Ben Bernard (he/him)

Programmer, roleplayer, sci-fi fan, motorcyclist, brother, son, uncle, husband, former co-founder & CTO, father of 2. Sr Staff Engineer. Pronouns: He/him

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

ICE agents enforcing immigration law is a real thing. ICE agents lying under oath about what happened is a different thing. The Minneapolis video makes that distinction for us.

The agent's sworn account said three assailants attacked him with a shovel and broom for roughly three minutes. The city security camera shows a twelve-second struggle. Two people, not three. The shovel was tossed aside before the confrontation started. The Minneapolis police chief watched the footage and said it sounded like an unarmed person got shot running away. The bullet went through the closed front door and lodged near a child's playpen.

The federal government had that video within hours. Prosecutors filed felony charges two days later - without watching it. ICE's own acting director now says two agents appeared to have lied under oath.

That's not Democrats doing political theater. That's the agency's own internal conclusion, on record, about agents who served under the same DHS you're now leading.

Calling accountability for documented perjury "political theater" doesn't make the twelve-second video twelve minutes long.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The people dunking on this photo have it exactly backwards.

That’s the Outer Sunset, somewhere between the 30s and 40s Avenues. Those rows of identical stucco boxes were built by Henry Doelger, who from 1934 to 1941 was the single largest homebuilder in the United States. His crew finished two houses per day.

Before Doelger showed up, this was literally sand dunes. Maps labeled the entire western half of San Francisco “Great Sand Waste.” Nobody lived there. Nobody wanted to.

What changed: the Twin Peaks streetcar tunnel opened, the FHA started backing mortgages for middle-income buyers, and Doelger figured out assembly-line construction on 25-by-120-foot lots. He sold homes for $5,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $125,000 to $175,000. A working-class family could buy one on $32.50 monthly payments.

Those “cookie cutter” homes used redwood framing, which is why they’re still standing 85 years later while many luxury developments from the same era have been torn down twice. Doelger built roughly 25,000 of them across the Sunset and into Daly City, where they inspired Malvina Reynolds to write “Little Boxes.”

The reason 90% of SF looks like this is because 90% of SF’s housing was built to solve an actual problem: where do tens of thousands of postwar families live? The Painted Ladies on Alamo Square and the Victorians in Pacific Heights survived the 1906 earthquake. They represent maybe 10% of the city’s housing stock. The Sunset represents the city that working people actually built and lived in.

Here’s the math that makes this photo funny for a different reason. Those Doelger homes that sold for $5,000 in 1939? Median sale price in the Sunset District is now $1.63 million. That’s a 32,500% return. The Sunset is currently the most competitive neighborhood in San Francisco, with homes selling in under two weeks, often above asking.

The “ugly” part of San Francisco turned out to be the best real estate investment in the city’s history. The fog-covered rows of stucco that tourists never photograph generated more household wealth than the Victorians everyone puts on postcards.

[kasey @kaseyklimes]

I just got off a call with a friend in minneapolis

I didn’t understand how bad the situation is right now, I don’t think any of us outside MSP do

they were patrolling outside her window as I was talking to her

there are thousands of them

she (a white woman) now carries her passport with her when she leaves the house

our call was interrupted by helicopters

last year the ICE budget was $10B

it’s now $85B

this is coming to your doorstep soon

the silence of CEOs and even Democratic leaders right now is shameful. if you don’t understand how 1930s Germany happened, this is how it happened.

there’s nothing more unamerican. my grandpa manned a machine gun in the south pacific to fight this ideology. our constitutional rights are being shredded to pieces, and the powerful are bending their knee to it.

i don’t care about your stance on immigration, if you support masked thugs terrorizing american communities, pointing guns at citizens and demanding papers, entering homes without warrants— please, take a hard look in the mirror and reevaluate the dissonance with your american values and the freedom your ancestors fought to give you.

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

At Netflix, I had a rule that drove people crazy: every person who came in for an interview should leave dying to work there—even if we knew in the first five minutes we weren't going to hire them.

Because that 'wrong candidate' is going to tell everyone they know about their experience.

And you never know which of those future conversations will matter.

[rahul @rahulgs]

yes things are changing fast, but also I see companies (even faang) way behind the frontier for no reason.

you are guaranteed to lose if you fall behind.

the no unforced-errors ai leader playbook:

For your team:
- use coding agents. give all engineers their pick of harnesses, models, background agents: Claude code, Cursor, Devin, with closed/open models. Hearing Meta engineers are forced to use Llama 4. Opus 4.5 is the baseline now.

- give your agents tools to ALL dev tooling: Linear, GitHub, Datadog, Sentry, any Internal tooling. If agents are being held back because of lack of context that’s your fault.

- invest in your codebase specific agent docs. stop saying “doesn’t do X well”. If that’s an issue, try better prompting, https://t.co/SOjpn47yxo, linting, and code rules. Tell it how you want things. Every manual edit you make is an opportunity for https://t.co/S1ZvtYQwta improvement

- invest in robust background agent infra - get a full development stack working on VM/sandboxes. yes it’s hard to set up but it will be worth it, your engineers can run multiple in parallel. Code review will be the bottleneck soon.

- figure out security issues. stop being risk averse and do what is needed to unblock access to tools.

in your product:

- always use the latest generation models in your features (move things off of last gen models asap, unless robust evals indicate otherwise). Requires changes every 1-2 weeks - eg: GitHub copilot mobile still offers code review with gpt 4.1 and Sonnet 3.5 @jaredpalmer. You are leaving money on the table by being on Sonnet 4, or gpt 4o

- Use embedding semantic search instead of fuzzy search. Any general embedding model will do better than Levenshtein / fuzzy heuristics.

- leave no form unfilled. use structured outputs and whatever context you have on the user to do a best-effort pre-fill

- allow unstructured inputs on all product surfaces - must accept freeform text and documents. Forms are dead.

- custom finetuning is dead. Stop wasting time on it. Frontier is moving too fast to invest 8 weeks into finetuning. Costs are dropping too quickly for price to matter. Better prompting will take you very far and this will only become more true as instruction following improves

- build evals to make quick model-upgrade decisions. they don’t need to be perfect but at least need to allow you to compare models relative to each other. most decisions become clear on a Pareto cost vs benchmark perf plot

- encourage all engineers to build with ai: build primitives to call models from all code bases / models: structured output, semantic similarity endpoints, sandbox code execution. etc

What else am I missing?

[Matt Little @LittleCongress]

ICE cut off her wedding ring.

Sue Tincher is a 55-year-old American citizen: a grandmother, 5’4’, and white. Just in case you thought you’d be safe.

She walked to her neighbor’s house after getting alerts that ICE was nearby. She stood across the street and asked an officer if they were ICE. They told her to “get back.” She didn’t move.

Seconds later, they threw her to the ground, handcuffed her, and hauled her away. She spent five hours in leg shackles at a federal building. Agents cut off her wedding ring and threatened to pepper-spray her in the truck. Her husband spent all day trying to find where they’d taken her. Federal officials wouldn’t tell him.

Her "crime" was simply standing on a public street, watching, and asking questions.

Read that again: here in Minnesota, a U.S. citizen was arrested, restrained, and disappeared for hours, not for interfering, not for resisting, but for asking a question.
If they can arrest Sue Tincher for standing on a public sidewalk, they can arrest anyone.

Immigration attorneys said they’re seeing constitutional violations every single day now. I’m running because we need leaders who will call this what it is- un-American, unconstitutional, and unacceptable.

Sue Tincher stood up.
I’m standing up.
We must all stand up.

https://t.co/f7AT3WtVUn

[Daniel Vassallo @dvassallo]

When internet commerce started in the 1990s, if a person from Germany bought something online from Amazon, that person was treated as if they travelled to the USA and brought the product home with them. When Bezos started Amazon, he didn’t choose to operate in Germany, but German people still ordered things from him. Just like a hot dog vendor in NYC selling to German tourists is not considered to be operating in Germany. This framework made sense, but the EU and other governments didn’t like it and invented new laws to break the internet into local markets that online vendors are automatically subject to just because someone can visit from there. What’s most disappointing is that almost everyone got brainwashed that this is the way online commerce ought to be done. That if I offer something on the internet, I am automatically subject to the laws of Trinidad and Tobago just because someone could visit from there. How absurd.

[Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford]

I’ve previewed the content for this course and I’m jealous of these kids—wish I had had something like this!

We’re going to undo the doomerism that teens pick up in school and inspire them with an ambitious vision of the future. Please share with any high schoolers / parents:

[jacob paris ▲ @jacobmparis]

It’s called Single Sign On

because you have to Sign On

every Single time

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

I am tired of ai timelines discourse. But I will just say:

It has been clear for a while now: big changes are coming, and they will happen slower than the fast timelines people expect, but faster than most people expect.

The changes will be slower than some thought because diffusion is hard (this is not cope, and this was a strange miss from dwarkesh, but we all have those, no big deal, this is why I did not tweet much in my 20s and lord knows I still have my fair share of clunkers), because of bad interpretations and naive extrapolations of various straight lines, and because of simplistic conceptions of both the world and of intelligence.

Yet the models will be capable in 2027 of things that will be objectively astounding, including to many observers of AI today.

2035 is not really a “long” timeline, and it would have been aggressively short 3.5 years ago. It is now a “long” timeline, even bearish.

“Men on a river, on a vessel afloat, oft see the land move, not their boat.”

[Scott Hechinger @ScottHech]

In ordinary times this alone would be a scandal sufficient to threaten to take down a presidency. No one will even know this happened.

[Vic 🌮 @VicVijayakumar]

We used to ask candidates to build a particular stateful API from zero. You show up with your laptop and you’re given an empty folder, and can use the internet however necessary to accomplish it. (this is all pre-AI)

Startup engineers owned it, FAANG devs struggled.

The theory is that big tech engineers rarely if ever have do greenfield development. All your work is sandboxed within a framework that someone has already setup for you. You get routing, build tooling, logs, observability, database connections, CICD, for free, and those muscles either never developed or have atrophied.

The conflicting signal was that the big tech engineers were then considerably better at large systems design than the startup folks, and we had to tweak the whole process to get better signals.

[Romy @Romy_Holland]

i know a guy whose wife had serious fertility issues and they used a surrogate to carry 3 children for them. they badly wanted these children and love them dearly.

they were friendly with the woman who acted as a surrogate and were deeply grateful to her. she was delighted to be able to bring more children into the world after completing her own family. she was also grateful she could earn money while being home caring for her children.

i don’t know why everyone’s imagining some nefarious scenario as the surrogacy default. there are some bad situations and we should continue to create appropriate protections, but these are the exception not the rule and a world without surrogacy is worse world.

if you’re a parent who was able to conceive and carry a child you should count yourself lucky and should want to remove barriers that people less lucky than you are facing.

[Vic 🌮 @VicVijayakumar]

Once upon a time I started at a certain tech company. In the first week, I was like wow the build takes 45 minutes? And everyone was like of course it does why would it take any less time than that ya dolt? The next day my build was projected to complete in 6 hours because it used a merge queue and was behind 7 other builds. Everyone were like yes obviously, that makes sense. Felt like I was taking crazy pills for being the only person who thought this was absurd. I thought they were playing a prank on me.

The story of how I made it my mission to fix it is less important than the takeaway -

Resist the cultural normalization of dysfunction - when inefficiency or pain points become so routine that everyone stops questioning them.

I was the outsider seeing clearly that the existing process was absurd, but the team had been conditioned to accept it as “just how things are.”

Don’t let familiarity make you complacent. If something feels broken, it probably is.

[Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford]

Waymos are safer than human drivers—for both humans and pets:

[Ian Andrews @IanAndrewsDC]

I met someone this week who shared that in the 90s Bain paid employees to make slides for customer presentations. This was pre-PowerPoint so the job was literally using an exacto knife and ruler to cut and splice together materials for overhead transparencies. As soon as laptops, PowerPoint and digital projectors became widespread this job went away. Somehow the consulting industry is 10x the # of employees that it was then 🤣

What Aaron is describing is how almost every technology adoption cycle has played out. No evidence to suggest AI will happen differently

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

I'm not letting this go. It seems like it should be a much bigger deal that the President of the United States admitted on live TV Sunday night that he has no idea who he's pardoning — that he only pardoned a crypto fraudster because his sons told him to. Why is the media ignoring this corruption?

[Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford]

Part of social progress is shrinking the amount of time and energy that people have to spend on politics

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

Called FedEx 10 minutes after the fake "delivery attempt". Was assured driver would turn around and try again.

Called again 2 hours later, asking for an update, was told they forgot to attach the tracking # to the request. They filed a new one.

Called back another hour later, asking for an update. Was escalated twice. Told by a supervisor that they can't actually do a redelivery on this package because it's not really an Express package even though it is labeled Express and was paid as an Express delivery. I ask why other representatives said otherwise, and he hung up on me.

I'm 1+ hour of phone calls into this. @FedEx requested I DM them here. I did and they never responded.

@fedexhelp is there any world where I get my package today? I've never in my life seen such incompetence.

[Governor JB Pritzker @GovPritzker]

I will not back down.

Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power.

What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?