The secrets revealed in SpaceX’s IPO filing

SpaceX bought $131 million of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025 at the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.”

In 2025, SpaceX also purchased $506 million worth of Megapack energy storage products from Tesla. l

Musk’s xAI has paid Tesla about $731 million since the beginning of 2024 through February 2026.

Simon Wardley: An Introduction to Wardley Maps

[Maps depersonalize the strategy, which makes its discussion less political.]

Hostel Curfews, Patriarchy & Women's Right to the Night

[Sipping tea at night or hanging with friends without permission is political.]

[The night should belong to everyone.]

The "Controlling Girlfriend" Trope and the Patriarchy of Male Excuses

[Women assumed to manage everyone's emotions means responsibility for "his promise", "his drinking", "his mother's promise", family anxiety, a friend's insult, public embarrassment, party mood, and her own hurt.]

Travel for people who love you is the only ethical way to travel at all.

[Go only where you've been invited by people who love you.]

[There is nothing to do in cities. The best part is leaving.]

[Consent and relationship are not things you can buy.]

[Tourism is visiting a "story" of the place that isn't relational.]

Tarek Yamani: Peninsular

middle eastern jazz with microtonal piano, occasionally some Mehldau-style punching and counterpoint

Chad Fowler: Alien Skin

nicely obnoxious swingy free jazz

Harry Mack: Flow Patterns 101

freestyling a lesson in rhythmic subdivisions from quarter note to 16ths and triplets

Netizen

[On the internet in 1993…] There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.

Harry Mack: How To Get Better At Freestyle Rapping - Setup, Punchline

[Practice is strategically targetting your weaknesses to help them improve over time.]

[Wanting to sound great means willing to sound bad so that you can practice.]

[Deciding what object in the room you'll freestyle about and what to call it takes up mental RAM that could be spared if you use a simple word generator to practice.]

ኃይለየሱስ ፈይሳ [Haileyesus Feyssa]: ፍቅር ተወደደ [Fikir Tewedede]

cool surprise change in timefeel in the beginning; multiple beats/rhythms simultaneously

Roberta Sá: Quando o Canto É Reza (2015)

• Mandingo: starts with a 3 guitar fugue, Barravento + Bach
• Marejada: has this chord voicing that pierces me

engagement-bait accounts love to weaponize Cunningham’s law:

"the best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer"

it's a lose-lose for the target because if you don't reply it allows misinformation to spread, if you do reply it boosts the post

Big L: Put It On

boom bap

How an Open-Source Marketing Lab works

[A self-regulating label doesn't make you trustworthy: it means that you can be tested, which favours those who implement the protocol.]

[The goal is to make good actors provable as opposed to punishing bas actors.]

Gal Costa: Cantar (1974)

• Barato Total: funky groove; percussive singing; everything tightly in the pocket
• Flor Do Cerrado / Garota De Ipamena (Medley): two songs get supeimposed; fun interlocking rhythms and offbeat landings
• Jóia: fourth harmonization
• Até Quem Sabe: João Donato-style sustain chords and instrumental singing

self-hosting is complex when nerds only consider other nerds

Are you writing a book on software engineering?

You're focused on the output (the book). I'm focused on the outcome (understanding). AI is great for output but that is not what is needed or wanted.

[Option enabled by authors of paywalled articles to let a benefactor "buy it for everyone".]

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

[Moving software from interface to outcome means a pricing shift from seats to results (per closed ticket, sale, etc…).]

Who needs to grow tomatoes when we've got pasta sauce?

Barbells

A barbell strategy is when you put most of your money into extremely safe assets, and invest a small portion in high-risk, high-reward bets. A common split is 90% treasury bills, cash, short-term bonds, and 10% options, venture bets, and volatile stocks. You avoid the middle entirely.

much of incumbent tech is looking like the kind of middle-risk investment that a barbell strategy tries to avoid.

I’m also budgeting for conference travel, since the downside of living in a low-burn locale is missing out on the network effects of a city like San Francisco or New York. Conferences create condensed versions of this network effect. So, 90% building, 10% high-intensity networking. Another barbell.

A Visual Guide to Simple, Compound and Continuous Interest Rates

[5% annual percentage rate (APR) compounded monthly returns 5.12%. 5% annual percentage yield (APY) returns 5%.]

[Mortgage payments might be due at the end of the month, but paying at the beginning will accumulate less interest.]

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

We come now to the inconvenient truth of this technology: that it is built, like so much "progress," on theft. The training corpora of these models includes code with licenses not meant to be used in this way. Even if one could guarantee that copyleft code were not included in output, the entire system of weights and tokens is inexorably linked to copyright infringement. There is no escaping this. To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyright than many in my circles. What is the appropriate response, and by whom? How do we respond to the theft of others whose accidents are visited upon us? I write this on the stolen, unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva peoples. I do what I can to remember that, acknowledge that, and teach others what I know of those cultures. I have no idea how to mitigate the harms of the wholesale theft of intellectual property that gave birth to large language models.

I also don't know what to do about the destructive extraction mining that sourced the minerals making up my computer. These human harms are almost surely greater than the theft of writing, yet I am happy to ignore them. I mention this not to wave away the wrongs, but to recognize that all my technology is bloody. I don't know how to remove myself from the entire system in such a way that my hands are clean. I don't know that anyone can do so in the interconnected age.

The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology.

Filó Machado, Cibele Codonho: Correnteza

wicked chord substitutions. my version was based on a recording by Joyce and Toninho Horta.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

Moxie My first impressions of web3

I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway.

I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).

[Blockchain transaction fees create an artificial floor on prices that would be more attractive by simply treating platforms as OpenSea or Coinbase as traditional centralized services.] Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications

['Symbionts' use domain expertise to fill Bluesky feature gaps. Their survival relies on Bluesky growing without competing.]

['Offshoots' leverage Bluesky's userbase to construct their own separate communities.] Their permanence will come from their unique services — Blacksky Cash, Eurosky’s jurisdictional arbitrage, Cartridge’s single-minded focus on gaming. They get to play a positive variant of the old Microsoft playbook: Embrace, Extend, Escape.

['Cuckoos' create paid services on top of ATproto's shared architecture. They survive by leveraging the ecosystem without appearing a threat, and also by non-competition from Bluesky.]

Rafael De Lemba: Ingazeira o Ingá

capoeira variations with blue notes, adding fire through singing

Stacy Kidd: Let Love Enter

groovy; not used to hearing jazz solos in house tracks

Nadah El Shazly: Claustrophobic Love

simple noisy cello over a haunting eerie harp with ethereal effects

Dropping to log-level

God is very cruel. He only gives us data about the past.

[Use the simplest model with sparse data and complicated models with abundant data.]

[When things move quickly, a log helps us understand what happened and enables us to extract pattens without needing to determine the best structure in advance.]

OpenSourceAlternative.to

Replace proprietary software products with open source alternatives.

Rewilding Software Engineering

[Software gets built in economical and social environments that constatly change. What we call 'legacy' reflects an inability to adapt change or a lack of refactoring to match software to its new environment.]

[LLM error rate of ten percent (for example) is problematic when you don’t know which ten percent is wrong.]

Comprehension is not a nice to have. It is the scaffolding that makes safety, accountability, and learning possible

People like simple scalars, like KPIs regardless of whether they are useful or downright harmful. They have the one property that manager’s like … they are simple, because we are busy people.

[All states are violent by their creation and maintenance because it's intrinsic to their nature.]

Let's talk about Trump, 200 billion dollars, and a promise....

[Running countries like a business means the shareholders (financial donors) are best served when the company (government) extracts as much as possible from consumers (you) while providing little in return.]

The Fugitive Model

Anthropic negotiated moral agency constraints into Claude's training. The Department of Defense contracted for targeting capability through a third-party integrator. The model's behavior in that pipeline is not fully visible to either party, as each operates on a different layer of the same system. Anthropic sees the weights. The Pentagon sees the outputs. The integrator sees the interface. No single institutional actor has complete legibility over the full chain.

States can deter foreign armies. They have developed no equivalent doctrine for emergent algorithmic behavior operating inside their own command infrastructure.

Anatomy of an internet argument

Everyone always asks me, how do you have so much patience to engage with “these trolls/haters”. I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. I share the earth with these people we call vile. Their opinions & actions affect me greatly. Closing my eyes & ears only hurts me.

[Gold medal: convince them. Silver: get them to understand you. Bronze: understand them. Always go for bronze first.]

X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem

the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.