$hika godde$$

Fiction is just the truth edited for libel. I have been taking notes this whole time. A series about hunger — for food, for intimacy, for the version of yourself you perform over dinner. Every story is a table. Every table has an empty seat. Loosely based on true events. Sit down and see if you recognize anyone.

BREAKING: Claude can now watch videos for you! You can plug in a YouTube, Tiktok or Instagram URL and let Claude break it down for you Live now inside of Algrow

I think this is why sf earnestness doesn’t get nyc irony: The idealist, who’s rigidly fixed on innovating a better future, sees gritty irony as evil and mean when it’s actually the will to win in a radically flawed world and an exuberant defiance of despair, which, compared to an earnestness that insists on “goodness”, is actually a deeper authentic optimism

@eriktorenberg Could be me but you’re fading my DMs bruv 🥹❤️‍🩹

I still haven't found this person by the way. They're either too retarded, or not retarded enough.

Many of you seem to be interested in oral sex. As your unc, let’s make sure you do it safely. Protocol below. Have fun licking, friends. [Before oral sex] + Get tested. List below + Get vaccinated. List below + Wash hands + Brush & floss 60 min before + Avoid cleaning teeth right before + Avoid mouthwash + No active cold sores or ulcers + No gum bleeding + No fresh dental work + No recent oral piercing + Trim fingernails + Check genitals for infection + Learn your partner’s protocol [During oral sex] + Avoid anal to vaginal transitions + If not tested or vaccinated: dental dam (vaginal oral sex) and condom (penile oral sex). + Avoid ejaculation in mouth if STI status isn't fully cleared. [After oral sex] + Rinse mouth with water + Wait 30 min before brushing teeth + Monitor symptoms + Get retested + Abstain until test results return [Tests, male + female] + HIV + Syphilis + Hepatitis B + Hepatitis C + Gonorrhea + Chlamydia + HSV-1 + HSV-2 [Tests, female specific] + Cervical screening (Pap / HPV) + Trichomonas (NAAT test) + Vaginal pH + Bacterial vaginosis panel (vaginal microbiome) [Vaccinations] + HPV (9-valent) + Hepatitis B + Hepatitis A HPV-related mouth and throat cancer is now more common than cervical cancer in the US. Cases roughly tripled from 2000 to 2017, and oral sex is the main way it spreads. About 80 million Americans currently have HPV. Take care of yourself and your loved ones by getting tested.

@Shilllin Oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one

Founder disappears post raise Their blue chip meme nukes Doesn’t look good for printr

@berdyn Day One -> One Day 🙏🏼✨

Just found this screenshot 4 years of being in this industry Crazy.

Vulnerable post that may come off as a red flag for some people or some kind of deterrent, but I think it’s important to be open about this sort of stuff to show that social media should be more than just manufactured positivity to compare against Today, I finally took the long overdue step of having an initial consultation with a psychotherapist - not because of any recent event, but rather my realising that after four years I’ve still not done anything to process the aftermath of the Indexed attack and a lot of my subsequent work in crypto security This perfectly genteel man asks me to explain my background/history, and I realised halfway through a ten minute monologue that he wouldn’t be unjustified in writing “Walter Mitty lunatic, pure delusions of grandeur” on my file and nothing else It made me realise that there are so many of us working in crypto that live absolutely *insane* lives, and trying to explain them to the man on the Clapham omnibus would rightfully get us sectioned Anyway, back to arguing about the Strait of Hormuz or commenting on the latest story about Clavicular, I guess

My biggest takeaways from @evanspiegel: 1. Distribution is the biggest bottleneck in consumer, not product. The only two consumer social apps to break through since Snapchat—TikTok and Threads—both solved distribution. TikTok spent billions on paid ads. Threads piggybacked on IG’s social graph. Organic app discovery is effectively over. If you’re building a consumer product today, your distribution strategy matters more than your product. 2. Software is no longer a moat. Snap learned this 15 years ago, and everyone is discovering it now with AI. Stories got copied. Lenses got copied. Snapchat+ got copied. Evan has learned that the things that are hard to clone are ecosystems—millions of developer-built AR lenses, creator relationships—and hardware. Thus why he’s been so adamant about investing in hardware. The lesson applies even more today as AI makes software even easier to build (and copy). 3. Snapchat cracked early growth by focusing on close friends, not the most friends. The conventional wisdom was that network effects meant bigger networks were always stickier—there was no way to beat Facebook. But Snapchat discovered that connecting someone to their best friend, partner, or spouse delivered more value than connecting them to everyone they’d ever met. Quality of connections mattered more than quantity. This insight allowed them to grow despite having far fewer total users than competitors. 4. “If you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas.” Snap’s design team presents hundreds of new ideas every week. New designers present work on their first day. There’s no gate, no filtering process to get ideas in front of Evan. This high-velocity, non-hierarchical structure is what enables Snap to innovate at scale. 5. Stories exist because Snap refused to build what users asked for. Customers kept asking for a “send to all” button to blast Snaps to everyone. But when Snap talked to people about social media broadly, they heard: “I feel pressure. Everything is permanent. There are likes and comments, so there’s judgment. I can only post pretty, perfect things.” Stories solved the underlying problems: easy sharing without spam, no public metrics to reduce pressure, 24-hour disappearance for a fresh start, and chronological order. Listen for insights, not feature requests. 6. Snap had 200 employees before hiring its first PM—on purpose. Evan’s concern was that the traditional tech org structure reduces designers to producing visuals in response to PM direction. By telling designers, “If you need PM support, do it yourself,” Snap locked in a design-led culture before adding coordination layers. The order in which you introduce roles shapes your culture permanently. 7. Snap is mapping every job to be done—across the Snapchatter journey and the advertiser journey—and handing each one to an AI agent. One example: a go-to-market agent takes a product idea and in one shot writes the spec, identifies sign-off stakeholders, does legal and trust-and-safety risk analysis, writes blog and marketing materials, and is starting to build visuals. The organizing principle isn’t “Where can we use AI?”—it’s “What are the jobs to be done?” 8. Successful companies need both innovative flat teams and structured hierarchical teams—and leaders must create healthy dialogue between them. This comes from Safi Bahcall’s book Loonshots. Large organizations need hierarchy and operational rigor to deliver at scale, but that makes people risk-averse and promotion-focused. Small, flat teams are better for innovation but can’t deliver at scale. The companies that win have both types of organizations, and leadership’s job is creating mutual respect and constructive dialogue between them. At Snap, the small design team constantly innovates while the larger org serves a billion users reliably. 9. Snap hires designers almost entirely based on portfolio, and the two things that matter are range and the story behind the work. If everything looks the same, the person is expressing themselves, not solving for users. Range is the signal that separates designers from artists. Most designers join right out of school; diverse backgrounds like 3D animation and electrical engineering are prized. 10. Evan’s contrarian AI take: the tech industry massively underestimates societal pushback on AI adoption. Technology leaders assume people will adopt new tools as they emerge. Evan predicts a period of significant resistance and argues that the industry needs to put humanity’s goals ahead of business goals. Building great AI capability is necessary but not sufficient—earning human trust is the harder problem.

Rage baiting Thirst trapping Vague Posting Clip Farming The 4 Horsemen of the attention economy apocalypse.

The coolest wildest enby witchy princess you know is going to marry the straightest whitest most boring male at the club and you won’t know what hit her. Little do you know…

New piece in @NewYorker on the microdrama boom — the vertical, minute-long soaps originating in China and dominating the world. Roughly a tenth of humanity has watched one, and new ventures are sprouting up in almost every major country. The industry is still young, but it may be the future of entertainment and a critical bellwether of how AI will transform the future of entertainment. 🧵

He sent me the bones of the dead, with a farewell letter inside. // My latest — on grief, nduja, and what you eat when you're not invited to the funeral:

My biggest takeaways from Claude Code's Head of Product @_catwu: 1. Anthropic’s product development timelines have gone from six months to one month, sometimes one week, sometimes one day. Part of this acceleration is access to the latest models (i.e. Mythos). Another is shipping new products into “research preview,” making clear it's early, experimental, and might not be supported forever. Another is an evergreen "launch room "where engineers post ready features and marketing turns around announcements the next day. 2. The PM role is shifting from coordinating multi-month roadmaps to enabling teams to ship daily. As Cat puts it, “There should be less emphasis on making sure you are aligning your multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams and more emphasis on, OK, how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door?” 3. The most efficient shipping unit is an engineer with great product taste. On Cat’s team, many engineers go end-to-end—from seeing user feedback on Twitter to shipping a product by the end of the week—without a PM involved. Also, almost all the PMs on the Claude Code team have either been engineers or ship code themselves, and the designers have been front-end engineers. The roles are merging, and the most valuable skill is product taste, not job title. 4. Build products that are on the edge of working. Claude Code’s code review product failed multiple times because earlier models weren’t accurate enough. But because the prototype was already built, they could swap in Opus 4.5 and 4.6 and immediately test whether the gap was closed. Teams that wait for the model to be ready will always be a cycle behind. 5. The most underrated skill for building AI products is asking the model to introspect on its own mistakes. Cat regularly asks the model why it made an unexpected decision. The model will explain that something in the system prompt was confusing, or that it delegated verification to a subagent that didn’t check its work. This reveals what misled the model so the team can fix the harness. 6. Every model release forces their team to revisit existing products and audit their system prompt to remove features the model no longer needs. Claude Code’s to-do list was a crutch for earlier models that couldn’t track their own work. With Opus 4, the model handles it natively. Features built as scaffolding for weaker models become debt when the model catches up—so the team actively strips them. 7. Anthropic employees build custom internal tools instead of buying SaaS products. A sales team member built a web app that pulls from Salesforce, Gong, and call notes to auto-customize pitch decks—work that used to take 20 to 30 minutes now takes seconds. Their core stack is Claude Code, Cowork, and Slack. No Notion, no Linear, no Figma. 8. People underestimate how much Claude’s personality contributes to its success. As Cat describes it, “When you reflect on everyone you’ve worked with, there’s just some people where you’re like, I really like their energy, their vibe.” Claude is designed to be low-ego, positive, competent, and earnest—qualities that make it feel like a great coworker, not just a tool. This isn’t cosmetic; it’s what makes people want to use Claude for hours every day. The team has a dedicated person, Amanda, who “molds Claude’s character,” and it’s one of the hardest roles at the company because success is so subjective. 9. The future of work is managing fleets of AI agents, not doing the work yourself. Cat sees a clear progression: first, individual tasks become successful. Then people start running multiple tasks at the same time (multi-Clauding). Next, people will run 50 or 100 tasks simultaneously, which will require new infrastructure—remote execution, better interfaces for managing tasks, agents that fully verify their work, and self-improving systems that incorporate feedback. The human role shifts from doing the work to knowing which tasks to look into, verifying outputs, and giving feedback that makes the system better over time. 10. Hire people who lean into chaos and face every challenge with a smile. At Anthropic, there are weeks when a P0 on Sunday becomes a P00 by Monday and a P000 by Monday afternoon. If you get too stressed about any one thing, you’ll burn out. Their team looks for people who can look at a hard challenge and say, “Wow, that’s gonna be hard. But I’m excited to tackle it and I’m gonna do the best that I possibly can.” This mindset—optimism, resilience, and comfort with constant change—is increasingly essential as the pace of AI development accelerates. Don't miss the full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=Pplmzl…

When I was in VC I’d go to SF demo days and mixer events etc and would get added to various WhatsApp groups. Most are hot garbage and made me realize that a lot of founders have no intention of building anything meaningful and have no chance at raising a round. But they don’t care. They just want to be part of the scene. It’s like a loosely organized social club and there is a tier that just exists to be part of the crowd in the same way that there are people that travel to all of the major fashion weeks to hang out even though they don’t work in the industry and have no value to add other than being another person in a social scene. The mysterious source of income types. I suppose every city has a scene, but the SF tech circus is very distinct and a bit bizarre given the power dynamics between VCs/capital and founders.

New from Soon! We dive into social media apps that are anti-algorithmic to find out why they’re growing. Can social media get healthier?

@CiroxEth I remembered Taylor Swift lyrics wrong but turns out it’s on theme for our NFT pump too so lfggg

@shikami444 Ready to escape and start fresh together

C’mon baby with me we’re gonna fly away from here Out of the hospital gray and just disappear

AIPAAS = AI Psychosis As A Service

Autistic sub who loses verbage when overstimmed so using the line "use your words" in bed is ableist. Sorry I don't make the rules. Totally don't exploit this to make me even more overstimulated that would be mean