Some personal news: I’m stoked to share that I’ve joined Netflix as a Senior Software Engineer on the Experience Design team!

we’re hiring interns for fall 2026! in person, toronto, working with world-class founders, occasional bubble tea info session next week, apply here: luma.com/muvqfmar

cursor.com/@matallo my work profile looks less empty, I promise 🙈

We just launched Canada’s new AI Strategy: AI For All.    We’re taking control of our future — with AI that’s governed by Canadian values, AI that’s accountable to Canadians, and AI that serves all Canadians.

VoidZero is joining Cloudflare. Our mission stays the same: to make JavaScript developers more productive than ever before. Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite remain MIT-licensed. Evan and the VoidZero team will continue leading them. Cloudflare shares our commitment to open source. Together, we can keep investing in the tooling developers rely on every day, while bringing the Vite ecosystem and Cloudflare’s platform even closer together.

I just finished teaching the first lecture of the course “Geoeconomics Uncovered: Theory Meets Evidence” at Oxford, so I decided to post the slide deck: dropbox.com/scl/fi/tjkm9g6ig… This was a 90-minute, big-picture lecture: what is geoeconomics, why does it matter, and what can economists do in this field? It draws on several plenary talks I have given over the past year, so you may have seen some of these slides before. But I have many new followers, and some are clearer than before. During the rest of the week, I will post more of these slide decks. The next one will be on the history of the field. PS: Oxford is such a lovely place. Unfortunately, a country that gave us Newton, Darwin, and Turing cannot keep escalators running at Heathrow.

Heads up: we're hiring members of the technical staff at Earendil again. If you're interested mail join@earendil.com

Are you a crazy, awesome space tech founder who wants to help build the first moonbase? If you or anyone you know fits this description, check out this official guide from NASA! nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/…

CONTACT REALITY a Rainmaker film A look into the history of cloud seeding and how we're building Rainmaker into next-generation water infrastructure.

Oye, que en Tinybird estamos buscando un/a product engineer para que se una al equipo de ✨ producto ✨ tinybird.co/job-offers/c32d4… - Pros: full remote, buen salario y gente increíble con la que currar - Cons: me vas a tener que sufrir Si conocéis a alguien que pueda encajar o nos ayudáis spreading the word, dios os lo pagará 🙏

if you're looking for a solution to run tests on your agents, are questioning why evals are so fucking complicated, and use typescript: vitest-evals.sentry.dev/ spent a bunch of cycles yesterday making the docs not slop works oob with pi-ai, ai sdk, and openai/agents

double-digit temperatures in Toronto this weekend 🥹

if you want to come work on things like this i have open recs at Sentry $350k to $1m TC you need to have a proven track record, ample public work, be highly autonomous, 5 years industry experience, and be based in SF or willing to relocate. if your github profile cant compare to mine, its probably not the right fit DM your credentials (or email to david at sentry)

you will both really like @JesusFerna7026 on today's Plain English! We talk about how we at least need one set of explanations (explanations, plural) to explain why a country would go from TFR of 7 to 2 ... and another set of explanations that explain why some places go from replacement rate to 1 and below bc while economic growth and feminism and contraception can surely explain the first, they don't explain why Korea has gone from 2 to <1 long after it modernized and made contraception easy. for that you need to bring it social and technological phenomena that might be more recent. start here youtu.be/5F7_qa-XLBg?si=UYy5…

I’ll be in València, Spain 🇪🇸 this Sunday if any nerds want to meet for morning coffee. DM or email. (It’s been fantastic to meet so many founders and their teams in Madrid. I’ll write up some themes next week.)

NEWS: "I've written 983 pages" - Robert Caro on his final LBJ book Via @cspan c-span.org/program/qa/author…

I love Tobi Lütke but lets be honest, we have all heard him on several podcasts. This episode is @tobi like you have never seen before. Spicy, fun and leaning into controversy. I mean wow, he did not shy away from hard topics: - AI as a scapegoat for layoffs - The dangers of irresponsible charitable giving - Carney’s stance against a Trump administration being wrong - Why Elon Musk deserves more credit I condensed my notes from the discussion below for you: 1. The $160 Billion CEO Who Did Not Want to Be CEO To run a truly product-driven company, you must be in control of the company itself because the needs of a product and a business often diverge. This requires passing the "marshmallow test" by prioritizing a three-year perspective over immediate gratification. Founders must be willing to endure "bad numbers" in the short term if they believe it is the only way to reach the right long-term destination. 2. The Best Engineers in Shopify Are Not Writing Code Anymore and the AI Does It for Them AI now generates over 50% of the code at Shopify, and that number is steadily increasing. Many of the company’s best engineers have not written a single line of manual code since December 2023, as the release of advanced models like Opus changed the fundamental nature of the job. Engineering has shifted from manual execution to "steering" AI agents through high-level context engineering. 3. Why AI Is Being Used as a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs The current wave of industry layoffs is largely a result of "over-hiring" during the COVID era rather than displacement by AI. AI has become the "perfect scapegoat" for slow companies because it cannot fight back against the narrative that it is destroying jobs. In reality, AI is an incredible tool that improves productivity across every department when implemented correctly. 4. Why We Are About to Enter a Golden Age of Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is the most "AI-safe" and "AI-benefiting" career path available today. AI acts as a "handy sidekick" or co-founder, allowing individuals to focus on their core ambitions while the technology handles various execution tasks. The barriers to entry are dissolving; you no longer need a family background in business to understand that business formation is something real humans can do. 5. Why We Need to Place More Not Less Scrutiny on Charitable Giving Giving money is only virtuous if it yields results; prioritize what works over what sounds good. "Charity dollars" lack the "self-healing fitness function" provided by for-profit markets. Be skeptical of organizations that choose to opt out of market intelligence. 6. Why Will Governments Regulating the Technology We and Our Children Use Push Us Into the Hands of the Chinese? Age limits won't stop kids from using AI; they will just drive them toward uncurated "donut" Chinese models. This risks exposing youth to a collectivist monoculture that censors historical truth. Such regulation trades individualistic enlightenment values for state control. (links below)

May we present to you 5,000 words on Casey Handmer and Terraform Industries reported over several months. If you would like to read about a team trying to make fuel from water, air and sunlight while working inside of a castle, we have what you need right here corememory.com/p/the-magical…

what are the best designers doing to wrangle AI? @brian_lovin is one of the people I study for inspiration 👇 So today's episode is a deep dive into how he’s iterating on his approach to both using AI tools as well as building AI tools at Notion youtube.com/watch?v=dvEwb1Aj… There are a ton of practical workflow nuggets in this one: ✧ Why Brian has started using Cursor again ✧ Behind-the-scenes of Brian’s new side project ✧ Practical tips for prompting AI more effectively ✧ How to stay relevant as a designer in an AI world ✧ Why his first Notion design offsite was so impactful ✧ How Brian built Notion’s prototyping playground a lot more

ok banger

America’s largest weather modification company, @RainmakerCorp, says it has made a major breakthrough and can prove its cloud seeding operations work. We went back to their HQ for our latest documentary.