Nathaniel Pendleton

You can’t buy Linux. It’s free. Always has been. So IBM did the next best thing: it spent $34 billion buying Red Hat, a company whose entire business is selling tech support for this free software. Largest software acquisition in history. For support contracts on something anyone can download for $0. The “side project” story, while true, is maybe 5% of what actually happened since. Linux itself is managed by a nonprofit, the Linux Foundation. That nonprofit pulled in $311 million last year. Only $8.4 million of that (2.6%) actually went to Linux itself. The rest of the funds support ~1,500 other open source projects, events, and training. Every Fortune 100 tech company is a paying member. And here’s who actually builds this “free” software now: 84% of the code changes to Linux in 2025 come from developers on corporate payroll. Intel is the biggest contributor. Google is second. Huawei, Oracle, AMD, and Meta all have engineers writing Linux code full-time. Over 1,780 companies pay people to work on it. The solo genius in a dorm room stopped being the real story around 1998. The wildest part: over 65% of Microsoft’s cloud computers run Linux. Microsoft, the company whose former CEO once called Linux “a cancer,” now runs more Linux than Windows on its own servers. Amazon and Google’s clouds are even higher, both above 90%. A 2024 Harvard Business School study attempted to calculate how much companies would spend if all free, open-source software vanished tomorrow. The answer: $8.8 trillion more per year. 3.5x what they currently spend. And that number didn’t even include operating systems like Linux. Linus Torvalds still personally approves every major code change. He makes about $1.5 million a year. He also built Git, the tool that powers GitHub (which Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion). Two pieces of software the entire tech industry runs on, same guy. Linux started as 10,239 lines of code. It’s now over 40 million. Every one of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers runs it. 96% of the top million websites sit on it. Every Android phone has Linux inside it. That’s roughly 3 billion devices in people’s pockets. It’s the largest collaborative engineering project in human history, free to use, funded by the same corporations it was supposed to replace.

Ben Affleck told you exactly what's coming and nobody caught it. At the DealBook Summit, he was asked point blank: could Netflix use AI to create its own James Bond with completely synthetic actors? His answer started safe. "That's not possible now." "Highly unlikely" in the future, movies will be "one of the last things" replaced by AI. Then he kept talking. He said AI will "intermediate the more laborious, less creative, and more costly aspects of filmmaking." That it will "bring costs down" and "lower the barrier to entry." Then he said the quiet part out loud. "I wouldn't like to be in the visual effects business." They're in trouble and what costs a lot of money is now going to cost a lot less and it's going to hammer that space. And it already is." He said "maybe it shouldn't take a thousand people to render something." But he wasn't done. He described a future where AI lets you get "two seasons of House of the Dragon in a year instead of one." Where studios make more content with the same spend and fewer people. Then he went further than any Hollywood insider has gone publicly. He said AI will eventually let you pay $30 and order your own custom episode of Succession. Pick the plot, the characters and AI builds it from the show's existing sets, actors, and footage. "It'll be a little janky and a little bit weird," he said but it'll work. He described consumers buying an "Iron Man pack" so they can look like Avengers characters on Twitch. Licensed AI character packs replacing costumes and digital rights replacing DVDs. This is not a man worried about AI. This is a man who mapped out the entire business model. And then he built a company to execute it. Yesterday, Netflix bought that company. It's called InterPositive and it trains AI on a film's own footage. It does exactly what he described fills in the "expensive and burdensome" parts of production. He told you AI can't write Shakespeare. He told you it can't replace actors in a room. He never told you it wouldn't replace the thousand people behind them.

Listen closely…. JFK tried to stop it. Rosevelt tried to stop it. Lincoln tried to stop it. I am willing to bet…. America was built on it. If you believe the story you were told…

Chinese "Princess" (Yu) Der Ling Qing speaking English in a 1930 video. Der Ling, who was not a member of the Qing royal family, was appointed a "lady in waiting." In her 1911 book, Two Years in the Forbidden City, Der Ling says that the princess title, given to her by the empress, was valid only within the palace. The book was called the first eyewitness account of the Imperial Court and was written by a Chinese aristocrat for the West.

In 1978, Willard Custer sued the U.S. government for $80 million (about $395 million today), alleging the A-10 Thunderbolt II's engine placement borrowed his induced-lift idea; the case was dismissed. 👀His 1948 CCW-2 Channel Wing flew at 11 mph with takeoffs in 45 feet, using pusher props to suck air through wing channels for STOL lift. Inspired by a barn roof blown off in 1925, it outdid conventional planes in short runs but lagged in efficiency. The channel wing remains a notable but unrealized innovation in aviation history, with preserved examples like a CCW-5 at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum.

U.S. counties with the highest and lowest rates of excessive drinking. The map draws on the most recent annual data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program. Wisconsin’s elevated drinking rates are influenced by a mix of historical, cultural, and policy factors. Large waves of German immigration in the 19th century helped cement a strong beer-brewing tradition, particularly in Milwaukee, which grew into a major brewing hub with companies like Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller, all founded or shaped by German immigrants. Tavern culture became ingrained in both urban and rural communities, supported by relatively lenient alcohol laws, long winters, and social life often centered around bars. Fittingly, the state’s Major League Baseball team is even called the Brewers.