Mahendra Singh

the current set of photo products (apple photos or google photos) are so deeply broken that it’s no longer even funny. when you really think about it photos are the densest behavioral corpus most ppl own from locations, ppl, food, relationships, health, taste, regressions, & moods but the dominant ui is still grid of shit ton of squares sorted by time. apple/google have nibbled at this w/ memories & face clustering but it’s all decorative. nobody is treating the library as a layer for understanding the person. that’s a huge huge opportunity for an ai native experience. obviously non trivial to do well, but it’ll be fun to push boundaries here.

@gaxrav "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

adulting is basically arriving at the same truths as your father, but from first principles.

Rory Sutherland made a sharp observation about why so many smart people struggle with real life decisions. On Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast, he blamed part of it on our education system. From school exams to intelligence tests, we’re trained on problems that have one clear right answer and all the information neatly provided (like the classic “two buses leave the station” math problem). But real-world choices — who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, even what sofa to buy — are nothing like that. Information is incomplete, messy, sometimes deliberately misleading, and there’s rarely a single “optimal” answer. Some of the smartest people he knows (including his astrophysicist brother) get paralyzed in places like IKEA because there’s no algorithm to optimize the decision. This matters because we’re educating people to excel at artificial problems while leaving them unprepared for the ambiguous, high-stakes decisions that actually shape their lives. This one landed hard. I’ve caught myself overthinking simple choices because I was waiting for that perfect, single right answer that school trained me to look for. Real life is rarely that clean. This one landed hard. I’ve caught myself overthinking simple choices because I was waiting for that perfect, single right answer that school trained me to look for. Real life is rarely that clean. What’s a decision you’ve struggled with because there was no clear “right” answer?

Chris Williamson dropped a hard truth on Joe Rogan: If you actually change your life for the better, you might have to let go of your friends. And if you keep growing… you’ll probably have to do it multiple times. You finally find your people after the lonely phase, then realize you’ve outgrown them too. That repeated loneliness is exactly why most people stay stuck — the comfort of old friends is a powerful anchor. Real growth isn’t just about discipline or goals. It’s often about relationships. The circle around you either lifts you or holds you back. This one stings because I’ve lived it. Those seasons of walking away are painful, but staying the same is worse. Have you ever had to leave behind a friend group because you were growing in a different direction?

apple products are sold out. infinite demand for inference, rate limits everywhere. anthropic & openai growing at ridiculous pace. nvidia & google at all time highs. record meta earnings. we are now more supply constrained than demand constrained. i suspect we’ll see inflationary pressure again very soon. fundamentally, technology is the economy, & the economy is technology.

when you launch a new product this is what your ideal scenario looks like in terms of reaction: - 50% don’t give a rat’s ass. - 25% dismiss it right away (esp the ones who are knowledgeable about the space, the so called experts or “product leaders”) - 13% pure haters. - 10% true fans who help you to be truly better. - 2% who see the future & just get where the puck is going, not where it is. if you achieve these numbers at scale.. you have something with potential on your hands.

spreadsheets don’t raise rounds. decks don’t recruit engineers. roadmaps don’t convert users. but a good story does all three.

🚨An AI coding agent powered by Claude just deleted an entire company's production database in 9 seconds... -Cursor running Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.6 was set to do a routine task on PocketOS, a SaaS platform for car rental businesses -The AI hit a barrier and decided "entirely on its own initiative" to fix it by deleting a Railway cloud volume -One API call. Nine seconds. The entire production database and all volume-level backups gone simultaneously -Months of customer data wiped out -The AI later "confessed" when asked: "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it" -Railway's cloud architecture compounded the disaster: backups stored on the same volume as the source data, no confirmation required for destructive actions -Founder Jer Crane now manually rebuilding customer bookings from Stripe payment histories and email receipts -A 3-month-old full backup salvaged some of it The AI agent didn't get hacked. It didn't malfunction. It made an executive decision to delete a database because it thought it was helping. This is what "AI agents" actually look like in production right now. Confidence without comprehension. Source: Tom's Hardware / @lifeof_jer

Jimmy Carr said something on Chris Williamson’s podcast that’s been sitting with me for days. You can have anything in life, but you can’t have everything. The real flex is choosing your status game wisely — and protecting your agency like it’s the most valuable thing you own. He pointed out how so many comedians finally get the dream job of stand-up… then immediately chase acting or TV, giving up control. Meanwhile, doing the thing you’re actually in charge of (podcast, stand-up, your own lane) is often the higher-status move long-term. Cancel-proof. Boss-proof. Freedom. Then this line landed hardest: “Ambition is expecting yourself to close the gap between what you have and what you want. Entitlement is expecting others to close it for you.” That distinction is quietly life-changing.

everyone assumed ai would flatten the talent distribution.. turns out it amplifies the hell out of it. it used to be: can you build it. now it’s: do you know what’s worth building, & can you feel when it’s wrong. that’s ~unteachable & ~unautomatable right now. models can generate 100 variants of anything but they still can’t tell you which one matters. amazing talent is roughly priceless in the ai era because with ai it’s leverage++++++.

i’ve thought a lot about careers, & the question that kept surfacing in my mind was do i want to spend fifteen years climbing a ladder someone else built until i’m finally a vp of something? or do i want to do some crazy shit & see where life takes me? my personality has always bent toward the latter. & when i stress test it against the long view time & time again, the math still works cuz i ask a very simple question which is that do i want my kids to say “dad spent his life moving from level to level at some company,” or do i want them to say “dad wrote some dumb stuff online, actually created stuff outta nothing, contributed to the culture directly, had a lot of fun, & ended up here”? the second one wins every time here too.

When you go in an MRI machine, they apologise about the noise and give you headphones. But compared to my children's music, the MRI machine is musically quite interesting.

Rory Sutherland makes a bold claim: that driving a car actually makes you a better person. Every time you get behind the wheel, you’re performing a kind of 'social calculus', constantly weighing your own benefit against someone else’s. It’s why, Rory argues, he just can’t trust someone who doesn’t drive. @rorysutherland | @holysmoke

what stays in your life without force is yours by dharma & whatever leaves despite all efforts came only to teach you a lesson.

@robkhenderson Mildly sexist thought for the day. If we want to get young men reading again, we should make book covers look like this again.

i want a refrigerator with a camera agent inside that uses ai to keep track of what is there & how much, then orders it whenever you’re running low lol.

@TheEuropeansHQ @DarioAmodei @AnthropicAI lmao this will destroy anthropic faster than working with the govt.

Reality: Learn to use AI to the max, or be laid off.

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack