menveac

Busy, busy but very happy mummy to 7

[Rob Hallam @robj3d3]

For only 25 years old, Michael carries himself like an absolute veteran.

You can only watch in awe.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Being comically maladapted to sunny climes, I have in endless and often unsuccessful pursuit of self-defense experimented with a sprawling battery of different sunscreens. This one is by far the best I’ve found: https://t.co/JpGfY3L5sY. (You need to illicitly procure the non-US version; the FDA valiantly shields us from its benefits due to their restrictive and seldom-updated set of permissible sunscreen ingredients.)

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Stripe Sessions this year!

More than 10,000 attendees for the first time.

We had a ton of fun putting everything together and are very proud to support everything that you are building.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

We just announced a large raft of improvements at @Stripe Sessions. My meta reflections:

• It feels that the entire economy is replatforming right now.
• Many charts at Stripe are inflecting in quite dramatic ways. What GitHub recently reported for commits we are seeing in economic activity (such as new company formations).
• It is increasingly clear that agents will be responsible for most transactions in the not overly distant future.
• Stripe was always developer-centric, but AI is making developer-centricity strategic in a new way: agents are even hungrier for good DX than developers themselves are.
• Things that we’re launching are increasingly network products at heart. (Instant transfers between Stripe businesses, new kinds of fraud prevention with Stripe Radar, stablecoin payouts to anyone with Link.) "How can we turn Stripe's economies of scale into user benefits?" is increasingly the relevant question.
• Between Privy, Bridge, Tempo, and Stripe’s core capabilities, we’re now doing a lot in stablecoins/crypto, and companies like DoorDash, Ramp, Meta, and Klarna are using our crypto stack to deploy meaningful new functionality in production. “But where’s the production use?” is rapidly becoming stale when applied to crypto.
• After more than a decade of building, we seem to have hit some kind of critical mass of core platform capabilities such that building new things now feels easier and faster than before. (AI also helps.) We announced Stripe Treasury last year (originally called Financial Accounts); since then, we’ve added multi-currency support, global payouts, card issuance and rewards, and a bunch of other sophisticated functionality. By the end of this year, Treasury will support 15 more currencies and be available to businesses in 160 countries.

On the launches themselves, a small selection that I thought were cool, though this is really just a subset:

• The @Link AI wallet. Point your agent to https://t.co/vYdvNtJgpE and ask it to make purchases on your behalf with secure single-use tokens. (To test it, I asked Claude Code to buy a small gift for me yesterday. It purchased HTTPZine on Gumroad.)
• New payment methods for Link, including Pix (largest payment method in Brazil) and UPI (largest payment method in India). We’re also adding stablecoin support to Link (which I think will be huge if we execute well).
• We’re adding a lot of new Machine Payments Protocol functionality, including micropayment and recurring payment support.
• We announced Checkout studio: a sophisticated dashboard for managing your checkout flow, including things like transaction replays and A/B tests. Today this tends to require a lot of fussy edits to production code.
• Adaptive Pricing (which automatically localizes the price and currency that customers see) now supports subscriptions. We’ve seen pretty huge (4–5%) conversion rate improvements after enabling it — customers really like paying in their home currency.
• New Stripe Terminal reader (the T600) with a customer-facing screen that can run native apps, plus support for 15 new international markets for Stripe Terminal.
• General availability for Stripe Managed Payments, our merchant of record solution. (Natively handles tax, disputes, fraud.) Maybe sounds a bit arcane, but it’s one of those iykyk products. It saves a lot of schlep.
• Fraud is a *much* bigger priority for customers than it was 2 years ago (AI makes fraud easier + unlike software, tokens can be resold), so we’ve been extending Stripe Radar to support things beyond payments fraud: free trial abuse, multi-account abuse, pay-as-you-go abuse. Early results are extremely positive. We also announced Stripe Signals — new scoring APIs for customers, businesses, and other objects, not just payments on and off Stripe.
• Usage-based billing is also becoming the de facto business model of the AI era, and we launched a bunch of new pricing models in @getMetronome and features like low-balance alerts, automatic credit top-ups, and multidimensional pricing structures.
• We showed streaming payments built on @Tempo and Metronome — track usage and get paid the instant value is delivered. Hard to predict, but I think this could be big. (Why wouldn’t you want to get paid as costs are incurred?)
• We added automatic US tax filing in Stripe Tax.
• We announced Stripe Database -- a hosted PostgreSQL database with all of your Stripe data, updated in real time. Read-only to start but we’ll make it read-write.
• Stripe Workflows are now GA.
• We showed Stripe Console, a full agentic execution environment built directly into the Stripe Dashboard. It’ll happily write code and use tools to answer your questions.
• We previewed custom objects: model your business data directly in Stripe, with custom objects, typed fields, and relationships.
• As mentioned above, Stripe Treasury accounts will support storage in 15 currencies by the end of the year. And instant/free(!) transfers between US Stripe businesses.
• You can use a Stripe card with your Treasury balance and get 2% cash back on purchases.
• We’re massively expanding our Global Payouts coverage -- soon 100 countries with fiat rails and 160 with stablecoins.
• Atlas companies can now raise money directly within Stripe.
• We launched the platform growth studio, which uses Stripe’s network data to generate specific recommendations for optimization/growth.
• We announced the Stripe Managed Risk API — platforms can outsource risk handling to Stripe while maintaining full UI/UX control.
• Connected accounts now benefit from networked onboarding, which hugely increases conversion rates.
• We’re launching Treasury for Platforms. Connected accounts can get spend cards with just a few lines of code. (Plus cash rewards, cash acceptance, check acceptance, real-time payments…)
• We announced Issuing for agents: easily create cards for agents.

But that’s really just a subset of a subset. (See https://t.co/Ej0S8aRVi0 for more.) The Stripe team is cooking! And if you’re interested in building the economic infrastructure for this new world, we’re hiring.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him.

His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left.

He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one.

Here is what I missed the first time I watched it.

Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand.

That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration.

The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer.

He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him.

The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force.

He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.

Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop.

The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football.

They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want.

This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all.

And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room.

He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway.

Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter.

He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room.

It was for his three kids.

Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been.

The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person.

That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely.

Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut.

Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week.

He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.

[Miles Grimshaw @milesgrimshaw]

As the capabilities of AI models improve exponentially, we are seeing a new wave of AI-native applications emerge. We believe that @cursor_ai is breaking that ground, reimagining the nature of programming by taking on more and more of the work while keeping you in charge. And developers love it; the speed of adoption is one of the fastest we’ve ever seen!

Thrive is grateful for the opportunity to deepen our partnership with @mntruell, @sualehasif996, @amanrsanger, @ArVID220u and the team. They had a prescient vision and are passionately obsessed with building the tool that helps every engineer write the world’s software. They’re their own harshest critic, using Cursor to build Cursor!

Cursor is inventing what the future of work and the tools we use can be … less drudgery, more power to create. Their latest launch is another glimpse into that future, speed running the next 10 minutes of work with confidence: https://t.co/EA1AZzQgh3

[Sam Altman @sama]

I wrote this early this morning and I wasn't sure if I would actually publish it, but here it is:

https://t.co/7Dw9UFpeep

[Joshua Kushner @JoshuaKushner]

sam is a wonderful human. many have worked very hard to make you think otherwise

[RobLogic @RobLogic]

Behind the Moon, where no human eyes had recently ventured, the crew of Artemis II captured this: our pale blue planet slipping behind the lunar landscape.

Let this view inspire unity, wonder, and the courage to explore further.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Andrej Karpathy explains what makes Elon Musk unique

“I don’t think people appreciate how unique [Elon’s style] is. You read about it, but you don’t understand it—it’s hard to describe.”

The first principle Karpathy — who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot — has observed is that Musk likes small, strong, highly-technical teams:

“At companies by default, teams grow and get large. Elon was always a force against growth… I would have to basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that at big companies it’s hard to get rid of low performers. Elon is very friendly by default to getting rid of low performers. I actually had to fight to keep people on the team because he would by default want to remove people… So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management that is non-technical for sure. That’s number one.”

Number two is that Elon wants the office to be a vibrant place where everyone is working on exciting stuff:

“He doesn’t like stagnation… He doesn’t like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they’re not being useful. You actually do see this where it’s a large meeting and if you’re not contributing or learning, just walk out. This is fully encouraged… I think a lot of big companies pamper employees, but there’s much less of that. The culture of it is that you’re there to do your best technical work and there’s intensity.”

Elon is also unusual in terms of how closely connected he is to the team:

“Usually the CEO of a company is a remote person, five layers up, who only talks to their VPs… Normally people spend 99% of the time talking to the VPs. [Elon] spends maybe 50% of the time. And he just wants to talk to the engineers. If the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth… not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.”

And lastly, Karpathy believes the extent to which Musk is involved day-to-day operations and removing company bottlenecks is not appreciated. He gives an example of engineers telling Elon they don’t have enough GPUs. As Karpathy explains, if Elon hears this twice he’ll get the person in charge of the GPU cluster on the phone. If NVIDIA is the bottleneck, he’ll get Jensen Huang on the phone.

Video source: @sequoia (2024)

[Cursor @cursor_ai]

We’re introducing Cursor 3. It is simpler, more powerful, and built for a world where all code is written by agents, while keeping the depth of a development environment.

[WTFGOP @doggintrump]

So here’s a good story in these shitty times

Alex Dumas, the CEO of Hermes, was reportedly contacted numerous times by Jeffrey Epstein. And Dumas was like, fuck off you’re a pedo.

So in 2016, Jeffrey Epstein went to a charity auction. When Dumas found out Epstein won a lot offered by the house, he refused to honor it & then donated the exact same amount of money that Epstein was gonna pay, to that charity.

There are still good, moral people in this world

[etn. @etnshow]

BREAKING: Cursor (@cursor_ai) CEO @mntruell says Cursor may have "discovered a novel solution to Problem Six of the First Proof Challenge".

The First Proof challenge is a high-level mathematical benchmark designed to test if AI systems can perform genuine, research-grade reasoning.

Released in February 2026, it was created by a group of prominent mathematicians (including Fields Medalists and MacArthur Fellows) to move beyond "competition-style" math problems - which AI can often solve via pattern matching - and into the realm of authentic mathematical discovery.

The CEO of the $29.3B valued AI start-up believes "this suggests that our technique for scaling agent coordination might generalise beyond coding".

Cursor recently surpassed $2BARR and has seen it's revenue doubling approximately every three months.

[Kylen Mills @KylenMills]

The ability to truly celebrate others wins in the wake of the biggest defeat of your life to me shows the highest character. Ilia Malinin has been like a proud dad watching the rest of the Olympic skating. He will go far in both skating and life.

[Miles Grimshaw @milesgrimshaw]

I was born too late for the early days of the internet, but I’ve studied it with boundless fascination. Stories like my dad’s, who founded one of the first ecommerce software companies out of MIT as a side quest from producing electronic music with Yo-Yo Ma. His love of creation inspired me.

I pinch myself that we get to be a part of this moment! Change is the catalytic force for startups, and fundamental technical change is the most powerful of all. The internet digitized what we do. Intelligent computing does it for you. Every week our team has a ‘can’t unsee it’ experience, a product that would have been science fiction a few years ago.

In a changing world, the biggest risk is comfort in the status quo. We are proud to be a part of the teams who are pioneering the future right under the nose of incumbents … look at Cursor, OpenEvidence, Turbopuffer, OpenAI… it’s a golden time for the missionaries, the visionaries, the inventors.

With Thrive X, we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to partner with the founders blazing new trails at this moment of tectonic change.

https://t.co/uzIpzEroI3

[Miles Grimshaw @milesgrimshaw]

The very first deal … with an industry leader … barely a year after founding … WOW!

A huge testament to the incredible @chaidiscory team and the step change in research they unlock.

[pedram.md @pdrmnvd]

oh you’re using claude code? everyone’s using open code. just kidding we’re all on amp code. we’re using cline, we’re using roo code. we just forked our own version of roo. were using kilo code. we were on coderabbit but their ceo yelled at us so now we’re using qorbit. apple just acquired them for $30bn so we just migrated our entire team to slash commands. one guy is still on aider. the PM is on loveable. he just shipped a new product on replit. the intern installed a slackbot that lets you chat with your spreadsheet. legal is still reviewing devin’s enterprise contract. we evaluated junie for three ukrainians using jetbrains. someone in slack just asked “has anyone tried amp?” we are using goose for scripts. next week we’re piloting augment code. the CTO heard good things about trae.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ our CEO is friends with the guy from conductor. our CFO resigned. our CISO said we’ve had fourteen supply chain attacks in the last week. we’re shipping the worlds most expensive todo app.

[Miles Grimshaw @milesgrimshaw]

Search is not a feature, it’s foundational. The right context is critical and @turbopuffer makes every byte searchable to deliver the most intelligent experience.

After 1.5 yrs of getting to know @sirupsen and the @turbopuffer team, I am elated he chose Thrive to join the team!

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Today is @arcinstitute's fourth birthday!

Thank you to the scientists for their amazing work (I was very optimistic about what would be possible, but I didn't expect so much progress so soon), and to the Arc employees, donors, partners, and friends who've made everything possible along the way.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

"I've been in the big world today and now I need to be in a tiny space."