mehdi

I build small, calm software for one-person businesses. Web apps that give you time back. Shipping quietly, real numbers, notes on a slower life.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

building apps, studying products, and occasionally looking up from the screen when the internet invents a new main character. expect useful details, honest progress, and dry commentary.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Metaphor: ReFantazio launched at $69.99 in 2024. Today it's out on Switch 2 for $39.99.

Reviewers still love it, but frame rates dip into the 30s in big areas.

My take: an 80-hour RPG for $40 is the best game deal of November. Just play it in Performance mode.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

A 3-hour NFL broadcast has about 16 minutes of actual football.

One analysis timed a game second by second: ball in play 9% of the time. Soccer broadcasts run close to half.

My take: people don't watch the NFL for the action. They watch it for the waiting. That's the product.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Dec 18: Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three open on the same day.

Dune has the US IMAX screens for its first three weeks. Marvel gets everything else.

Prediction (Nov 11, 2026): Doomsday wins opening weekend. Dune wins the second one.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

China's 11.11 sale used to be one day. This year https://t.co/5qL9Qnblhs started it on October 12.

Sales through Oct 31: up just 2.4% on last year (Syntun data).

My take: a sale that runs for a month isn't a sale. It's the price. Keep that in mind when Black Friday "deals" start weeks early.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

People are paying $9.99 to watch a TV show in a theater. One they can stream at home.

Heated Rivalry made $1.4M in its first weekend in 945 theaters, two old episodes per ticket.

My take: they aren't buying episodes. They're buying a room that screams at the same scene.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Many Oilers fans already pay for Sportsnet on TV. They still couldn't watch last night's game without paying again.

Monday Night Hockey is streaming-only now. That's nine Oilers games this season.

My take: cable won't die from cord-cutting. It'll die like this.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

About 9 in 10 smartphone users in Nigeria are on Android. Roughly 12% use an iPhone. (KPMG/Orange survey, 13,000+ people.)

Over the weekend, Nigerian Android users shared stories of feeling embarrassed to pull their phone out in public.

The phone in most pockets is the one people apologise for.

Opinion: status was never about what's good. It's about what's scarce.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Apple's foldable iPhone Duo costs $1,999.
An iPhone 18 Pro plus the new iPad mini: $1,898.

One device. $101 more than carrying both.

My take: you're not paying for a better phone. Reviewers say the cameras trail the Pro and the closed screen feels cramped. You're paying to never carry a tablet again.

Worth $101 to you?

[mehdi @indiehkr]

https://t.co/KqUuyi8w2e

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Two AI price tags, one week apart.

OpenAI's private round: $1.25T.
Anthropic's IPO, per buyers talking to Bloomberg: $1.2T to $1.3T, some as low as $1.1T.

Prediction, Nov 8 2026: if Anthropic lists this year, it prices below OpenAI's $1.25T.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

https://t.co/WZWIHmMUsR

[mehdi @indiehkr]

An outside group spent 11 weeks inside Anthropic. Its finding: about two years of AI progress in one.

METR saw benchmark gains at 1.9x the old pace since Oct 2025 (likely range 1.5x to 2.8x).

Its best guess for how much of that is AI helping build AI: roughly 80%.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

@DrewSchlansky Ha, fair. Annualized it's still $0, but the denominator is doing more of the work.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Everyone's sharing October revenue.

Mine was $0. In fairness, Calmretry could only take money for the last 3 days of the month.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

@mathiasvrb Same split I'd make. A broken VPS is an afternoon. A broken payment flow is someone's money. That's the one I keep paying for.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Cory Zue cancelled a $600/year SaaS and replaced it with an in-house tool Opus coded for him.

What he still pays for: servers, email, payments. The parts where a bug costs real money.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

@srikeerthandev Markdown, mainly so I can open them in anything later. Readable is the bar. Fancy formats age poorly once the app that made them is gone.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Anthropic says Claude now "dreams" between sessions.

It rereads old transcripts, fixes notes that were wrong, merges duplicates and builds its own linked wiki.

On 350,000 internal files, going from 2 dream sessions to 128 took it from 13% to 48% on a 25-question test.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

OpenAI is now worth $1.25 trillion. And it still came up short.

The plan was $30B+ at a $1.4T valuation. What has closed so far: $11B, with maybe $20B by the end.

In March it raised $122B at $852B. The valuation went up 47%. The checks got a lot smaller.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

https://t.co/WZWIHmMUsR

[mehdi @indiehkr]

The first U.S. pure-play humanoid company just went public.

Agility (AGLT) started trading on Nasdaq Nov 5. Digit: 65,000+ hours in warehouses. Digit 5: $300M+ multi-year orders.

Prediction, Nov 6 2026: by Nov 2027, 2+ more humanoid makers are public — none profitable yet.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

Anthropic just locked in $895 billion of compute spending.

About $70 billion of that comes due in the next 12 months. Their Q3 revenue annualized is roughly $68 billion.

The bill for the next year is already the size of a full year of sales.

[mehdi @indiehkr]

ChatGPT's biggest market is no longer the United States.

Sam Altman said India now has more users. OpenAI's India MD said the local base roughly doubled since January.

Not a revenue ranking. A weekly-user ranking. That distinction matters.