alex 🏴‍☠️🇺🇸🇺🇦

Written words: Cautiousoptimism.news Spoken words: @twistartups Favorite person: you!

1/ what cnbc.com/2026/03/19/us-…

the faster breakout startups grow, the higher these numbers get until the former slows, the latter won't

@alexbronzini @ryanlawler its ur fav meme

Here come dat progressive candidate who understands nuance! Oh shit waddup!

this is a chonky raise calcalistech.com/ctechnews/arti…

Cursor’s Composer 2 beats Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks at a fraction of the price thenewstack.io/cursors-compos…

Cursor launches Composer 2, an AI agent trained solely on coding-related data to perform autonomous, lengthy coding tasks, to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI (@rachelmetz / Bloomberg) bloomberg.com/news/articles/… #a260319p34" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/260319/p34#a26… 📥 Send tips! techmeme.com/contact

@TheAnnaGat secular religion is just a moral code in a fancy wrapper

Interesting framing - thoughts?

Our new safety data is in 📈 Over 170M miles through Dec 2025, the Waymo Driver was involved in 13x fewer serious injury or worse crashes than human drivers in those same cities. At our current scale, that means preventing a serious injury crash every 8 days—a real, positive impact on road safety. Learn more: waymo.com/safety/impact/

crickets from the tech-right incensed about hunter

Here’s how data centers pay for themselves cautiousoptimism.news/heres-how-data…

Consumer-focused privacy company Cloaked raises $375M as it expands to enterprise techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/con…

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company cut ~12% of its workforce, or ~180 roles, saying the layoffs target roles that "do not adapt" as it integrates AI (@dangawrites / The Block) theblock.co/post/394318/cr… #a260319p21" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">techmeme.com/260319/p21#a26…

🔥EXCLUSIVE🔥 Corey Lewandowski and DHS contracts. “He wanted payments — what some people would call a success fee,” said a person with knowledge of the meeting. WH officials aware of “pay to play” claims. @JuliaEAinsley, @Mdixon55 @strickdc & me. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/d…

NEW: Anthropic-Pentagon dispute over AI ethics has a new player: Theologians From me and ⁦@TaraCopp⁩ washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/03…

The UK's censorship agency, Ofcom, issued 4chan with a giant fine today. We responded to Ofcom with a giant hamster today.

So now it's not just the generals disappearing, but scientists as well. Reportedly high level scientists in radar and nuclear weapons have also been removed from institutions This is either a paranoid purging of anyone with power or there are profound problems in PLA weapons

Axios going one step farther in not only saying Trump knew about the Israeli gas strike, but that he “coordinated” and approved it with Netanyahu in advance

WSJ: Arab governments were furious about Israel’s attack and the U.S. failure to head it off, officials said. They had aggressively lobbied the Trump administration to stop U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and now feel a target has been put on their backs, they said… America’s Arab allies are now fuming that they don’t seem to have any influence with the Trump administration despite heavy investments of time and money.

JUST IN: “At least a dozen” military officers were missing from China’s legislative meetings, suspected to have been purged by Xi.

I'm going to make some obvious points. (1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war. (2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East. (3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked. (4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy. (5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately. (6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty. That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area. (7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people. [a]: reuters.com/business/energ… [b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene… [c]: reuters.com/sustainability…