bootstrapped to $100k mrr ✅ thanks cold email

Sam Harris has written the best thing you’ll read today. open.substack.com/pub/samhar…

The most successful gambling products don’t remove luck. Instead, they disguise it with agency.

Think about what it takes culturally and how deeply rooted these lies and manipulation are. It’s a form of terrorism on good people in the West who become useful idiots for very very bad people

A clear quick masterclass of moral genius 🤯 German “goy” Matthias Dopfner, CEO of media giant Axel Springer on why everyone should be a Zionist, and how Anti-Zionism is only utterly bigoted and racist

reminder

We went faster to concentration camps than I expected.

This is a devious rhetorical trick. Labeling someone a “Nakba survivor” is designed to evoke instant sympathy and a false sense of moral clarity, but it is little more than taxpayer-funded propaganda. Consider the absurdity: roughly 99% of Palestinian Arabs alive in 1949 survived the war and its displacements. Calling the displaced a “survivor” stretches the word beyond recognition. It is a newly coined term, crafted in academia and activist circles long after the events. Its real genius lies in creating false equivalence. It places ordinary Palestinian civilians who were displaced amid a war their own leaders launched on the same moral plane as Holocaust survivors (of whom only about one-third emerged alive). It airbrushes away the ~6,000 Jews killed in 1948, elevates the ~12,000 Arab deaths, and erases the thousands of Jews forcibly expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem and other areas. By anointing the displaced as sacred “survivors,” the term invites us to forget that the Nazi-aligned Palestinian leadership rejected the UN partition plan, chose war to prevent any Jewish state, and promised quick victory while urging Arabs to flee. It glosses over Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which explicitly invited Arab inhabitants to “participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” And it conveniently overlooks the ~150,000 Arabs who stayed put, accepted Israeli citizenship, and whose descendants now form over 20% of Israel’s population. This is international grievance politics pushed by the Mayor of New York City, who genuinely believes that Palestinians should be able to “return to their homes” – a nonsensical idea designed to justify perpetual victimhood and violence. The move weaponizes real civilian hardship while inverting roles: turning a war of choice and rejectionism into an unprovoked “catastrophe” inflicted by the intended victims. It sustain grievance and does not nothing to advance peace.

They reinvented the hearing aid by studying the human ear Normal hearing aid: $4700 Theirs: $20

Banger

I appreciate that

These 2 just went on a 10-0 run in a playoff game

Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus gave commencement speech at Penn Engineering School in 2024. He does version of Steve Jobs “paint both sides of the fence even if other people don’t know” attention-to-detail story…about screws for the Cinema Dislay monitor: “Here’s my first [advice]: the care that you put into your work really matters. My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward. At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25. I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.” *** H/T to @kevg1412 for flagging this: aletteraday.substack.com/p/l…

OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open source project, but there are no stories of running it safely in production at scale. As we started deploying agents internally at @brexHQ, we couldn’t stop thinking about this question. Agents work, but nobody wants to give them real credentials. Instead of waiting for a solution to emerge, we decided to try a novel approach: using LLMs to judge the network traffic of an AI agent. Today we’re announcing CrabTrap, an open-source proxy that intercepts every outbound request and blocks risky activity using LLMs, before it ever hits an external API. The results are promising; we believe it’s a meaningful step forward in the security of agent harnesses in production environments. Try it out today. (As a side note, it was really fun to work personally on a real systems problem again. And btw, if you want to work at a place where the CEO is building proxies at night, we’re hiring!)

White smoke seen from Apple Park to signify a new CEO

On Yom HaShoah, I feel the need to reiterate that calling the Gaza war a “genocide” empties the word of any meaning. Holocaust: ~34% of the global Jewish population systematically exterminated. Gaza: ~75k deaths since Oct 7 and 120k births. Amidst a brutal urban war.

[Warning, very very dark] To survive in the Holocaust as a child, my grandfather pretended dead laying on a pile of dead children his age. His mom physically threw him on it to save him. Everyone else in his family perished. Today is Holocaust Remembrance day in Israel. Never Again.

Today @brexHQ is officially part of @CapitalOne ! When we started Brex, we always believed that how a company spends money defines what it becomes. Finance isn't back office, but the core of how every business decision gets made. With AI reshaping how companies run, there's never been a better time to rebuild business finance from the ground up. Brex now serves tens of thousands of businesses, from 1 in 3 startups in the US to the largest companies on the planet, including all major AI labs. But we're still less than 2% of the way to bringing intelligent finance to the majority of US businesses, and we couldn't think of a better partner than Capital One to close that gap. Together, we'll build something truly unique: an n-of-1 combination of a fintech and a bank, unmatched in technology, scale, distribution, and brand. This is a special day. The ceiling just got lifted. I'm so grateful to our team, customers, investors, and everyone who bet on us over the past 8 years. The opportunity ahead is bigger and more ambitious than we've ever dreamed. Onwards!

Working at @brexHQ is fun because we're trusted by 22-year-olds with a term sheet and the finance team at OpenAI

"Make no mistakes DO NOT HALLUCINATE. YOU ARE AN EXPERT SOFTWARE ENGINEER"