u_chill

@saikatc AOC was right…

And in that time, you've taken millions of dollars directly from: AIPAC board members and executives AbbVie Aetna AirBnB Allstate Amazon Anthem Blue Cross AstraZeneca AT&T Blue Shield of California FOX Corporation Cruise Cox Communications DaVita CVS Health Deloitte DraftKings eBay Eli Lilly Enterprise Ernst & Young Facebook FanDuel Fidelity Ford Genentech General Motors Gilead Sciences Google Hewlett Packard Intuit KPMG Lyft Novo Nordisk Oracle Paramount PayPal PG&E Pfizer PwC Restaurant Association PAC Safeway Sprint TMobile Target TaskRabbit Tesla HomeDepot Uber United Airlines Visa Verizon Walgreens Yelp Zillow I could keep going, but this is already a novel of a tweet.

@wordi25 Bengali mishti are on a different plane. Subtle and incomparable when done right.

Kaju Katli is the vanilla of Indian mithais. Not bad. But predictable and a safe choice. Nothing exciting. All boondi laddoos aren’t made equal though. Motichoor Laddoos especially the ones from Kanpur are melt in your mouth. Incomparable.

@adamsilverman From what I can tell, this is the permit you need to get bay legal. bcdc.ca.gov/programs/permi…

Are hovercrafts street legal in SF? Asking for a friend

@PalmerLuckey @stevehou Doesn’t that validate the case that they might be shadow banned for new posts?

@stevehou These are outliers, they are getting way more engagement on everything else they have posted over the last couple of days. Heck, a months-old clip of me has an order of magnitude more in just four hours!

What’s happening to TBPN fr? It feels like they just went from being wall to wall on my feed to outright poof since the acquisition. Saw that Kevin Hart was appearing but didn’t even see a post of the clip. Looked them up and found 30-70 likes on Hart or the Jensen-Dwarkesh interviews seem really low? Are they getting shadowbanned by X?

@pratik_satija For eg. live1900.com

@pratik_satija Move to Oakland.

i will be homeless in 3 weeks. i moved to SF 1 year ago and found housing without ever visiting the city. First time in my life, i’ve actually had to tour places before even being considered for an application SF housing prices are ridiculous and process is absolutely broken.

@lulumeservey @dylan522p @dwarkesh_sp Inn-mates when they go on roadtrips?

Friends, housemates, officemates. Maybe lovers?

@bhatnaturally Like seriously? Atleast ask @grok before you post on the app? x.com/i/grok/share/c…

'A Peek into a Deracinated Hindu Psyche' 'A few years ago, some random conversation with my friends led us to begin a back-of-the-envelope calculation about the corpus of Sanskrit literature that India has produced till date. We agreed that the final number fell in the general range of about 70 Lakh printed pages. That includes every genre — Vedas, Vedangas, Puranas, Itihasa, Kavya, digests, commentaries, biographies, plays, and so on.' thedharmadispatch.substack.com/p/a-peek-into-…

@MrInvigorator @thechosenberg Zaid got laid!

@thechosenberg Bro, lmao. Deborah, what are you doing you oldhead

Is San Francisco real

@Kazanjy So rent obligation increases by 20-30% and none of that goes to the property owner? Genius move:-/

This is a GREAT idea.

@wordi25 Homes, garages and at least one storage unit rented many years back for $199/month set on autopay and forgotten.

Plenty serious answers so mine’s a joke. But. Consumerism The amount of ‘stuff’ the average American buys & owns is amazing. Go to a store like Costco, go to a mall, go to an amusement park & people shop like there’s no tomorrow. Homes & garages are full no matter the size.

Portrero is a missed opportunity as developers were simply allowed to build as long as they stuck to low rises and allocated units for affordable housing. Mission Bay on the other hand was planned in the early 2000s, if anything it took a long time to execute the vision and the south portion is still being developed. See this article from 2005 where the public school was already included as the neighborhood got developed. spur.org/publications/u…

@credealjunkie @u_chill MB: Also a new SFUSD school, library w a large kids' section, well-maintained parks on the creek. They have nice things, why not for Potrero too?

Literally the lowest possible bar to develop the last large swath of vacant land close to downtown at an embarrassing low density to preserve the view of a couple dozen old hippies living in Potrero Hill

@objectionupdate Community Notes would like to file an objection.

@devahaz Pretty much never written by people with bios like President and COO of SpaceX 🤷🏽‍♂️

Somehow articles like these are always written by people with bios like “UVA Law grad working at policy and advocacy think tank”

That’s some great insight into the past, kinda reminded me of the PayPal saga. Edtech is now truly at the crossroads- content is no longer a moat, AI is impacting both traditional education and all associated tech enabled delivery mechanisms. Harvard has no clothes and the Ivy’s are about to get shaken up. What’s next for the field? Where are those elusive innovation levers to build the next Stripe of Ed-tech?

People have asked me how I feel about Udemy’s sale to Coursera. Honestly, I’m kinda pissed about it. I want to be clear - I’m grateful for the opportunity to start and benefit from Udemy’s success. It changed my life. But there’s another side to Udemy. A story of what could have been. After our Series B, founders owned less than 30% of the company. Our investors took over and installed their own CEO to run it. We all liked this new CEO and honestly, for years it looked like a brilliant move. The company kept growing and growing. They launched B2B and built a $500M ARR business. Eventually, the company IPO’ed for $3B. Yet all along there were clear cracks under the surface. Over Udemy’s history, there have been 7 CEO’s. The board replaced the second CEO with dud after dud. I’d often try to meet with the board or the new CEO, and was completely ignored. Eren had influence as Chairman of the Board but Oktay and I were so ignored they didn’t even invite us to the IPO. LOL WTF. There are like 50+ people invited to these things and nobody thought: “oh maybe we should invite the people who fucking invented the thing we’re all celebrating.” It shows how little respect they had for founders and for product innovation as a discipline. I think they wanted a CEO they could control, a buttoned-up suit instead of a brash founder/CEO that is risk-taking, visionary, but a bit of a pain. For awhile, it looked like it didn’t even matter who was CEO - the company was run by the incredibly talented team that reported to them anyways. Well, it worked until it didn’t. The company made no major product innovations for 15 years. Instead, they took the original idea (video-based courses) and sold it in every place imaginable. It got us to $800M run-rate. That’s no joke; that takes serious execution and a great team that hustled hard to win the market. But eventually the consumer business stopped growing. The B2B business has now flattened out as well. Meanwhile, Coursera was catching up. Original Coursera was a far worse product than Udemy, but it got a ton of press. Learning ivory tower bullshit from academics doesn’t get you a real education, but it does create prestige. They raised from better investors on better terms, and had better leadership. Udemy to this day has more revenue than Coursera, but Coursera won the court of investor opinion. They got higher multiples from both private and public markets. Coursera innovated heavily. They added corporate courses to their university catalog, built fully-online degree programs, and offered a B2B competitor that kept Udemy on its toes. Still, the Udemy B2B business (and team) out-performed and so the two companies were deadlocked. Coursera was better at B2C, Udemy at B2B. A merger was inevitable. But WHY IN GODS NAME did we sell to Coursera instead of the other way around? Why are the combined companies under $3B in market cap? Three reasons: First, edtech didn’t live up to its promise. While these two companies had solid revenue and cash positions, their growth slowed, and public markets balked. This meant compressed multiples and significantly lower valuations. Second, the companies stopped innovating. They are selling a product to businesses that their customers don’t love. They were category leaders, but they lead the category into mediocrity. They captured a significant share of learning and development (L&D) spending, but L&D as a whole actually lost budget within their organizations. That’s Udemy’s fault, and it doesn’t even realize it. That brings me to my final point: I personally believe Udemy traded upside opportunity for downside risk. Us founders were unproven and young. We made lots of mistakes, including fighting amongst ourselves. A good investor would have supported us through it because they believe founders drive the highest long-term returns. Instead, they brought in outside CEOs to replace us. I sometimes wonder if they recognize this error; everyone makes mistakes and maybe they learned from it. Either way - the consequences are real. By ignoring the founders, Udemy failed to innovate, which led to slowing growth which led to mediocre public market results. Furthermore, they don’t have a good evangelist and public markets don’t like a headless horse. I sold my Udemy stock awhile ago. I think the merger was critical for both companies’ survival. Now, though, the new combined entity needs to innovate again. On B2B, Coursera needs to help L&D become the heroes of the AI era so the entire market starts growing again. On B2C, they need to build the most educational AI product on the planet. (I’d focus on the former, since the latter is a lot harder and riskier). Coursera can still achieve our original vision and likely build a $10B+ company in the meantime. Even though I’ve got no stake in its future, I’m mission-driven and I REALLY hope they figure it out. The current education system sucks and the world deserves something better.

& yes, Bhagat. You can hate him but he got distribution, managed to sustain and gain virality with his own style catering to an audience that was always there. Roy, with a fully Indian upbringing preceded with the virality of The God of Small Things taking aim at so-called diaspora writers.

Is it that hard to explain? Distribution, sustenance and virality were all gated till liberalization plus a decade or so. Also interesting how the author goes from diaspora straight to regional stalwarts, completely missing Arundhati Roy and Chetan Bhagat’s rise. Let’s pretend they don’t exist for building the narrative.

“When the most internationally visible fiction from a country of 1.4 billion people is written primarily by a handful of authors living in Brooklyn, London, and Rome, the version of that country that reaches the global reader is inevitably partial.” timesnownews.com/lifestyle/book…

@Akash_S9 I don’t see an apology for the blatant racism on display from their own footage. Face tattoo guy might have almost lynched you and planted fake evidence of the cops didn’t show up on time.

My world was turned upside down this weekend. As some of you may have seen, I was featured on a recent episode of Vitaly Zdorovetskiy’s live series, where I was wrongfully portrayed as someone attempting to engage in an inappropriate conduct. This accusation is completely false. Since then, Vitaly has publicly acknowledged, through both written and video statements, that this was a mistake. Additionally, the officers from the Santa Ana Police Department, who I called to the scene, conducted their own assessment and confirmed that I am innocent of any wrongdoing.  I am sincerely grateful to Officers Renald Galstian, Lorenzo Sanchez, and Joanna Hatziefstratiou for their professionalism and for taking the time to carefully evaluate the situation and establish the truth. While I appreciate that the mistake has been acknowledged, the impact of the false accusation has been significant. I have experienced harassment, judgment, and damage to my personal and professional relationships based on something that has now been proven false. I wholeheartedly support efforts to expose real wrongdoing and protect the vulnerable. At the same time, this experience has shown me how important due process and verification are because mistakes, when made publicly, can have serious consequences on innocent lives. Thank you to those who have supported me during this time. Thank you, Akash Singhania

@RenaldyApreza @urbanistvc Not necessary for new breed of LiPo and LiFePO4 batteries. Look up Sparkz Energy, Dragonfly, American Lithium Battery and others building capacity with lithium mines like Thacker Pass for largely American supply chains.

@u_chill @urbanistvc Battery from China

This essay changed my mind about opening the American market to Chinese cars