I learned last week that VCs don't seem to fly out to see the hardware companies they're investing in. This struck me as totally insane. While I was in India, my walk through @Airbound_Aero revealed much of what I wanted to know. Have been through so many factories that I can usually tell in about five minutes what's real and what's hoping to be real and what's total garbage. Airbound had lots of the touches of an early @RocketLab - organization, attention to detail, etc. I get that investors are looking at the founder and the business and their models. But feels like you could save a lot of heartache by bothering to get on a plane.

Ex-Anthropic Jacob Coxon says he's 90% certain China already has spies inside both OpenAI and Anthropic Jacob Coxon: “Right now, if we just stopped, they would try and catch up. But I think one really important thing people don’t realize is that China already has spies at OpenAI and Anthropic. China has the ability to hack at any time. If we pull ahead, that doesn’t give us a big lead. They can just step in, steal our progress at any time and catch up.” Patrick Bet-David: “How certain are you that they already have spies there?” Jacob Coxon: “Ninety percent. Yeah, it’s almost certain that they have spies.”

The human brain is approaching its ChatGPT moment. I spent 6 months writing Phase Lock: a manifesto on how brain computer interfaces can help align AI and preserve human agency. If you only ever read one thing from me, read this.

This morning, 23 engine room employees called in sick. Every employee qualified to fill those positions has declined to fill them and keep the ferries running. (1/6)

“NBC has the best election night music!” “No, it’s CNN.” Fox Business:

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building. We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented. A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters. Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light. It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated. Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum. We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

Claude Opus 5.5 writes a fugue in the style of Bach. I called Astra’s fugue the most impressive musical feat I’d ever seen from an LLM, and this is just as good. The circle-of-fifths sequence beginning at 1:13 is beautiful. The interplay of voices is natural and satisfying. LLMs are getting to the point where their music is good enough to listen to for pure enjoyment.

"We want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible. Dear @MarkJCarney, I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU." — President @vonderleyen at #SOTEU 2026

incredible conversations are being enabled by the chinese to russian and vice versa translate button

Friends are doing cool things

Update: This "Super El Niño" will be perhaps the strongest in 500 to 1000 years, and could legitimately be the most extreme global weather or climate event experienced by humanity since the invention of the printing press. Only more extreme situation is a volcanic winter.