The highest and most important form of design is actually pure transmutation of human pain and suffering.

The smartest thing Larry Ellison did wasn't building better software. It was choosing the right enemy. When Oracle was fighting Informix and Caiase for market share, nobody cared. So Ellison did something counterintuitive: He stopped fighting his actual competitors. Instead, he picked a fight with Microsoft and IBM. "We pick our enemies very carefully. It helps us focus... If you're a fighter, the only way up is through the top fighters in your division. So, we picked fights with Microsoft and IBM because they're the ones we had to beat to reach the top." The positioning was genius. When you're positioning Oracle against smaller database companies, you're fighting for scraps in a niche market. When you position Oracle against Microsoft? Suddenly you're a heavyweight. The media came. Fortune magazine put him on the cover. "Software's other billionaire." Customers started thinking differently: "Oracle is in the ring with Microsoft. They must be serious. They're not going anywhere. They're a survivor." Caiase and Informix couldn't say the same thing. They weren't fighting anyone. They were just... there. Ellison understood something most competitors miss: "Your position in the market isn't determined by who you actually beat. It's determined by who you're willing to fight."

Anthropic, the $380B company we all know to be shipping at historical rates, forgot basic CI hygiene and dropped a 59.8MB source map of their entire Claude Code in npm. The 3rd time this has happened btw… I imagine Dario will be DMCA'ing the mirrors by morning, and pretending this didn’t happen again… for a third time. A literal AI giant preaching safety alignment and selling enterprise solutions can’t secure its own production builds. Quite ironic when you think about it.

the most underrated hire right now is a great product person. when i say product person i'm def not talking about a product manager. perhaps i think there has to be somewhat of a new role. i don't have a good name for it yet but maybe something like "product thinker".. someone with an intuitive grasp of the product as it exists, where it's soft, where it sings, & how to iterate it toward something even sharper. in some sense, this person has to cohesively hold in their head where this product should be 2 years from now & work backwards from that. i say this cuz when building was hard, engineering was the bottleneck & the status hierarchy often reflected that. building is no longer hard. which means the variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment on what to build, how to sequence it, & how to talk about it. & the story matters as much as the thing. internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. you can't retrofit narrative onto a product & expect it to land, it has to be load bearing from the start. the rarest version of this person sits at the intersection of culture & deep technology. someone genuinely bilingual. they know what's technically possible & they know which cultural currents are real vs. ephemeral. that combo is what separates products that feel inevitable from products that feel assembled. before ppl clap back with this person has always been valuable, i know.. i am just saying now they might be the most *important* person in the room. their value compounds like never before.