Esco Obong

Senior SWE @Airbnb (ex @Uber) Follow for LLMs, Algorithms , System Design & Career Growth

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

Join us today for an AMA with one of the most respected engineers in the industry who recently gained the legendary "Distinguished Engineer" title at Google! @kelseyhightower on Twitter spaces 👉🏿 https://t.co/nu2ApjGOrb

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz Reminds me of the Coinbase outage

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

A look into the future of security from saedsaed Senior Security Engineer at Google, and Esco Obong, Senior Software Engineer at Airbnb.

Everyone is saying SaaS is dead.

But the biggest value in buying services is maintenance. People may trade off reliability for convenience, but security is a deal breaker.

It’s one thing to build an application with AI in a weekend. It’s another to monitor vulnerabilities, patch dependencies, respond to incidents, and keep everything secure for years.

SaaS companies will remain if they offer a team dedicated to providing a level of security that individuals can’t achieve or keep up with.

Exploits like PHP2Shell and HTTP2Shell are perfect examples of why.

These vulnerabilities exist deep in the technologies that applications depend on. You could write perfectly secure application code and still be vulnerable because of something running underneath it.

And with AI accelerating vulnerability discovery, the time between vulnerabilities being discovered and attackers exploiting them keeps shrinking.

Most individuals and small teams aren’t equipped to patch security flaws rapidly.

The future of SaaS won’t be about selling software that people can’t build themselves.

It will be about selling software they don’t want to be responsible for securing and maintaining.

What do you think?

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

Singles are turning to LinkedIn for love with this new dating hack

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz This is a huge benefit of AirChat which is an agentic coding wrapper we have at Airbnb. Many services have skills that teach agents how to work with it. And there’s a bunch of MCPs to access internal stuff

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

Would you spend $2,300+ on an iPhone Duo?

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

pov: training everyone’s muse to dance before our launch this week

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

"god when is meta ever going to launch muse voice they announced it forever ago"

muse:

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz Wow, the new reality lol

[StarPlatinum @StarPlatinum_]

Elon Musk took a $40,000 username from a guy who had owned it for 16 years.

He paid him absolutely nothing.
Not even a dollar.

Instead, he was offered a T-shirt and a tour of Twitter’s headquarters.

This is the story of Gene X. Hwang the first @X username

2007

- photographer from San Francisco
- co-founder of Orange Photography
- registers @x on Twitter
- keeps the username for 16 years

over the years

account grows to ~53,000 followers
receives offers of up to $40,000 for the handle

But he refuses to sell

2014

- hackers steal his x account
- Twitter helps him recover it

July 23, 2023

- Elon Musk announces Twitter will become X
- Gene is in Canada playing in a pinball tournament

He has no idea what’s coming

July 25, 2023

- Twitter officially becomes X
- the company wants x
- Gene receives an email from Twitter support

“Your user handle is affiliated with X Corp.”

his username is taken and gets a new one @x12345678998765

what X offers him

- company merchandise
- exclusive tour of X headquarters
- meeting with the management team

$0.

Gene even asks if he can have the old blue Twitter bird sign being removed from headquarters.

they say no.

October 2025

X launches its Handle Marketplace
rare usernames can cost $2,500 to over $1 MILLION

users must maintain a paid subscription
lose the subscription, potentially lose the handle

the same company that took x without paying its owner now charges people for access to rare usernames.

16 years building an identity.

$40,000 in offers rejected.

and all he got was an offer of merchandise and an office tour.

BROTHER.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@MariahCarey They gon be listening to this in the year 3026 too

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

It feels wrong that GTA 6 is finally coming out on November 19th.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@heis_fazzy If you lie and give extremely positive feedback for something you hate then you will keep getting what you hate. If you secretly handle yourself, you will have no motivation to address the real problem.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz Stripe is always on the bleeding edge (stablecoins). I feel like MCPs are going to be huge. I find myself constantly checking if an app I use has an MCP and when it doesn’t it feels like they’re missing a big opportunity that a competitor can take advantage of.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz Wow I wonder if the number (60k) is so large because they only expect a small % of people to take it?

[Kevín @KevOnStage]

They called the police on a little Black kid for being too good at soccer.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz I don’t understand why people are still writing code by hand. Do they think it’s better or is it guilt?

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz I’m not a fan of doing those chores, especially after paying a cleaning fee. Glad to see the change.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz Who approved that statement 🤣🤐

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Credit to Dario who said pretty much exactly this would happen, and on this timeline, thanks to seeing what Mythos could do.

In May, Dario said there's a 6-12 month window before Chinese models catch up was also correct. That was 5 months ago.

[Esco Obong @escobyte]

@GergelyOrosz This is scary