A municipal IT dept from Brazil doing a kickass job!

Alibaba Qwen3.7 slowly fading into irrelevance at the frontier due to proprietary stance. In it's place we have Minimax M3 and... *checks notes* Rio 3.5 397b, made by the municipal IT company of Rio de Janeiro's city government. huggingface.co/prefeitura-ri…

Most fintech & e-comm products are built for the happy path. Sign up. Pay. Book. Submit. Track. But trust is won or lost on the broken path, Amazon nailed this. Refunds. Delays. Claims. Exceptions. Escalations. Recovery. The broken path is where the real brand begins.

Software has already conquered clean digital surfaces. The new opportunity with AI are ones with messy coordination: factories, health, insurance, money movement, support, logistics, compliance, recovery.

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models. No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success. There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price. This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc. I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

Delhi IGI: IMD forecasts rain, thunderstorms and gusts to ~60 kmph Friday and Saturday (Jun 12-13 IST), in morning and afternoon/evening spells. Connecting in DEL on a US-bound itinerary? Pad the layover; 3h is the safer play. (per IMD, Jun 11 6:45 PM PT)

When headlines write themselves: In 2023, UnitedHealthcare denied one in every three claims it received. That same year, its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, reported $22.4 billion in net earnings, and its stock reached record highs. Those two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact. And it’s not just United, it’s pretty much every insurer on earth today. The combination of float economics public-market pressure for ever‑lower loss ratios creates a perverse incentive to hold down claim payments by any means that are at the limits of what’s legally politically tolerable. thefirmo.com/unitedhealthcar…

I used to think forgetting authors meant I’d absorbed them. Now I think it means I read too fast to encode the lineage.

It’s a shame when contract clearly defines one thing at payment collection, and when the pain occurs; insurers seem to flip the terms and leave people stranded. This is why insurance penetration and adoption suffers; not lack of marketing or reach. Just bloody honour the terms of the policy and see how adoption goes up. youtu.be/VfIy_l24uEw?si=Ij_G…

Update 5:05 PT: The attack has now expanded well beyond @TanStack and @Mistral. 373 malicious package-version entries across 169 npm package names, including @uipath, @squawk, @tallyui, @beproduct, and more. The malware propagates by stealing your CI credentials and using them to publish new compromised versions. Full IOCs, affected package list, and detection steps: aikido.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

TODAY: Amazon is opening its entire logistics network—freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping capabilities—to every business, of all types and sizes. 📦 Amazon has built one of the most reliable and efficient supply chains on Earth. Now, Amazon Supply Chain Services gives all businesses access to the same infrastructure that moves, stores, and ships goods for hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers. Healthcare, automotive, manufacturing, retail, and more. Businesses across industries can now tap into Amazon's logistics network. Learn more here. ⬇️

The 'why vote for actors' takes are missing the signal. Star power got Vijay on the ballot. The mandate he’s got now is for his message: change, development, secularism, an exit from 2 parties that voters have given up on. When incumbents stop earning your vote, betting on the upstart is the rational move. And TN just proved its willingness to take a bet.

AI product sense is now a real interview round. And the candidates treating it like "regular product sense with AI buzzwords sprinkled in" are losing offers right now. Three tiers of companies are running this round. Each tier wants something different. Walking in with the wrong prep is how strong PMs get blindsided. Tier 1: AI-native companies. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind. Dedicated AI product sense round in every PM loop. Not optional. Not team-specific. Every candidate gets it. The questions force model-aware tradeoffs. Ankit shared an OpenAI example: "How would you double ChatGPT image creation with just three engineers?" You're allocating against model constraints, engineering scarcity, and product bets at the same time. Standard product sense playbooks weren't built for this. Tier 2: Big tech that just bolted it onto the loop. Meta is the move to watch. Ankit shared that they added a fourth interview specifically for this. Live prototyping. Interviewer in the room. Meta calls it "vibe coding" internally. You ship while they watch. Google's AI teams, Amazon's Gen.AI org, and NVIDIA are running versions of this. Often gated to specific teams or seniority levels, but the format is the same: prototype live, defend choices in real time. Tier 3: Companies weaving AI into the existing product sense round. This is the trap. LinkedIn won't label it as an "AI round." But the questions in their standard product sense slot now sound like: "How would you leverage Gen.AI capabilities while thinking through this product?" Or: "What are the implications of OpenAI and Anthropic capturing new markets, and how should our product rethink its strategy?" Answer those without referencing model capabilities or competitive market shifts and you fail. Quietly. You'll walk out thinking you nailed the case. The rejection email won't tell you what happened. The skill split is real: Tier 1 wants you to reason like a model-aware operator under engineering constraints. Tier 2 wants you to ship working prototypes live with AI tools. Tier 3 wants AI reasoning baked into every product answer without being prompted. Most candidates I've seen are still prepping for the 2022 version of product sense. The ones converting offers at companies like Uber, Atlassian, and Cisco are training on what the loop actually looks like now. The full mock with Ankit shows what a tier 2 vibe coding round looks like end-to-end, plus the 9/10 breakdown of where it landed.

We've hit the GPT-1 moment in electromagnetism. Last month, our Chief Research Officer, @m__frei was on stage breaking down our foundation model for electromagnetism at CDFAM - Computational Design Symposium, in Barcelona. In the talk, Mike covered why EM has resisted AI for so long, what it took to change that, and what comes next on the roadmap for our team at @arenaphysica. EM is one of the four fundamental forces of physics, and underpins the future of the physical systems that'll change the world around us and how we experience it. satcomm, radar, high-speed on-chip communications in the datacenter and at the edge, and photonics. For the physics AI crew, and those building next-gen hardware, worth the 30 minutes. enjoy youtube.com/watch?v=Dd80tO-p…

The possibilities with this are endless. I’d always felt sport streaming could do with an upgrade. Imagine an AI director delivering camera angles, graphics, and commentator tone adapted per user in real time! This could be 🔥

🚨 Vercel was compromised and the incident affects many of its customers. 1. Rotate all env vars and secrets in your vercel dashboard. 2. Regenerate any github tokens connected through vercel's git integration 3. Check build logs for cached secrets from old deployments 4. Revoke API keys for stripe, databases, anything sitting in that dashboard.

Microsoft managed to get teams work in space for video calls with astronauts. Took 3 attempts for a F500 client to get their teams call to get working earlier today. Moral of the story: teams is not for mere earth bound mortals anymore. MS Teams doesn’t suck, gravity sucks.

The therapist line in the end is the most interesting take. Tools that enable to scaffold thinking will be the actual design problem of the next decade. Writing, research, strategy, code review, maybe therapy itself will need this and nobody has built a good one yet. Obsidian still falls short. Maybe the incentive of software building today pushes toward measurable replacement over augmentation, which is still hard to quantify.

Claim adjudication is a one sided lever that exposes premium payors to bad management actors.

"Why We Think" by Lilian Weng is a serious look at how LLMs reason. The argument: more thinking time doesn't automatically mean better reasoning. The inference strategy is what actually moves the needle. Technical and worth the 40 minutes. lilianweng.github.io/posts/2…