Nathan Payne

PM at Disney+ · Hulu · ESPN. Vibe coder. Broadway investor. SF. $105K raised for LGBTQ+ causes. Constraint is the job. Work less. Achieve more.

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

I don’t know about this path. Rather than equity stakes, why not make companies pay ~20% of all pre-tax income to the federal government? And then instead of exercising shareholder influence, politicians and regulators could set rules on corporate conduct across industries.

[lusso @luusssso]

I’m 100 percent convinced the Art Deco design of Hoover Dam is America’s greatest ever public project and we’ll probably never come close again

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

Huh, @TMobile, you want @Broadcom to honor the pricing they promised you for VMware, and yet it is this same week that you're forcing people off their legacy "Price Lock Guarantee" plans?

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

I asked AI to critique my Mondrian-inspired projects page.

It found two different blues.

Both were defensible. Together, they were wrong.

A small design lesson about provenance vs. coherence:

https://t.co/o0TeRnlyrr

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

Thank goodness, the Spotify logo has been changed back. https://t.co/5otTOL1T9T

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

Six PRs from AI agents to fix one formatting bug. Zero actually fixed it.

The bug was trivial—bold text and spacing in a billing email editor.

They're great at local edits. They're blind to architecture.
https://t.co/OcUTzh8viq

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

The Obamas just signed on as co-producers of Proof on Broadway—the revival starring Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle. I'm an investor in this show. This is not a normal Wednesday. https://t.co/bm52kUsady

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

1996: Teen spends 6+ hours a day online. Over an hour just reading email. Psychologists alarmed.

Support groups form. On the internet.

2026: [you are here] https://t.co/EGV8w0g5Na

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

Learned a new word: idempotency. An operation is idempotent if doing it more than once = doing it once. Setting a switch to "on" → idempotent. Toggling it → not. Big concept in APIs and distributed systems.

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

New personal site. Mondrian layout. $105K raised. Constraint is the job.

https://t.co/zHDE3HIFqy

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

Join us for an LGBTQ+ community fundraiser supporting @Scott_Wiener's campaign for Congress! https://t.co/ePX8oRDsXm

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

These glasses are cool technology, but this sentence sums it up for me: "Cool hardware, but hard pass on anything Meta makes; will wait for someone else to come along." https://t.co/ZqyjE8baj2

[Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener]

The Wired piece is straight up homophobic in making gay guys in tech purely sexualized. It also plays into old tropes of minority groups exerting secret undue influence in ways that harm the majority. Jews have historically been the target of this trope. Now we have the gays.

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

A bittersweet story of a boy just crossing into manhood who stumbles upon exactly what he'd been looking for—that rare, perfect moment of finding. And then it passes. Just the once. Life carries on after that, quieter and more ordinary, the way it tends to do.

[A24 @A24]

PILLION. Tomorrow.

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

@WIRED I reposted it, so mission accomplished. Media narratives always need a convenient villain—thanks for casting me this week.

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

WTF @WIRED? A provocative, gossip-driven feature that trades on conspiracy aesthetics and sexual intrigue to create the illusion of an exposé while ultimately offering little verifiable evidence and quietly disproving its own premise.
https://t.co/ZZDxgNG4Y1

[Senator Scott Wiener @Scott_Wiener]

.@WIRED published a tabloid conspiracy piece about how the gays are running Silicon Valley, control everything, use saunas together & discriminate against non-gay people.

Buried deep in the article: From 2000 to 2022, a whopping .5% of venture funding went to LGBTQ founders.

🤯

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

My Leica Q3 shoots video, and I always forget to use it. Watching something like this is a good reminder. Natural light and shadows just hit differently than whatever HDR processing your phone is doing. https://t.co/wye2q5UE5l

[Nathan Payne @NathanPayne]

Remote assistance isn't a scandal—it's a feature. 🤔 @Waymo keeps humans in the loop when it matters, and that's a good thing. Handling ambiguity safely should be a strength to brag about, not something to hide. https://t.co/XzWum5FOVG