David Haddad

Anti “monopolize a table for 5 hours with a cup of coffee”. Rent is expensive. Happens around the world.” Europe loves money like everyone else. Your weekend laptop energy makes them make less money. So they told you to leave and instead of recalibrating you’re whining about it on x and blaming it on others. Low agency behaviour. Get a coworking space day pass like a big boy.

@recouso Anti work

Okay guys, had a few cultural shocks in Spain: > Go to the gym, opens 10am on a Sunday > Go to work from a coworking, closed > Go to a coffee shop, no wifi Absolutely unthinkable in a barely productive economy like the US, yet alone UAE. Europe is a daylight museum.

The need for Emirati royals to come out and pledge allegiance to the union in itself is an admission of internal fission over Abu Dhabi's direction towards the immediate neighbourhood Abu Dhabi has been an engine for hyperdevelopment in the UAE at the cost of centralization - the long-term costs of an Abu Dhabi-centric economy is a de-federalization of the union to remain in name only The old rifts between the Al Qassimi and the Bani Yas over strategic direction won't be buried by money alone

Some fields work in theory but not in practice. Some fields work in practice but not theory. The uniqueness of economics is that it works in neither theory nor practice.

one of the most refreshing things on the planet is talking to someone who just *gets it*. like you don’t need a preamble, & you don’t need to articulate the shape of the thought before you can share it cuz they just meet you where you already are. as if they skimmed your mind & married to the culture before you say a single word. these people are rare, & conversations with them are incredible because you skip the surface layer entirely & land in the depth almost immediately. they’re the best ppl to riff with, ideate with, & think forward with.. the bandwidth is wide & already open. this is true for any type of relationship.

all technology brothers should have a birthright trip to paris to see how good certain things can get and all the axes of civilization they don’t think about. they should also get one to singapore to witness the hollow Disneyland feigned joy of technocratic perfection

The migration in numbers: - Team of 16 engineers worked over 6 weeks. - We reduced our footprint from 6M CPU cores, to just 10k cores. - We are now using the same Grok-based transformer models that power your home timeline. - Eliminated 15 years of tech debt - replaced 1M LOC of Scala with just 50k LOC of Rust and Python

Stockholm will be the tech powerhouse of Europe. You can walk into a real startup event any day of the week now. Not the old invite only VC dinners. Actual community stuff. Hackathons, operators sharing playbooks, fireside chats, product and design workshops. Companies opening their doors and giving away knowledge that used to stay locked inside teams. Most of it free and fully open. Teenagers building their first company sit next to veterans starting their next one. The full mix is showing up. Sweden has always been good at riding technological shifts even when we don't build the underlying platforms. This feels like one of those moments. A new wave of hackers out building and spotting opportunities everywhere. The investing side is widening too. First time angels writing checks, not just the usual insiders. Global funds fly in every week. US firms move fast, local funds compete, and I've seen pre seed and seed rounds of 3 to 15 million close in days. The government is even looking at allowing private assets in ISK, which would open up private company investing to far more people. And all of it sits within a short walk. The internet and mobile generation with Spotify, King, Klarna. The digitize the physical world generation with Voi, Kry, Einride, Instabee. Now the AI first wave with Sana, Tandem and Lovable. A new era is starting in Stockholm.

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, former Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and current Ambassador to the UK: Due to scientific and technological progress, it has become impossible, regardless of what others may claim, to carry out operational-level tasks. 1/12

The plan is greater Israel by any means necessary. That’s it. There is no other 12D chess going on here. The war is destroying the petrodollar, they don’t give a fuck. It’s not part of some deep strategy involving energy resources, it strengthens China immensely. They don’t care. They will burn everything to the ground to try to get greater Israel. It was a common error in analysis to treat the Iraq war as “stupid” or “a mistake.” Paul Bremer dismissing the Iraqi army, obliterating the state through De-Ba'athification, creating the insurgency. It doesn’t make any sense as a strategy unless you understand that the war was for Israel. The Iraqi state had to be pulverized so it could never again threaten Israel. Iraqi academics, engineers, specialists of all kinds had to be killed or chased out in terror. Then ditto in Libya, ditto in Syria. The only plan is to try to do that to Iran. None of this was “a mistake.” None of it was “stupid.” The actual goals were just different from the justifications presented for public consumption. The Israel lobby is immensely powerful but a war with Iran was always the one thing they couldn’t get. U.S. state planners since the Iranian revolution have understood what closure of the strait of Hormuz would mean. It is apocalyptic for the maintenance of the petrodollar that the U.S. empire depends on. The lobby has been working our government for decades now. They’ve finally got a president blackmailed enough and a deep state zogged enough that the initial start of the war could go forward. Now they’re riding on the back of a tiger. The cost of living crisis is coming home. They have to keep the war going over what will be increasing civil unrest. Eventually they’re going to push Trump into doubling down. The goal is to go nuclear. That’s what they think is the way out. Nuking Iran. This is genocidal madness. It’s why everyone in Congress needs to be held accountable for not funding a single dollar for this illegal war. It’s why the anti war movement in this country needs to wake up and recognize that we are in a crisis moment. Our passivity will be taken by the ruling class as permission to do the unthinkable.

1) who writes this shit in a diary 2) how did team elon get it in their hands?

@denisyurchak Which cafe do you see young people reading newspapers in? You’re full of shit.

Sitting at a cafe in Warsaw, 90% of people are working with their laptops Same cafe in Western Europe – most would be reading books, newspapers, or chatting, almost 0 people working The staff would kick you out the moment you take your laptop out of your bag, because "cafes are for social life, not work" In Warsaw and Krakow, there are a ton of specialty coffee places that allow laptops. The internet is usually good, and nobody is going to harass you if you work or do calls The price of a coffee cup is around 16-18 zl (4 euros). You can take 1 or 2 and sit in the cafe for hours. This is a small detail, but very telling about the vibe in Poland vs Western Europe In Poland, people will respect you for building cool shit or trying to start a business. The people are hungry, and there is a hustler mentality In Western Europe, people are content with what they have (a house from grandparents they can rent out and live off it) or rely on the state This gives rise to a society of eternal students of political science and bureaucrats. If anybody wants to build a business, they leave and go to the US Meanwhile, Poland is taking over Spain in GDP per capita, and soon will take over the UK as well

This is the trade BlackBerry, Yahoo, and MapQuest refused to make. Adobe just made it. For 30 years, Creative Cloud's defensibility was muscle memory: keyboard shortcuts, panel layouts, plugin ecosystems, designers trained to think in Adobe gestures. Three decades of UI lock-in. That layer gets vaporized when the interface becomes "describe what you want." Adobe could have fought it. Doubled down on Firefly as a destination. Tried to make adobe.com the agent interface. Kept users inside their UI. That's the strategy that killed every incumbent above. Defending the wrong layer of the stack. Instead they wired 50+ Creative Cloud tools into Claude as orchestrated workflows. Designers stop opening Photoshop. They open Claude and say "use portrait refinement." The Adobe UI disappears. The Adobe subscription stays. Stripe rebuilt their APIs as agent-native. Cloudflare shipped MCP support. Adobe joined the same club: become the tool the agent reaches for when a user says "edit the portrait." The math is asymmetric. Adobe gives up surface area in the user's workflow. Adobe keeps the algorithms behind every "portrait refinement," every "color match," every "remove background." When Claude users build muscle memory around those calls pointing at Adobe's models, the switching cost transfers from Adobe's UI to Adobe's position in the agent's toolkit. First incumbent into the agent layer captures the default. Once "use portrait refinement" routes to Firefly automatically, the next 100M Claude users never learn there's an alternative. Firefly, Substance, Lightroom's algorithms, the file-format gravity across the creative industry. Those are the actual assets. The UI was distribution. Adobe found a better distribution system.

The Persians freaking collected a toll from the Romans, lol. You go to war with these people and they are like 'let's see, what did we do 2,000 years ago in a similar situation?'

Twitter must be the lowest ratio of (Value Captured :: Value Created) of any company in existence There are countless billion dollar companies that owe much of their early success to Twitter. And it continues to be a main channel for Anthropic, OpenAI, Replit, and others.

corporate subtweeting at its finest

Iran war amplifies UAE isolation and rift with Saudi The relationship between the Emirates and the Saudis has been deteriorating for several years. Old grudges go back to the 1974 Jeddah Treaty, which was supposed to settle disputed borders. The Emirates claim they were forced to hand over oil-rich territory (the Shaybah field) and a land corridor linking the country to Qatar in exchange for Saudi recognition of their independence. In the early 2000s tensions flared again when Saudi Arabia blocked Emirati maritime infrastructure projects, claiming they crossed its territorial waters. There were even naval incidents involving coast guard vessels. In Yemen the rift became glaringly obvious. In 2018-2019, UAE-backed forces clashed directly with troops of the internationally recognized government, which were supported by Saudi Arabia. Heavy fighting broke out in Aden, with dozens killed and wounded as separatists seized parts of the city. A brief calm followed. Then, between December 2025 and January 2026, the STC, heavily backed by Abu Dhabi, advanced and seized the governorates of Hadramaut and Mahra, precisely the ones bordering Saudi Arabia. Riyadh responded with airstrikes on ships and cargoes linked to the UAE, accused Abu Dhabi of threatening national security, and gave a 24-hour ultimatum for Emirati forces to leave Yemen. After the withdrawal, the STC itself was weakened and partially dismantled. The Emirates weren’t just supporting the takeover of cities on the Saudi border, they were planning to overthrow the Yemeni government. What began as a coalition against the Houthis turned into an open dispute over influence, ports, and control of southern Yemen. The UAE bet on separatists and proxies; the Saudis prioritized central government unity and their own border security. With overflowing coffers in recent years, the Emirates began running their own highly interventionist foreign policy. The country is now involved in at least eight conflicts across Africa and plans to expand its influence, always in partnership with Israel. In Somaliland, the Berbera base operates under tight coordination between the Emirates and Israel. But the cooperation goes far beyond that base. On the arid, remote islands of the Socotra archipelago in Yemen, the UAE built a network of military and intelligence bases. Israeli officers are on site, operating radars, drones, and Israeli equipment integrated into the system. The entire network was developed in direct coordination with Israel to monitor the Houthis and control the Gulf of Aden. The Emirates chose Israel as a strategic partner years ago, but during the war against Iran and the truce period it was the first time Israeli soldiers operated equipment on Emirati soil. In fact, it was the first time the Iron Dome was deployed anywhere outside Israel or the United States. None of this pleased Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is now acting on two direct fronts to curb UAE influence: Sudan and Somaliland. On April 20, MBS received Sudanese Army chief General Burhan in Jeddah. In addition to the high-level meeting, Riyadh is financing and guaranteeing a major $1.5 billion arms deal with Pakistan to equip Burhan’s forces, while also increasing direct financial and logistical support to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which are fighting the Rapid Support Forces financed by the Emirates. To read the full article: open.substack.com/pub/global21/p…

There are some real bombshells in this one.

@henrythe9ths The new IC is a CTO of agents. x.com/henrythe9ths/s…

Something strange is happening in tech. CTOs of billion dollar companies are quitting to take IC roles at Anthropic. Workday CTO -> MTS (Mar 2026) You[.]com CTO -> MTS (Mar 2026) Instagram CTO -> MTS (Jan 2026) Box CTO -> MTS (Dec 2025) Super[.]com CTO -> MTS (July 2025) Adept AI CTO -> MTS (Jan 2025) The mission is that real.

1/ Today @Mercury received conditional approval from the OCC to establish Mercury Bank, N.A. I started Mercury in 2017 to build the bank I wish had existed as a founder. Nearly a decade later, we’re getting there. 🧵