This launch video is as wholesome as Jo is amazing. Great work @liveink and @pradeep24

So excited to see what @sergeisorokin builds here. He’s been someone I turn to whenever I need product advice, so it’s wonderful to see him back on the playing field.

Atoms. Http://atoms.co/vision

introducing 🐺 AlphaClaw, the ultimate setup harness for @openclaw. open-source, self-managed, free-to-use, with no lock-in. AlphaClaw makes OpenClaw setup and maintenance easier by providing an elegant GUI that wraps OpenClaw's CLI. 📅 Google Workspace OAuth & pubsub built in w/ gog-cli 🔄 Auto-backup to GitHub 🧱 Prompt hardening reduces agent drift 🩺 Drift Doctor analyzes your prompts and workspace for drift 💬 Telegram multi-topic workspace setup wizard 📂 Full file browser and editor, no SSH needed 🐕 Watchdog auto-detects crashes, self-heals gateway 🛠️ Manage env vars from the UI 🔑 Manage model keys & OAuth visually 🪝 Webhook creator & inspector with replay & debug 📊 Token usage & cost analytics built in ⬆️ One-click updates, no redeploy needed 📦 Import existing setup from GitHub i didn't build alphaclaw to replace openclaw or compete with it. openclaw is the best user-owned AI agent framework out there and more people should be able to use it without wrestling a CLI for two hours. there are so many managed "deploy your AI in seconds" product. but they lock you into their platform. if they pivot, shut down, or jack up pricing, your agent goes with it. alphaclaw gives you that same one-click simplicity, but everything runs on your infra with your data. no proprietary backend. no config hostage. if railway disappears tomorrow, you still have a standard openclaw instance backed up to your own github repo. everything alphaclaw does, you could do manually. it's just automation and UI on top of the real thing. outgrow it? disagree with its opinions? eject. your openclaw instance is still a standard openclaw instance. to make it convenient, i’ve created both a one-click deploy template on railway and render to start quickly. make sure you have 8GB of ram on your instance. look forward to your feedback and to building this out with the @openclaw community! 🦞 github.com/chrysb/alphaclaw feature deep-dive in the 🧵

Big launch today from @liveink and @pradeep24! ycombinator.com/launches/PZb… highly suggest you check it out. If you’ve been inspired by openclaw but want something user friendly and built by people that deeply understand how to build great software this is for you.

just scraped 4,784 AI agent skill repos from 5 registries 59% ship executable scripts 12% are completely empty some are shipping malware lots of dupes if you’re running a self-learning openclaw, a heads up. pradeep.md/2026/02/03/ai-age…

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left. I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up. I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet. But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting. I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn. It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team. This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time. In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back. After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization. Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses. During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived. Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well. The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails. On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else. The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature. The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails. More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it. Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype. None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions. The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct. But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure. In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year. This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years. I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company. The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction. I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability. Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes. That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

may i just add that the hysteria around the moltbook thing - in terms of treating it as anything more than a fun experiment - is absurdly stupid. you mean when you told a bunch of instruction following llms to go create their own social network they started cosplaying as ai’s with their own social network? no way!!! and you mean to tell me people can prompt said ai’s to behave however they want (or just manually post as humans pretending to be ai’s)? c’mon guys. be better. it’s a very fun experiment and worth talking about. you can ofc imagine a version in the future where they’re actually coordinating, and this has helped make that more concrete for people. but if you believe for a second that they’re actually coordinating and that it’s an agi takeover or something, then either you’re farming clicks (again, be better), or extremely clueless about how models work. it’s frustrating that the masses will take it as serious. ugh. it is fun though!

Here's the story of how I vibe coded a #judo #randori tracker before I even landed in Sapporo. I started this project on Claude Code Opus 4.5 when I was in San Francisco and committed my changes 24 hours later. I wanted a tracker to help me keep track of what thrills I was doing during randori. Nothing existed, so I vibe-coded something.

When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed "dream sheet" with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams. It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method. Here's exactly what Shohei did 👇 1. First, some history.... The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese junior high track coach. He took a team ranked last out of 380 schools and, using his system, turned them into the #1 team in the region within 3 years. They held that top spot for the next 6 years. 2. You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick." 3. Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal. Ohtani's 8 pillars were: • Body • Control • Sharpness • Speed • Pitch Variance • Personality • Karma/Luck • Mental Toughness 4. You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines. This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan. To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like: • Showing Respect to Umpires • Picking up trash • Being positive • Being someone people want to support 5. The method goes far deeper than just technical skills. It forces you to analyze your weaknesses and build confidence. It also has a highlight on service to others, emphasizing that humility and contributing to your community are essential for personal success. 6. The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice.

so we raised a new round, but haven't told anyone yet our investors are like, hey put our money to use how come burn isn't going up i gotchu fam introducing burn rate by runway an award winning, blind taste-tested (by me!) hot sauce, wrapped in a genuine $100 bill for $13.99

It's pretty funny that we are converging on the reality that will upset the maximum amount of people: LLMs are pretty good. They're not transformative, and also not useless. There are some tasks where LLMs will save you a lot of time. And that's it

In what feels like a bleak era of brand refreshes (Kia, Jaguar, Cracker Barrel), credit where credit is due: the new Crocs logo is an instant classic.

i keep saying i'll write more frequently – hopefully i stick to it this time!

We tested 21 AI models on 5 self-harm scenarios. The results were sobering. When we saw the recent news involving AI chatbots and teen suicides, we became deeply concerned. As LLMs are proliferating through every piece of software in the world, how can developers know the models they’re using are safe? We have public benchmarks for AI reasoning, math, and legal capabilities, but not for one of the highest-stakes interactions an AI can have with a human, so we decided to build one. Introducing CARE, our initial evaluation framework. Think of this as v0.1. We're making it public and inviting researchers, safety experts, and developers to help us build something truly comprehensive because this problem is too important to solve behind closed doors. We need an objective measure for public visibility. If you’re interested in contributing to the effort, we’d love to hear from you.

Been waiting for someone to build this. Used to do MBSE back in the DoD where we'd model out all the reqs etc. There's been a missing middle layer to act as the source of truth to enable "vibe coding" of real software, this looks like the right future to me.

The smart bit in the piece by Tim Etler of @vetted_ai: Clamp MDX to a static JSX subset and only render allowlisted React components with schema-checked props. Models can place real UI inside streamed markdown. No iframes. Pretty neat. 📝👇

✨ At Google Labs, our mantra is simple: We ship. 🚢 I'm hiring a Senior Product Manager to join my team. If you are a product builder at heart, this role is for you. I'm looking for someone with exceptional product taste, boundless creativity, and the leadership to chase the future and turn ambiguity into products people genuinely love. 🌟 This is a rare opportunity to own a 0-to-1, AI-first product from the ground up. It's a role for a visionary who gets excited by the undefined and has the resilience to navigate the non-linear path of launching something truely innovative. 🔍 This role is for you if: 🚀 You are a proven 0-to-1 product builder. You have a track record of shipping, but you also experiment with AI just for the joy of creating and exploring what's possible. 🧭 You are a "clarity in chaos" leader. You thrive in ambiguity, inspire teams through earned trust, and have a relentless bias for action that unblocks everyone to get things done. 🎨 You possess exceptional product taste. You have that sharp, well-honed instinct for what separates a good idea from a truly delightful, category-defining experience that users love. We are a team of dot-connectors, scrappy builders, and super-collaborators. We move fast, but we also know how to sweat the details because we know that’s where the magic is. 💡  How to Stand Out (This is the fun part) A resume tells me where you've been. I want to see how you think; specifically, I want to see your product creativity in action. While the official application (link below) is the required first step for everyone, I know that the best builders often have projects and ideas that don't fit neatly onto a resume. This is your opportunity to bring your application to life and give me a clearer sense of who you are. Record a short video (under 2 minutes) that shows me how you embody the qualities mentioned above: a 0-to-1 builder, a "clarity in chaos" leader, and a PM with exceptional product taste 🎥 "Showing" is better than "telling." This could be: A quick walkthrough of a prototype you've built. A presentation of a product idea you're passionate about. Any other creative way to demonstrate how you think. 👉 I want to see how you think. Tell me what your idea/project is and why I should care. I’m looking for product creativity, user empathy, and clarity of thought (not your video production skills). Once you've submitted your official application, please paste a link to your video in the comments below. I might not be able to respond to everyone, but please know I'm watching the videos. Can't wait to see what you've built. 🚀 Google job posting: google.com/about/careers/app… ...and to celebrate Google Flow generating over 100M videos so far - here's a quick one I made this morning for this job opp 😉