We read A LOT around here, so you don’t have to. Here are our faves this week: @Ritholtz: buff.ly/GT7uYGr @awealthofcs: buff.ly/PhKtLuI @ateachmoment: buff.ly/onuGbX2 @abnormalreturns: buff.ly/L4Ug0Jt

Because this is a brand new form of centrism being born in San Francisco The 2030’s will look back on this time when the new San Francisco common sense Democrat was born from the failures of the hard left

The AI revolution in cancer is already happening, but looks quite different than what most people expect ↓ color.com/blog/ai-revolution…

I was on a train in Tokyo. We stopped between stations. Announcement in Japanese, then in English: "We apologize for the delay. We will resume shortly." The delay was maybe 3 minutes. Not a big deal. When the train started moving again, another announcement: "We sincerely apologize for the delay. We were stopped for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. This is unacceptable. Thank you for your patience." Three minutes and twenty seconds. They measured it exactly. And called it unacceptable. When I got off at my stop, there were station staff on the platform bowing and handing out delay certificates. I took one out of curiosity. It was an official document stating that the train had been delayed by 3 minutes and 20 seconds, signed and stamped. The staff member said in English "for your employer. So they know the delay was not your fault." I said I'm a tourist, I don't need it. He looked confused. "But the delay affected you. You deserve an apology." Three minutes. They were treating a three-minute delay like a major incident. Later I mentioned this to a Japanese friend. They said "oh yes, delay certificates are normal. Trains are supposed to be exactly on time. If they are late, they must apologize." I said three minutes isn't late, it's nothing. My friend said "in Japan, three minutes is late. On time means on time. Not approximately on time." They said the train company probably investigated why there was a 3-minute delay. "They will find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again." I kept the certificate. It's framed in my apartment now. A reminder that somewhere in the world, people care about three minutes. © 6IX.

This makes me sick and want to move my kids out of SF. Not because it’s too expensive. But because tech striver culture is so warped, I worry it’s unhealthy for them to be around. By any objective measure this is not “broke,” not even in SF (ELEVEN MILLION PRE TAX!!!! 3M house! Chunky nest egg! An email job that lets you pay for private school AND a f/t nanny!) This is not a “996 and camping” lifestyle. This is a “we’re taking the kids to Japan for 2 weeks with the au pair” lifestyle. It’s not the expense that keeps people trapped, it’s the mindset. There will always be someone with more. The only way you can be truly poor is being unable to see your blessings for what they are and let someone else decide what is and isn’t “enough.”

A friend's teenage daughter is going to visit San Francisco and asked me to draw a map of "where not to go in SF." How'd I do?

I was on the phone today with a friend who’s deep in the startup scene in San Francisco. His eyes completely lit up as he was telling me about the scene there right now. “It’s AI pandemonium out here!” People are flying in from all over the world. They just want to be part of this moment. He said you walk into coffee shops or restaurants and hear every language you can imagine. Young people everywhere, all chasing the AI craze, and they’re all on Claude code all day doing crazy things. He told me the level of disruption right now feels like an absolute gold rush moment. They’re 100% convinced this is the beginning of a massive technological change that will completely change society. Apartments are hard to find. Rents are surging. People are doing whatever it takes to be there. It’s a massive gold rush and everyone wants in.

Whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, can we have someone with at least a little class next time? Because this is embarrassing.

It's my birthday and on my birthday I want to recognize all my haters. Haters do the best marketing. Love your haters.

🤯BREAKING: Alibaba just proved that AI Coding isn't taking your job, it's just writing the legacy code that will keep you employed fixing it for the next decade. 🤣 Passing a coding test once is easy. Maintaining that code for 8 months without it exploding? Apparently, it’s nearly impossible for AI. Alibaba tested 18 AI agents on 100 real codebases over 233-day cycles. They didn't just look for "quick fixes"—they looked for long-term survival. The results were a bloodbath: 75% of models broke previously working code during maintenance. Only Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 maintained a >50% zero-regression rate. Every other model accumulated technical debt that compounded until the codebase collapsed. We’ve been using "snapshot" benchmarks like HumanEval that only ask "Does it work right now?" The new SWE-CI benchmark asks: "Does it still work after 8 months of evolution?" Most AI agents are "Quick-Fix Artists." They write brittle code that passes tests today but becomes a maintenance nightmare tomorrow. They aren't building software; they're building a house of cards. The narrative just got honest: Most models can write code. Almost none can maintain it.

My friend who is trying to buy a single family house in SF is running 7 burner accounts talking about how Miami is the next big tech hub to free up housing inventory in SF

2022: It's so over in the Bay Area. Miami is the future. 2026:

This is why Silicon Valley is different to any other industry. In no other industry - fashion, film, finance - would you have someone as senior as Chamath responding to a cold email. So, why does it happen here? Structurally, Silicon Valley is organized around, and built on, finding and funding the new thing vs just expanding the old thing. The best new ideas often come from young, “inexperienced,” people with raw talent and intelligence. Zuck, Speigel, the Collisons, Dell, Gates, Ellison, Chesky, Moskovitz, Andreessen, all built their companies when they were in their late teens/early 20’s. So ignoring the young kid who has the balls to cold email you, could cost you dearly. The kids really are the future. ✊🏻 More of this ⬇️

SF Bay Area and California is too important for American innovation for us to just cede it to the worst policymakers and their worst policies. If you care about tech you have to start paying attention to local and state politics a lot more than you look at national culture war.

A copper shortage is coming next: The world economy is projected to face a copper deficit of 10 million tonnes by 2040, equivalent to ~33% of current global demand. This comes as global copper demand is estimated to surge to 42 million tonnes by 2040, from 28 million tonnes in 2025. Asia alone is expected to reflect 60% of total demand growth over this time, driven by EV adoption and grid upgrades. At the same time, AI data center copper demand is set to surge 127% to 2.5 million tonnes by 2040. Meanwhile, supply is expected to peak at ~34 million tonnes in 2030 before declining to ~32 million tonnes by 2040. Copper is the next global strategic commodity.

The most successful people I know all have an almost irrational belief that everything will work out And I just recently learned the word for it: Pronoia. It means the opposite of paranoia. The belief that the world is secretly conspiring in your favor. The funny thing about Pronoia is that it's self-fulfilling. When you believe things will work out, you try harder. You persist longer, and you see opportunities where others see dead ends. What's that quote again? "Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money." – Nat Friedman We all need a little more pronoia in our lives.

In just ~3 months, as a solo founder with no prior robotics experience, @gentrajectory trained a foundation model for dexterous manipulation that lets humanoid robots pick up unseen objects and perform real-world work. It generalizes to novel objects and scenes, including cases where prior SoTA models achieve 0% success. Congrats on the launch @joshuabelofsky! ycombinator.com/launches/P6q…

I used to think that the shoe bomber had wasted more hours of people's time than anyone in history, but the EU-mandated cookie pop-ups on websites probably have the shoe bomber beat by a wide margin. We underrate what a disastrous policy decision that was.

Real Luxuries in Life 1. Living 10 minutes from work 2. Living 5 minutes from the gym 3. Having quiet neighbors 4. Having money left at the end of the month and investing it 5. Peace at home 6. Drinking coffee without rushing 7. Sleeping with a clear conscience 8. Laughing with people who truly get you 9. Traveling every year 10. Waking up naturally without an alarm 11. Enjoying a home-cooked meal with loved ones 12. Having time to read a book in one sitting 13. Finding joy in simple daily routines 14. Having a pet that greets you happily at the door These are the things that actually feel rich.

Paul Graham on why you shouldn’t write with AI: “In preindustrial times most people's jobs made them strong. Now if you want to be strong, you work out. So there are still strong people, but only those who choose to be. It will be the same with writing. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞."