Frank X. Shaw

i refuse to be enraged by opinion pieces no matter how many times they are re-tweeted here. I am enraged enough by news.

So glad you were the one to find this @SantoshYadavDev. Bringing back the quirky fun to development with then new app. A small passionate team working on this with immaculate vibes. 👨‍🍳

From me 😊: Yes, but: More visibility is a blessing and a curse. Like Odin trading an eye for wisdom, seeing more comes with a cost: the burden of sorting a signal from noise. In a fragmented environment, judgment matters as much as access. axios.com/newsletters/... @emayhawk

@VietQNguyen It is probable this has more to do with Bellevue than Seattle!

One other thing: the Lincoln Insitite FISC database is the gold standard here. The short version: central cities almost always spend more per capita than their suburbs, and the gap usually runs 1.5x to 3x. Seattle’s 1.9x premium over Bellevue is firmly in the normal range. What makes the Seattle-Bellevue comparison unusual isn’t the spending gap, it’s that the gap has grown over 20 years while in many peer metros it has stayed flat or narrowed.

Seattle vs. Bellevue: 20 years of data, side by side I pulled the numbers and the gap is wider than I expected. Both cities grew about the same (Seattle +40%, Bellevue +34%). But the outcomes diverged hard. Budget (ex-municipal utilities, real per-capita, 2026 dollars): • Seattle: $5,997 → $8,677 per resident (+45%) • Bellevue: $5,741 → $4,653 per resident (−19%) • Seattle now spends 1.9x more per resident than Bellevue on essentially the same menu of city services Crime (per 100,000, 2025 estimates): • Violent crime: Seattle ~542, Bellevue ~99 (5.5x gap) • Property crime: Seattle ~4,100, Bellevue ~2,200 (1.9x gap) Homelessness (King County PIT count): • 2006: ~7,900 • 2024: 16,868 (+113%) • Seattle absorbs nearly all of the visible unsheltered population. Bellevue, same county, does not. Schools (4-year graduation rate, 2024): • Seattle Public Schools: 88% • Bellevue School District: 94%, ranked #1 in Washington • SPS has lost 4,000+ students since 2019. Families with options are leaving. Median household income (2023, inflation-adjusted): • Seattle: $121,984 • Bellevue: $161,300 (+32%) Life expectancy: • East King County (Bellevue area): 84.2 years • King County overall: 81.2 years • Seattle Downtown/Belltown/First Hill: 71.6 years • 15+ year gap within the same county Where Seattle still wins: • Parks system, ranked #8 in the U.S. by Trust for Public Land • Transit (more buses, light rail, walkability) • Cultural amenities Bottom line: Seattle spends nearly twice as much per resident as Bellevue and gets worse outcomes on schools, safety, homelessness, and life expectancy. Some of that is because Bellevue is wealthier and less burdened with regional problems. But not all of it. The dollars-to-outcomes gap is the real story, and Seattle’s defenders have a hard time explaining it away.

"narrative violation" 🤣

Defense at AI speed: Microsoft’s new multi-model agentic security system finds 16 new vulnerabilities microsoft.com/en-us/security…

New issue of Signal Magazine is out! I write about tools and how humans handle information: "The doomers’ take is straightforward: AI will make us lazier, less capable, more replaceable. It will flatten skills. It will cheapen creative work. It will “automate” what makes people valuable. I don’t dismiss those fears. But history suggests a more useful question: what do humans adapt into, when a tool takes over the old center of gravity?" news.microsoft.com/signalmagazine…

@film_girl you are fully capable sans devices I am certain. :)

two devices updated faster than the others so i was saved from being device-less

@matvelloso well actually

Heard this today: "You're so outdated you think Ariana Grande is some font in Microsoft Word" 🤣

@ashleymayer in the marines we'd say "carry your own pack" the key being you never asked anyone to do something you weren't willing and able to do and did on a regular basis.

Lots of possible takes on today's Coinbase announcement, but this passage caught my eye. If this becomes a trend, it will be quite disruptive to tech's managerial layer. It was something I was acutely aware of during my comms career: the bigger the title, the more abstracted you are from the actual work (and the feedback loops that are essential to doing that work well). I made sure I stayed in the trenches and kept my hands dirty with the tactical parts of the job, alongside my team. Elements of every function are now being remade with AI, and it's more important than ever that team leaders are participants and drivers of that change.

Today we’re introducing a new Legal Agent in @Microsoft Word, built to support the precision and rigor legal work demands. Every clause matters. Every redline tells a story. That’s why this agent was built to follow the structured workflows lawyers use while keeping them fully in control. Early in my career, I asked for a computer on my desk because I believed technology could change how lawyers work. It did. Today, I believe this next generation of tools will do the same, grounded in trust and responsible use.

Great to see the momentum in today's earnings. 20 million paid Copilot enterprise seats. Weekly engagement now matching Outlook, one of the most habitual enterprise apps ever built. 625 product updates shipped in 12 months and 1P agent usage up 6X YTD. Work IQ gives Copilot something no generic AI assistant has. 17 exabytes of organizational emails, Teams chats, SharePoint docs, and meeting transcripts. That context layer is what makes Copilot work in ways a standalone AI simply can't replicate. The best is still ahead.

@5h15h the spot watch. Loved it.

Anyone recall this #Microsoft #Timex Datalink watch from the 90's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Dat…. I think it was effectively Microsoft’s first #smartwatch platform

Microsoft says it has over 20M paid Copilot users, and they really are using it techcrunch.com/2026/04/29/mic…

$MSFT says $ACN is rolling out Copilot across its workforce. That means Microsoft’s AI assistant is now scaling across ~743K Accenture employees.

AI shouldn’t be confined to pilots and side experiments. That’s why Accenture is scaling Microsoft 365 Copilot to nearly its entire global workforce – 743,000 people across Accenture and Avanade – and embedding AI directly into everyday work. Based on 2025 company data from the first 200K employees using Copilot, they are completing routine tasks up to 15x faster, seeing a 53% improvement in productivity and efficiency, and driving strong adoption across the organization. Learn how Accenture is turning AI into a real work assistant at enterprise scale: aka.ms/SourceAccenture

@StevenLevy yeah baby let's fix this one!

I constantly hear about how AI will solve the world's intractable problems. Then I click on a link to an article that's on a site I subscribe to, and my computer loaded with AI apps can't figure out I paid for it already.

@bdsams that's the bar? :)

You know it's a friendly and happy updated because the blog post is written by "Microsoft Corporate Blogs" instead of a human.

Microsoft's amended agreement with OpenAI feels like a nice friendly revision..I'm sure everything is fine?

Awesome stuff from Josh...