NoCapsCap

Went through $XYZ to rubberneck. I've followed this company relatively closely since it came public as well as $TWTR so generally have a good feel for what's going on. Jack is an incredible product CEO. Amazing hits with Twitter, Square point-of-sale, and CashApp. Truly a product genius. That being said, his ability as a business operator has been consistently disappointing. $TWTR never evolved past group discourse and was just monetized as cheap ad tonnage. It was an incredibly bloated company that meandered until it was bought. $SQ (original $XYZ) had a great low-end point-of-sale system sold online. However, the company failed to make meaningful moves up-market largely due to the strategic decision to not have sales reps which opened the door for Clover and $TOST to seal off that opportunity. Then they completely missed most of the online opportunity which $SHOP dominated. They literally only started hiring field sales within the last year which is like showing up to a party a decade late. $SQ CashApp did great for peer-to-peer payments but the product literally did not evolve for a decade. It added bitcoin and stocks, and eventually a debit card. Despite having the initial lead, they lost P2P mindshare to Venmo / Zelle, lost asset trading to HOOD / COIN, lost BNPL to AFRM, APT, KLAR, etc. They lost the ability to build a closed financial network to Stripe / V / MA (though never really had a chance given their assets). Then $XYZ purchased APT which was orthogonal at best at a massive price and distracted the business. It took years for it to be integrated and still isn't there. Then $XYZ bought Tidal to have Jay-Z on the board. Most recently, the company is still investing in proprietary Bitcoin wallets / servers, and focused on "neighborhoods" whatever that means. The internal organization of the company has been adjusted for several years now and the presented logic hasn't ever really made much sense. First they were separate BUs, then some shared resources, and now who knows how they intend to structure the business. So tonight we learn they are laying off 40% of the company. The cited reason is AI improvements to coding. They spend 3b / year on R&D! Even if fully-loaded cost is $500k / year that is 6,000 engineers. Doing what, I have no clue for a set of products that haven't evolved much at all. They also spend 2b / year on G&A which I'm guess has a lot of fat in it as well. Long way of saying I'm pretty sure this has more to do w/ the company just being far too bloated from all the mistakes made above, and not AI advancements scorching the earth. Respectfully, the CEO splits his time between SF and Costa Rica (apparently mostly remote in Costa Rica these days), spends 2 hours a day meditating when not disappearing for 10 day retreats, etc. That's all pretty awesome and I'm honestly happy for him. Also he controls the vote at $XYZ so he can do whatever he wants. That being said, I wouldn't hire him to run a business (definitely would hire him to be chief product officer or whatever). And I don't think this 40% RIF really has any broader implications. I don't know if their tech stack is mostly self-built or SaaS, but I would think their spending on cloud AI is certainly going up (Anthropic, hyperscalers), their spend on payroll is going down, and their spend on CRM / customer support sw is going up.

continual learning, only continual learning, and nothing other than continual learning, is what's missing right now I couldn't care less about saturating benchmarks, getting +3% in SWE Bench or whatever will not make these tools much better than they are, for as long as they still forget all they've learned in the next session AGENTS and MEMORY markdowns don't do it either, the amount of information in even a few hours of work is already several thousand tokens long, and any attempt at compressing that will either lead to important information loss, or overwhelm the context to the point that the model becomes brain dead please may the next launches be more about how this is fundamentally addressed and less about whether then can RL an LLM to beat ARC AGI 7 - which, by all means, is cool and impressive, but what everyone actually needs is an AI that doesn't feel like we have to onboard a fresh new intern every 2 hours of work

Drop Site obtained harrowing footage of the latest killing which appears to be from the perspective of the woman in pink filming from the sidewalk

GOV. WALZ: “Quit referring to these folks as law enforcement. They are not law enforcement.”

🧵🚨 MINNEAPOLIS SIGNAL INFILTRATED Each chat (for a specific part of each city) has smaller districts broken up within it called “patrol zones” which guide ICE chasers on where they should be/position.

🚨BREAKING: NEW footage proves DHS lied. U.S. citizen Alex Jeffrey Pretti never pulled his LEGAL FIREARM on ICE/Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis… Even when HIS LIFE was in danger. He was helping one woman when an agent violently shoved another. Alex stepped in to help. The agent assaulted him, shoving him back and pepper spraying him in the face. Alex turns away. The agent doesn’t stop… he jumps on Alex’s back, trying to spray him continuously. Multiple agents then jump him… kicking him and hitting him with gas canisters, as Alex is on his hands and knees trying to protect himself. An agent in grey grabs Alex’s LEGAL FIREARM… which Alex never pulled. And then… agents opened fire on an unarmed U.S. citizen. Alex was never a threat. Agents’ lives were never in danger. The only life in danger was Alex’s… and he still never drew his weapon. ICE/Border Patrol removed a U.S. citizen’s legal firearm… Then killed him for exercising his Second Amendment right.

We're in the midst of the greatest wave of corruption in American history and all the Democratic elected leaders can do is encourage people to out and protest in -5 degree weather. Just a complete failure.

China awards 1.3 million engineering undergraduate degrees each year vs 130,000 in the US. 5/x

There’s 4.5 trading days left in November & as of today the monthly percentage drop is worse than that of Nov 2008.