refrane22

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Just today I've already seen Wispr Flow, Granola and WHOOP all "reverse engineered" and open sourced with a fully free version

Very interesting to see what's happening

The question is if normies will pick up on this (I think they will) and how companies will react and pivot to still make money

[Samrah @_Chemist1]

One of the clearest signs of a calm mind is being skilled at the art of letting go.

[✰. @swagoszn_]

Bro, your life gets better when you stop needing every day to be exciting. Some of the strongest days are simple ones. You trained. You worked. You ate well. You spoke to your family. You got some fresh air. You went to sleep with a clear head. That is not a boring life. That is a life coming together.

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

I don’t think you understand what ChatGPT Voice unlocks

I went on a 4 hour hike yesterday. Through the northern California redwoods.

Got more work done in those 4 hours talking to Voice through my AirPods then I do in 8 hours at my desk

Work can be done ANYWHERE now

45 minute drive back using self driving? Now 45 minutes I can talk to Voice and work on side projects

20 minutes in the cafe? I can sit and talk to Voice and when I get home I have drafts on my computer for my newsletter for the next month

Being able to just use your voice to talk to a super intelligence that controls your computer is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before

I don’t even care that the voice sounds human like, or you can interrupt it, or any of the wild advancements they made to the tech

It’s the fact that it can control my computer, meaning all I need to get incredible work done is talk through my AirPods anywhere in the world that is the major game changer for me

I don’t think people truly understand the implications of this yet

Why even have a desk or monitor anymore. Work can be done ANYWHERE now

The key is your set up:

1. Choose one device (preferably an always on desktop) as your main “headquarters” device all your work gets done on

2. Get the ChatGPT app on all your other devices (iPhone, iPad, laptops, Mac Minis)

3. Set up ‘connections’ in your settings so that all your ‘node’ devices can control your ‘headquarters’ device

4. Go legit anywhere in the world. Turn on Voice. Ask it to brief you on your projects, give you a recommended next step, then spin up new threads to do work

I really don’t think work looks the same moving forward.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

16 things that will be normal in 3 years and sound insane today

1. Somebody's entire job is making sure your agents don't do dumb things.

2. Kids grow up assuming any adult who types is old, the way we assume anyone who prints emails is old.

3. You get an itemized bill for what your agents bought last month and it reads like an expense report from a small company.

4. Someone you've never met sells you a business that runs itself, and you never learn what the code does.

5. Your doctor's first opinion comes from a model, and the human's job is deciding whether to trust it.

6. Job posts will say "must be able to manage agents" the same way they used to say "proficient in Excel."

7. The best-paid person at a company will be whoever's best at explaining the business to machines.

8. Your company has more agents than employees, and HR manages both.

9. Companies start hiding how few employees they have, because a lean team reads as fragile to enterprise buyers.

10. Your calendar fills with meetings you didn't schedule, because your agent and their agent worked it out.

11. The CV dies and gets replaced by a body of work an agent can verify in 4 seconds.

12. You interview an agent before you hire it. Give it a fake task, watch how it handles the weird cases, then decide.

13. Losing your job means losing your agents too, and it's kinda scary losing your best agents.

14. "Made by a person" becomes a label on products, and there's a certification body for it.

15. You'll have a folder of agents the way you have a folder of apps

16. Getting a human on the phone becomes a paid tier, and people gladly pay it.

[Shann³ @shannholmberg]

huge for marketers

you can now teach Claude a skill by recording your screen and do tasks step by step

this is why I recommend every marketer to run two computers at their workstation, one main and the second one they use for automations that playwright or browser agent can´t do

Example with LinkedIn, where you could run an agent just doing interactions there all day

or an agent that runs through your competitors' whole product onboarding funnel + records them

endless opportunities, just have to start experimenting asap

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

I was wrong. I said we were a year away from Fable 5 on our desk.

That day is today

An open model BETTER than Fable 5 in some benchmarks just dropped

Better than ChatGPT 5.6 on FrontierSWE. Better than Fable 5 on Automation Bench

This fundamentally changes the AI race forever

If people can start running Fable 5 on their desk, unlimited and for free, they are not going to pay thousands for subscriptions

Now let's be clear: will the hardware you need to run Kimi K3 be obtainable for most? No it won't

It will require multiple very expensive Nvidia chips or a bunch of Mac Studio 512gbs

But look at the slope, not the Y intercept. Over the last year local AI has become SIGNIFICANTLY more efficient and required way less compute

The smartest brains in the world are all attacking the compute problem as hard as they can

This is another step in that direction. And within a year or two, you'll be able to run this on a Mac Mini

Local AI has arrived, and it's not going anywhere

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

HOW TO USE AI LOOPS TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS 24/7

A lot has been written about loop engineering for building products. Almost nothing about using loops to run the business itself.

That's the bigger idea.

A loop is when you give an agent a goal, a way to check its own work, and permission to keep trying until it hits that goal.

Build. Verify. Repeat. Stop when the condition is met.

Here's what it looks like in practice:

1/SEO loop

You're position 30 for a term you want. The loop runs once a month, makes changes, checks where you rank, and keeps pushing until you're on page one. This is running in production right now on Inbox Zero.

2/Ads loop

You're spending $100 a day and losing money. The loop tests creative, checks profitability, kills what fails, and keeps going until the account is in the black.

3/Eval loop

Your AI feature is only 88% accurate. The loop keeps adjusting the prompt and swapping the model until it passes 90%.

4/LLM visibility loop

People search in ChatGPT now, not just Google. Same loop, new scoreboard. Are we the answer or not?

The whole thing hinges on one thing: a metric that comes back black and white.

Where do I rank? Did it hit profitability? Did the evals pass?

Give an agent that scoreboard and it runs for months.

Loops used to run for 30 minutes. These run for a year. Take a step, sleep, wake up next month, take another one.

You're basically hiring an agency that never sleeps, gets paid in tokens instead of invoices, and undoes its own mistakes when the number goes down.

Full episode on @startupideaspod

watch

[Riley Brown @rileybrown]

Niche personal tool that I built with 5.6 Sol this morning.

An exact clone of Excaladraw but it lets me create animated presentations that i can use in my videos...

And i love adding logos to my excaladraw so i added built in image search and background removal.

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

Anthropic engineer:

"You can build 5 assistants in one afternoon. Each one handles a task you've been doing manually every single day."

In 45 minutes he shows exactly how to do it from scratch, step by step.

Most people are still doing all of this by hand.

Watch the session, then save the guide below.

[blue @bluewmist]

be boring. wake up early. exercise. work. learn. do the boring things. find fun in them. stick to a schedule. do what you have to do, not what you want to. obsess about how youll get to where you want to be. don't waste your energy in anything that doesnt help you in the long run

[Robin Sharma @RobinSharma]

Agree? Name one area of your life that needs more of your attention right now. 👇🏽

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

The most influential immigrant group in American history is the one nobody argues about, because almost nobody remembers it was them.

Start at the beginning. The Continental Army was a half-trained mess until Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer, showed up at Valley Forge and drilled it into a real fighting force. The freedom of the press you take for granted traces back to John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant printer whose 1735 trial established that you can't be jailed for printing the truth. German-Americans were shaping this country before there was a country.

Then look around your own life. Your Christmas tree is German. The hot dog (Frankfurt), the hamburger (Hamburg), the pretzel, the delicatessen, all German. Kindergarten is German, the word and the idea, brought over and opened by Margarethe Schurz. Blue jeans came from Levi Strauss of Bavaria. Heinz ketchup, Steinway pianos, Oscar Mayer, and the big four beers, Budweiser, Pabst, Miller and Schlitz, were every one founded by German immigrants.

The Brooklyn Bridge was engineered by John Roebling, born in Prussia. The Santa Claus you picture every December, plus the Republican elephant, were drawn by Thomas Nast, a German immigrant. Pfizer was founded by Charles Pfizer, who arrived from Germany in 1848. Boeing was built by the son of a German immigrant. John Jacob Astor showed up from Germany with next to nothing and became America's first multimillionaire. Charles Steinmetz, a disabled immigrant nearly turned away at the border, went on to make modern electrical power possible.

And it kept going. Wernher von Braun designed the rocket that put America on the moon. Einstein was German. Carl Schurz, a refugee, became a Union general and the first German-born US Senator. Eisenhower commanded D-Day and won the White House under a name once spelled Eisenhauer. Babe Ruth was a German-American kid from Baltimore.

Here is the kicker. German is the single largest ancestry group in the entire United States, around 44 million people, bigger than Irish, English or Italian. The biggest thread in the whole American fabric, and somehow the quietest.

They never asked for parades. They just trained the army, freed the press, engineered the bridges, founded the companies, built the rockets and lit up the Christmas mornings, then blended in so completely you forgot they were ever the "other." That might be the most American story there is.

[philosophy for life @philosophy_life]

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience; this is the ideal life.”

- Mark Twain

[Leo | Phalanx Labs @SpartanPsyche]

A leader’s state becomes part of the room’s operating system. If he is frantic, everyone starts making smaller decisions. If he is reactive, everyone starts managing his mood instead of the mission. If he is grounded, people can think. Authority begins in the nervous system before it reaches the voice.

[deno @denohawari]

LLM SEO is becoming the fastest way to scale organically

our client went from $20K to $100K+ MRR in 4 months

most brands are relying on:

- expensive outreach
• paid ads with increasing CAC
• cold emails with poor deliverability

but these days, the highest-intent traffic comes from users searching on ChatGPT

a recent study showed traffic from LLMs convert at 18%

that’s higher than any other traffic source

this means if you’re not ranking there, you’re missing your most valuable users

I documented the entire process that helped our client 5x their revenue.

inside the document:

- how we captured high-intent “AI study tool” keywords
• the competitor displacement strategy behind 5K+ daily clicks
• how we rebuilt pages to win on depth and intent
• the backlink system that took them from DR 5 → 21
• how we layered LLM SEO for ChatGPT and AI visibility

SEO now drives 95%+ of their organic traffic, and it’s compounding month over month

want the complete playbook?

1. like + follow
2. comment “LLM”

and I’ll send it straight to your DMs

[Mike Brown @mbrown_co]

I found myself sitting in a circle of my peers at a personal development retreat, and the words surprised me as they came out of my mouth.

"I don’t love myself, and I don’t love my wife, and she doesn’t love me."

The tears that followed were even more surprising.

Where the hell did that come from? I was happy, wasn’t I?

⭕️ In this very raw episode of Inner Circle, Kevin (@Camp4) and I share our own stories of rebooting. We both burned a life that looked great on paper, but was suffocating from the inside.

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to start completely over, this one's for you.

👇 And if you've gone through your own reboot, we want to hear from you in the comments

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

Your farts are telling you something about your gut health.

Silent but deadly = bad sign.
Loud but odorless = good sign.

Here's why you should take it seriously:

[Parker @TheOtherParker_]

What a day for $STRC. When it rains it pours.

When panic is setting in, it helps to revisit the fundamentals of why you made the investment in the first place.

The main thing to focus on is that STRC is designed as a "bend, not break" instrument. Or, better yet, a "Stretch, not snap" instrument - yes, cringe.

First, let's get some facts out there:
1. Strategy's total annual cash outlays are about $1.7B for dividends and coupons. Most of that is for STRC dividends.

2. Strategy currently has $1.4B in cash, and raised $300M last week on the $MSTR ATM. They raised $100M each of the prior two weeks as well. The stock is still trading at a small premium to mNAV as of today. They have likely raised a few hundred million additional this week, maybe even $300M .

3. Strategy's converts have put dates mostly in mid 2028; however, a third of the converts are still trading at a premium to par, meaning they would be unlikely to be put.

4. Strategy has a number of mechanisms at their disposal to help bring the price of STRC back to par.

Ok, now for some additional thoughts:
1. The $1.7B that Strategy "owes" each year amounts to $33M/wk. The MSTR common traded $11B last week. $IBIT traded $6B last week. $BTC traded about $3B on Coinbase alone, while globally, traded multiples of that. If they need to raise $33M/wk, they can, basically forever. Even if they were just selling BTC and turned off the MSTR ATM, they'd be selling 545 BTC/wk at current BTC prices. They could do a mixture of MSTR ATM and BTC sales to spread it out. To put 545 BTC into perspective, so far in 2026, Strategy has acquired 174,863 BTC. So, if they simply sold what they acquired this year on a weekly basis, they could fund dividends and coupons for 74 months beyond the 10 months they already have - total of 84 months, or 7 years. What if BTC drops to $30k you say? They can fund things for 47 months, including existing cash, so 4 years. To be VERY CLEAR, this is only selling the BTC they bought this year, it leaves the other 672,500 BTC acquired prior to 2026 in tact. If you throw that all into the mix, they can fund cash needs for 31 and 16 years at $60k and $30k BTC respectively. If BTC is at $30k in 16 years, I think it is dead.

TL;DR - cash outlays aren't a problem. No "death spiral" is triggered from selling a few hundred BTC/wk.

2. The converts seem really scary, with put dates coming up in 2 years roughly. However, there are a few things to consider. First, with a volatile stock like MSTR, they can very likely refinance the converts with another convert that has a later put date, later maturity and lower strike price on the conversion price. This is due to the very high value of the imbedded option in the convert. There's some dilution there for the common holders, but not crazy, since it's somewhat offset by the elimination of the old converts. Based on today's prices and a 30% conversion premium, that would be about 10% in net additional shares issuable upon conversion of the new convert. If the common float doubles between now and that future conversion (very likely), that's only a 5% dilution. Not amazing, but also not horrible for the MSTR common holders. That 5-10% dilution would push back the conversion date by many years. Additionally, other companies have successfully swapped converts for preferreds in the past, e.g. Strive, so there's no reason that Strategy couldn't come to an arrangement there with a number of the convert investors.

TL;DR - the converts are not a huge problem and wouldn't require the company to come up with $6.7B in cash right on the spot.

3. Strategy has no margin debt. So, BTC could actually fall to $1 tomorrow and they would not be "liquidated". There is no liquidation price in the short-term. Period.

4. So, what is the "death" scenario for Strategy? Turns out, there's no killshot, just a slow bleed. Sure, if BTC falls to $20k and stays there for 6-7 years, then Strategy has a problem. But only at that point do they have a problem. If you think this is a realistic scenario, you should leave bitcoin immediately and short every company in crypto. Very few crypto businesses would survive that.

So, putting it all together, Strategy is specifically designed as an anti-fragile fortress for bitcoin accumulation. Sure, leverage creates some risk, but it is also the ONLY reason they are able to accumulate BTC. If they had zero leverage, then IBIT would be the better investment. Any big hedge funds that want to "liquidate" them would need to keep the price of BTC generationally low for over half a decade.

The biggest advantage that Strategy has is time. They can wait and be deliberate. To flip a common phrase on its head, Strategy can stay solvent MUCH longer than the market can stay irrational.

Now, regarding STRC specifically, this is Strategy's flagship product. If they stop paying the dividends on it, they lose S3 eligibility for a year. That's a HORRIBLE outcome, so they would only stop paying the dividend in the most dire of circumstances. In fact, very few preferred stock issues ever stop paying dividends, and most that do, do it because of bankruptcy.

They very much want to see STRC trading back at par, because it is their primary cash-raising mechanism for accumulating more BTC.

That does NOT mean they are going to panic, raise the dividend to 15%, and sell a bunch of BTC to buyback all the STRC. They have plenty of time, and as long as you don't sell, you have time too. You continue to collect the dividend that you signed up for, and likely an increased one as they increase the dividend over time. You still get $11.5 per year per share of STRC, regardless of the market price.

STRC can certainly go lower, but as long as you're not margined against it, it shouldn't really matter. It's very clear that Strategy has both the capacity and the desire to continue paying the dividends and ultimately support getting the price back to par. Maybe it takes a few weeks or maybe it takes a few months. STRC is a low time preference instrument issued by a low time preference company.

The important thing is, there's no "breaking point" anytime soon. BTC basically must completely fail before there's a "breaking point". There is certainly a "panic point" though for investors, and with STRC down almost 15% so far this week, nearly 3x worse than BTC, it's very clear we are at "panic point".

Ultimately, STRC was designed to remove the possibility of "breaking points". The goal is to "bend, not break".

"Stretch, not snap."

[Alex Lieberman @businessbarista]

I’m in a text group with 30 AI-pilled enterprise executives.

Someone in the group asked: “What is the highest ROI AI use case/initiative in your business?”

There were a ton of great answers, but mine was the 10x leverage engineers are getting from coding agents.

A group member asked me to explain what I meant. So I slacked two of our engineering leaders and said “Why are you guys so cracked?”

Here’s what one of them (@dan_zakon) said:

Software engineering is becoming more unrecognizable every day.

Historically, detailed system architecture planning was expensive and rarely done. “Agile development” became the industry buzzword to justify not planning upfront. Even the strongest engineers could not hold the whole file structure, code conventions, dependencies, edge cases, and product requirements in their head at once.

Now we spend 95% of the time and effort planning and 5% executing.

Over the past year at @tenex_labs, we’ve built custom tooling for structured engineering context that self-improves. It gives agents instant access to things like product intent, architecture, conventions, delivery workflows, and plans.

With this process, we use agents to map out whole systems far in advance with a level of coherence that used to be impossible.

Then the system can almost assemble itself. Long-running agents execute against the plans, implement scoped work, adhere to conventions, run tests, fix issues, update GitHub, sync Linear, refresh documentation, and revise the original plans as progress is made.

The result is a fundamentally different operating model for engineering.

Across Tenex, we are consistently proving it with small teams that are building complex, ambitious products in months.

Work that used to require huge teams, multi-year timelines, and massive coordination overhead is now becoming the baseline for what small, elite engineering teams can take on.