lucas

🏖️
Co-Founder & CTO at @ConvokeLabs

[lucas @lcas_swe]

@WumpusCentral ❌ invest in support
❌ invest in user safety
✅ add ai so investors are happy

[lucas @lcas_swe]

Product regression as a perk. Only at Discord 🫶

[Zach Davis @ItsZachDavis]

Discord in 2023: usernames need to be simple because incorrect casing and special characters make people difficult to find.

Discord in 2026: would you pay us to put confusing casing and special characters back?

Beyond the obvious backtracking, this creates real impersonation and safety problems when visually identical usernames become harder to distinguish.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

London Underground. VPN restrictions are still on the table in the UK. Much of it depends on the next Prime Minister. Hopefully, that question mark won't turn into a full stop.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

Piccadilly Circus. The London Councils didn’t like our campaign against the upcoming state spyware in the UK. So, first the word ”government” was blacked out. Then the whole message was scrapped.
On the other side of the road, though: alive and kicking.

[Vinegar @GetVinegar]

Huge thank you to @linusgsebastian and @luke_lafr for checking out Vinegar on the @LinusTech WAN Show!

Luke’s original “anti-Honey” browser extension idea is what kicked this whole thing off for us: shopping online is convenient, but ownership, parent companies, affiliate incentives, and alternatives are way too hidden.

Vinegar is our attempt at making that more transparent.

It’s a browser extension that surfaces brand ownership chains while you shop, so you can better understand whose pocket your money goes into.

We’re not pretending it’s the finished version of the idea yet. Luke was right: the independent alternatives piece is probably the hard part, and what exists today is the foundation.

Since the WAN Show mention, we’ve already made a bunch of improvements:
- Firefox add-on is now live
- Ownership cards have been restyled to be cleaner and less intrusive
- Avoid List search/picking is better when multiple companies match
- Cards now more clearly separate registry data, community context, sources, ownership chains, and flags

We also want to be very clear on privacy.

Random shopping browser extensions should be treated with skepticism by default.

Vinegar is bootstrapped, not VC-funded. We don’t sell user data, we don’t monetize through ads, and we don’t want to become the thing this product is supposed to push back against.

The extension only runs on supported product pages and reads the brand name needed to check our ownership database.

We don’t read your cart, purchase data, full page HTML, or track you across unrelated sites.

Revenue comes from Premium memberships, not selling out users.

What we’re working on next:
- Independent/product alternatives
- More supported retailers
- Filtering for alternatives, like non-publicly traded, veteran-owned, worker-owned, local, etc.
- More ways to let users decide what companies they personally want to avoid

We think of Vinegar as an index, not an authority.

The goal is transparency, not telling people what they should or shouldn’t buy.

Thanks again to Linus and Luke for giving the idea attention and fair skepticism. That feedback genuinely helped us sharpen what Vinegar needs to become.