Patrick Collison

@Stripe CEO, @ArcInstitute cofounder.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: https://t.co/aLhVgYXrbi.

Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create.

My reflections on the whole thing:

• Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many.
• It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest.
• The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take.
• Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions.
• AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider.
• Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested.
• There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

@Chris_arnade Am midway through Vol 2 and having the same reaction. A bit muddled, though some of the epigrammatic observations are memorable. "Oh, I didn't know that he visited Berkeley!"

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

It seems to me that democracy has on the whole worked very well in America over the last decade, and perhaps better than in any other major country in the West. National outcomes have repeatedly been responsive to underlying voter preferences on meaningful questions, and significant changes in policy have ensued. I’ve been reading Democracy in America this past week, and it’s striking how much it still rhymes nearly two centuries later.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

@spakhm From scratch. Haven't really thought about how to deal with that (https://t.co/3u2ZwwSYzR), but it's a good question.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

The models are very good at creating custom spaced repetition apps with algorithms adapted to you and the problem domain ("review my learning and improve the efficiency of your scheduler") plus tailored explanations for anything that you consistently get wrong.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Come help us figure out how the economy should work for agents. Pretty much every part of the stack is going to change.

[Jeff Weinstein @jeff_weinstein]

you already knew this, but repeating @stripe is hiring engineers/product people who wanna solve Hard Problems™️ in agentic commerce, e.g.:

- wallets
- payments
- identity
- risk
- discovery
- tokens
- tools
- provisioning
- catalogs
- micropayments
- etc.

[email protected]

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

@Chris_arnade Your Substack post inspired me to finally go read it

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

How can we make lovable cities? If you had asked a European architect this question in 1900, they would probably have referred you to a slender, lively book by the Austrian writer Camillo Sitte, translated as ‘The Art of Building Cities’. Published in 1889, ‘The Art of Building Cities’ swiftly came to be revered around the world.

https://t.co/qwVmTrPTGV

Sitte was repudiated by the modernists and fell into obscurity, but his ideas are beginning to be revived. My cousin @PMArslanagic and I have distilled nineteenth century's finest work on urbanism into five principles:

- Create enclosed spaces
- Keep squares small
- Symmetry is overrated
- Move monuments to the edges of spaces
- Nestle monuments in vernacular fabric

[Deedy @deedydas]

Congratulations to OpenRouter for crossing 10 QUADRILLION annual token run rate today!

Token volumes continue to 2x every 10.5 weeks.

In the last 9 weeks, OpenRouter processed more tokens than all of time before that.

[Vincent Geloso @VincentGeloso]

Bill Nordhaus died. People remember him for his climate change work. I remember him for these two papers

The first shows that innovators capture only a tiny share of the fruits of their innovations. I often tell people that shows something about property rights. If only 4% of gains went to innovators and we got so much innovation, what if property rights were tightened? What if they could appropriate 5% instead? How much more innovation would we get ?

The second is that living standards are not well represented by counting military spending (among many other things). After all, tanks and aircraft carriers are not consumer goods. Their value is not the cost-value (which is how government output is calculated) but rather the option value and the flow of deterrence. I expanded on Nordhaus (and others) in this piece (Geloso, V., & Reilly, C. S. (2026). A Defense-Adjusted National Accounting of the US Economy and Its Implications, 1791-2023. The Review of Austrian Economics, 39(1), 19-50). And thus I owe a debt to Nordhaus.

Both are underappreciated great works

[Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt]

@patrickc Malleable software!

https://t.co/3Xhk888Uuh

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I'm now building an "improvements" feature into all of my personal vibecoded applications: a freeform text input that's hooked up to an agent that yolo implements whatever is submitted.

It's an interesting experience -- the activation energy barrier to sanding any rough edge or implementing any new feature becomes extremely low. Someone else who uses one of the applications I created has already implemented 150 improvements over the course of a few days. This pattern feels like a new kind of tool -- liquid software? -- and every application that doesn't have this feature now has a slightly rigid and anachronistic flavor. Why can't I just tell it how I want it to be different?

Now, it's not obvious to me how this pattern can or should scale. Does it become unmaintainable after a while? (Maybe model intelligence improvement outstrips my feature appetite such that it's fine?) How does collaborative software work in this model? Can software designed this way be secure and reliable?

Whatever the larger questions about broader deployment, it definitely works great in a personal context. It reminds me a little of the visions of Lisp/Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and HyperCard -- systems that the user can take control of and modify. Those visions never quite worked, though: the vast majority of software today is not end-user modifiable in any useful way. So, while this "liquid" affordance is a very small touch, the way it changes one's relation to the software feels a bit transgressive and empowering in a Lickliderian and Engelbartian way.

[OpenRouter @OpenRouter]

We just shipped our biggest improvement to our provider router since the founding of OpenRouter.

Before, we prioritized mostly based on price. The new router now rewards the best quality inference for the actual cost of a request, so requests stay cheap but are also fast and reliable.

Providers that deliver more value automatically win more traffic, so every provider has a reason to keep improving. And every time a provider gets better, so does your inference on OpenRouter.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

A2A payments will be more important than P2P payments.

[Stripe @stripe]

Introducing 'stripe pay', for instant business-to-business transfers. Find companies using their Stripe profile handle and send funds for free. Available in the Dashboard and CLI.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

@VitalikButerin This is why we started https://t.co/FRj1KyN7ct.

[Noah Shinn @noahrshinn]

Give your Instinct a budget

Built with @Stripe and @link, we're launching Link balance in @instinct. You can now set a budget for your Instinct to make purchases on your behalf, and Instinct does the rest.

You choose how much money to add and set a limit for each purchase. Your Instinct can spend within those limits, without needing access to your credit card or asking for approval every time.

That means buying tickets as soon as the presale opens, picking up your size when the trail runners restock, or reordering your favorite coffee beans every other week.

Link balance is rolling out to Instinct users across the US starting today, with New York coming soon.

Ask your Instinct to set up Link balance and it’ll send you a link to get started.

[Link @link]

Introducing Link balance. You can now give your agent a balance to spend on your behalf, even when you’re away or busy.

• Purchase concert tickets while you’re asleep.
• Buy your favorite shoes when the price drops.
• Order your entire shopping list with one prompt.

You choose how much money to add and set your own limits, your agent does the rest. Rolling out now to @Instinct users in eligible US regions.