didn't understand the space or need. These developers onboarded, showed us what was possible, and Bridge quickly started to scale. After that, we had government entities onboard with us to disburse aid, fintechs build US dollar-based savings and spending products, SpaceX to manage their global treasury, and many others. Our belief that stablecoins could be a new payment platform started coming true. Developers worldwide were dreaming up new stablecoin-enabled financial products and coming to Bridge to bring them to life. And each new use case was larger than all of those that came before it. Today, we’re moving many billions in payment volume. Our business has grown >10x this yr. But more importantly, we’re now helping 100s of developers all around the world. And their products are giving millions of consumers and businesses more economic choice. A lot has changed (and improved) over the past 18 months. But we’re still incredibly early. Stablecoins represent an entirely new payments platform. Realizing the potential of this platform will be a decades-long journey. As we’ve gotten to know the Stripe team, it’s become clear that we both share a vision for what’s possible with stablecoins and an excitement around the opportunity to create and build this future Stripe operates globally and understands better than almost anyone the problems created by our existing localized payment systems. Our teams share an excitement about stablecoins and vision for how to maximize their impact. Together, we’ll be able to solve bigger problems, support more developers, and help more consumers and businesses all across the world. We built Bridge to solve our most vexing global financial challenges; to pull a more connected world forward; to give everyone more economic choice. We’re thrilled to be joining forces with Stripe to fully realize these ambitions. Full blog post here --> nitter.cf/Stablecoin/status/1848…