What was an impromptu decision to come to Argentina turned out to be a pleasant surprise! I didn't expect that my team would be able to deliver the full solution, nonetheless winning one of the finalists prize. After 3 days and 2 nights of little sleep and hours of coding/building/discussing, my team eventually was invited to the stage to pitch in front of 750 hackers and audience. Quite a surreal experience that I was able to crown @ETHGlobal finalist a 2nd time, even though this hackathon had the most number of ETHGlobal finalist, meaning it was very competitive. I think this moment, taken by a professional photographer, captured the spirit of hacking and what it meant to take ownership. The photo was taken at around ~6:30AM in the morning, just a couple of hours before the final submission was due. At that point, I was still struggling to give the right pitch, and the audio from my mic didn't function properly, but after the 6th recording, I came to an acceptable demo and submitted our project! Thanks to my team (@vaughnhew @ballew @netun0 @Ghost_xD2) that pulled all nighters with me to build this project. Also thanks to all the organizers and sponsors for making this hackathon experience smooth and fun! Until next time in this little Web3 world! Hasta la vista!

Looks like AGI came earlier than expected (Fable)

Who is gonna tell him?

Visited @AGIBOTofficial in Shanghai and left with a different feeling about robotics. A lot of “AI agent” demos still live inside screens. This felt different: humanoids, service robots, factory/lab setups, and real embodied AI moving through physical space. Still early, still messy, but the direction is clear. What happens when AI doesn’t just answer, but acts?

Just had the most terrible flight experience with @AirCanada, but the person suffering it was my unfortunate friend. I travel a lot, so as a result I've racked up points and miles with different programs. I've flown with the 3 major airline alliances (OneWorld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance), and have frequent-flier memberships in many programs. I've been very happy with @staralliance, especially with @FlyANA_official and @Flyasiana because they're superb, but this time I can't say any good thing about Air Canada. I'm currently in Shanghai for a month-long cultural and technology exploration program. After being here for a couple of weeks, I thought my friend may like it, so we discussed and planned the trip together for her to come. While I was searching around for the tickets, I happened to find a round-trip reward ticket via Air Canada with the perfect timing for my friend. I proceeded to transfer my points to Air Canada frequent-flier program called @Aeroplan and booked the ticket and paid the required fees (I still have receipts) with my card. Afterwards, I forwarded all the trip and booking information to my friend. 1 day before the flight, she was able to go online and did her online check in with All Nippon Airways (ANA) since it was a code-share flight. On the day of her flight, she came to the airport early (4-5 hours before her flight) and was able to check in at the counter smoothly with ANA ground staff. She proceeded to go through immigrations, and waited at the gate for her flight. About 50 minutes before her flight, she texted me saying: "Lam, I cannot get on this flight, did something happen?" I was bewildered by her sudden question. I did not know how to respond, because when I checked online the day before (see image below), all the information was correct. I called her briefly and told her that I'd try to figure out what was going on. I rushed to go on Air Canada, and I saw that my miles came back to me with a banner saying that I needed to contact Air Canada customer service. I proceeded to call Air Canada customer service number to see if I can resolve this situation and get her on the flight, but the 15-minute wait was the longest wait I experienced since I knew my friend was panicking and she was stuck at the airport. When I got on the line with the representative and after giving the Air Canada representative lady most of my personal information including my home address, DOB, and Aeroplan number, she told me that their fraud department had suspected that this was a fraudulent booking, so they proceeded to cancel it last-minute WITHOUT informing me anything. I was livid beyond imaginable after hearing that, but remained calm with the representative to see if we could resolve anything since I knew she was just a messenger. She told me that I have to send my document and proof of address to their fraud department email address. I asked her if this can be resolved in 30 minutes so that I could still fix the situation for my friend, but she told me that it'd take days, or even weeks. The next several hours was me in frantic mode trying to figure out alternative flights for my friend since @AirCanada just left her stranded. I cannot even begin to imagine the face of my friend when she went to the gate with the boarding pass in her hand but was told that she couldn't board this flight that she had successfully checked in few hours earlier. In the end, I don't know whether it was AI or human that flagged the ticket in Air Canada system at the very last minute, but this whole experience left me with an impression that among Star Alliance, Air Canada has the worst travel experience possible. I don't think this message will get anywhere, but I just needed to rant to inform other travelers and passengers. On a good note, kudos to the @FlyANA_official ground staff at the Haneda airport for assisting my friend professionally.

Used Meituan in China for the first time last night, and the biggest takeaway wasn’t food delivery. It was seeing how mature the China super-app stack has become. Ordering food is just the surface layer. Underneath it is payments, merchant software, logistics density, recommendation systems, address infrastructure, consumer trust, and habits already trained at national scale. That’s why the UX feels so normal, despite the Chinese language still being a big hurdle for non-Chinese speakers. The ecosystem is doing most of the heavy lifting. A lot of people outside China still evaluate these apps feature by feature. I think the real moat is system design. Which China product feels most misunderstood from the outside?

Most people trying to build in insurance start from software. I’m starting from the classroom. I’m sitting in a financial advisor class right now because I want to understand how insurance is actually sold, explained, and trusted by real people, not just how it looks in decks, product docs, or carrier org charts. A lot of the real signal is probably in the friction: - What clients ask, - What advisors repeat all day, - What still breaks trust, - And what never makes it into official process maps. If you want to build for insurance, you probably need to study the distribution layer up close. If you want to build in insurance, how close do you need to get to the frontline?

'@calcom going closed-source for security reasons feels like an early signal of what’s coming. As AI tools get better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, companies handling sensitive customer workflows will get more cautious about leaving core systems fully exposed. Open source isn’t dead. But the security calculus is changing fast. I think we’ll see more companies (both B2B and B2C) become hesitant to open-source core software over the next few years.

The Andon Market story is one of the clearest examples of where AI actually fits. Luna could execute the middle: hire people, source products, paint the store, keep things moving. But it still needed humans at both edges. Humans had to define the mission at the start, and humans had to catch the boring failures at the end like a broken staffing schedule on day one or inconsistent logos. That's the part I find most interesting. The risk is not sci-fi. The risk is mundane. AI usually doesn't fail like a movie villain. It fails like an unreliable operator. Also important: this was a controlled experiment. People had guaranteed pay, and humans still handled legal and lease realities. Guardrails mattered. To me, AI is becoming the execution layer, not the direction layer. Without context, it's just spending money fast. Where do you think humans still have to stay in the loop?

"People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private." The funding announcement isn't the work. The product launch post isn't the work. It's the 11pm call with a hesitant insurance exec in Vietnam. The bug you fixed before anyone knew it was broken. The pivot nobody sees. What's the unglamorous thing you've been grinding on lately?

Someone audited Garry Tan's website after he bragged about 37K lines of code shipped per day. 78,400 lines of AI slop. 6.42 MB just to load the homepage. 169 requests. for a newsletter blog. Shipping velocity is not the same as building something good. What do you actually optimize for when you're vibe coding?

One insight from my recent conversation with Bruce Yang (CEO of @agnesai_sapiens): The future of software may not be building tools for humans. It may be building tools for AI agents. If that happens, entire categories of SaaS could change. Really fascinating discussion on the global AI race, accessibility, and what the next generation of AI companies might look like.

Asked my @openclaw assistant about the main highlight at @ns today and this is what she told me

Rate limited. Frustrated. Opened Airtable to cool off. Noticed it has free Claude built in. Tested it with a tough differential equation and got full solution in 10 seconds. The free tier is hiding in places nobody's looking. What tools are you sleeping on?