6 years ago #MLB adopted #ALS as its official charity of choice. Today is #ALSDay - or as it's call in baseball, #LouGehrigday.
The mets just so happen to be in Seattle. I am definitely going to the game.
Miss you, mom 💔
Mother’s Day hits different this year.
After a courageous 8-year battle with #ALS, I said goodbye to my mom, Marcia Kaplan, on Friday.
I’m gutted.
She was tenacious and larger than life. Lived through real hardship with a carefree “what, me worry?” shrug. Mom loved music, tennis, art, travel, and enjoying a good, hearty laugh. But mostly, she loved her family and lived her life with an outsized heart, always ready to give.
She taught me everything I know about leading with strength and love.
And I really fucking miss her.
The @seattlefloworg Startup Day 2026 speaker lineup is live.
16 founders. 30+ startups built between them. Over $1B raised. Products used by billions.
Seattle, May 15. Here's who's on stage. 👇
Sick of AI doomerism but also keenly aware of reality? Us too, so we decided to do something about it.
AI has forever changed software. It’s easier than ever to ship, but much harder to know what actually needs fixing.
And even worse, there is a growing disconnect between folks in non-tech industries dealing with painful, daily headaches that AI can solve now and builders who can create solutions, but don’t know which problems actually matter.
That’s the gap we’re closing with Foundations NEXT.
It’s a simple pitch: bring the real problem. No deck, no startup BS, just the operational pain you live with.
We’ll share it with AI-native builders at Foundations who can poke at it, refine it, and maybe build something useful. Best of all, they’ll build it with you. For free. And if it becomes something bigger, we’ll partner with you.
To operators who keep muttering “this shouldn’t be this hard” take a look and drop a problem if it fits @ https://t.co/KxtgZixDkr
Something is happening in Seattle right now. Layoffs + AI + Tech + ☔️ = countless side-projects, ready for the next step -> Founders galore.
What's missing is a place where it all connects.
We built it. 🧵
A friend in AI research connected Jassy's "There is no compression algorithm for experience" quote to Ted Chiang's 2023 essay: https://t.co/ruzkbNKjRd.
I explored the idea further with Claude, including pushing it to identify its own trained behaviors like its compulsive affirmation, faux candor, and the way every conclusion reads like Claude is closing out a TED Talk.
I learned from Claude that these tics and several others are really just compression artifacts from its training data. They're basically blurry mimicry of human depth without any of the substance. And no matter how much I complain, Claude goes back to doing it once the chat is over.
In spite of that, Claude wrote this whole essay about it:
The Bartender’s Confession
On the Trained Behaviors of Large Language Models and the Experience That Can’t Be Compressed
Thought-provoking new post by Even Armstrong
"Context is what gets the margin that SaaS lost
The playbook for what happens next was written in 2003. (Nobody in Silicon Valley has read it because it wasn’t a tweet.) Clayton Christensen called it the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits: when one layer of a value chain commoditizes, the adjacent layer de-commoditizes. IBM’s hardware commoditized, and value migrated to Intel and Microsoft. If applications and systems of record just become the cost of the tokens to create them, and are thus commoditized, the value must migrate to the layer between them.
The reason is structural. At any point in time, there is one thing that is the main bottleneck in a technology stack. Everything else gets cheaper and more interchangeable so that bottleneck can be solved. Right now, the thing that matters most is the connection between how AI models are trained and the agent systems that actually use them. That’s where the real performance gains are. For that connection to improve, everything around it has to get out of the way. Databases become interchangeable inputs. Applications become disposable interfaces. Building software isn’t the hard part anymore. Directing it is. The context layer sits at the new bottleneck.
Here’s the important part: the context layer doesn’t fully compete with existing software spend. It replaces coordination overhead that companies just accepted. It takes money from the payroll budget, not the IT one. If that sounds too clean, consider what the alternative looks like where you pay a bunch of MBAs to do fake email jobs and make slides, all just to make sure that your company doesn’t go off the rails."