Sunil Rajaraman

To my San Francisco friends - I wrote 20k words on the city’s comeback. What’s real about it? What needs fixing? To my knowledge, this is the most extensive analysis of San Francisco data that’s been done to date - I went through the effort of analyzing the sentiment of 1,000 + public meetings as part of this. I’d be grateful if you’d consider giving me feedback, or sharing it. If you want access to the data, DM me and I’m happy to share it. I’d prefer if someone else who is more expert in public policy would go to down with the data. district.myhamlet.com/sf/through-the…

There's been a lot of discussion around an alleged fraud case in Minnesota around daycare centers in the past week. A citizen journalist took videos outside of the centers, which went viral and captivated the country. There is now a national discussion around fraud in government. I have no opinion on the MN case and will wait for the facts to play out. I do have a strong opinion on local government though, and I'm glad people are finally starting to pay attention. The vast majority of government employees work hard and do the right thing every single day. Local government is a thankless job - people just expect everything to work magically. But it's also true that fraud exists, perpetrated by a small number of people. If you really want to root out fraud, you have to start by reading budgets. Your instinct about whether fraud exists, or your policy disagreements with local government, are not the same as fraud. Fraud is in the numbers. It's hard for the average citizen to find and understand government documents - even when they're technically public. Budgets are scattered across hundreds of different websites with no standardization. In the past 48 hours, I went down a rabbit hole and built BudgetAPI - a free site containing the official budgets for hundreds of state, county, and city governments. You can browse recent budget news, download documents, and analyze them yourself. Budget transparency is good for everyone - citizens, governments, and anyone who cares about democracy. These documents are already public. They just weren't in one place. Now they are (wwww.budgetapi.us)

Anyone getting a trump phone?

Whose AI do you trust the most? OpenAI Anthropic Google Meta Grok …or someone not on this list?

@kaykas 😭

@subes01 Yes

Are we approaching end times?

Which company would you bet your well-being on in a self driving vehicle?

I’ve never been less excited about Apple.

This can’t be good for America.

It’s almost never a good sign when a company forces you to contact them to delete your account. It means they are trying to game retention numbers for future fundraises. My assumption here is a lot of people are trying Lovable and tools like it 1x-2x and peacing out.

At this present moment, what’s your opinion of Elon Musk?

Can anyone explain the strategy here?

You're almost certainly not using AI enough. This whole sweet "app" is a 75 word prompt on Gemini + an uploaded video. What an incredible time to be playful and just try using AI for things. It will often surprise you with how great it is (and, yes, also with how dumb it is).

Pretty much the worst thing to do is happening: instead of brain draining the world now the best startups will happen outside of the United States Colossal blunder at the dawn of the age of intelligence

@pitdesi This type of market has existed for a long long time. Remember Clearbanc? A lot of financial engineering involved, low returns.

This isn't equity. It's from GC’s Customer Value Fund: non-dilutive, revenue-based financing... like a Mr. Wonderful deal: they get a cut of revenue until a cap is hit. Can be better than equity for funding CAC if you’ve got a proven payback model and you don’t want to dilute.

This is one of the best basketball games I’ve watched in my entire life.

@paulg @garrytan This is accurate. Cupertino and Saratoga parents too.

@garrytan Prediction: Once all the parents in Palo Alto realize this has happened, it will get reversed very quickly. Palo Alto parents are just about the last people in the world to tolerate something like this.

Palo Alto just removed Honors Biology and Honors English classes from public high schools. The education bureaucrats have run amok, and the losers are kids who can't afford private schools. I remember they tried 'de-laning' at my public high school in Fremont in 1996. Our parents showed up in force and stopped the grifting bureaucrats from taking accelerated and personalized education from us. I'm glad they did. I never would have gone to Stanford if the water-it-down educrats succeeded. nypost.com/2025/05/13/us-…

2015 might have been the best year for TV of all time: Debuts of Better Call Saul, Mr. Robot, Narcos and Jessica Jones. Game of Thrones S5, which was epic, The Americans season 3, and Veep S4. Mad Men finale, along with Parks and Rec. Am I missing a year somehow? This seems pretty unbeatable.

@abenzer It’s just happening so fast now!

@subes01 is anyone not?

Is anyone here now using Chat GPT more than Google?

@kimmytaylor Pretty crazy how fast this shift is occurring.

@subes01 I use perplexity more than Google