Baxter Black

Webp(ug)

[Baxter Black @webpug]

@latent_drift i've never thought privacy was actually something people valued enough to pay for but would always say that they care a lot about if you ask them....what's that called cognitive dissonance?

[Baxter Black @webpug]

@signulll monarch is pretty solid for personal finance

[Baxter Black @webpug]

love this!

[Scree @latent_drift]

the first field note is live!

Cascadia, Seattle, maps, mountains, ai gravity, civic frustration, and why critique should start from attachment rather than contempt

the terrain is shifting

https://t.co/d9As31w5Zn

[Baxter Black @webpug]

@fortelabs @ohamaruri it's markdown...just ask cc to explain it to you

[signüll @signulll]

kinda fascinating ppl are so gung ho on llm psychosis but readily either ignore or simply do not realize the prevalence of tiktok & insta psychosis in everyday ppl already at scale.

[Madrona @MadronaVentures]

We're proud to continue supporting @axiommathai as they go after one of the most important unsolved problems in applied AI. Congratulations to the whole team.

[Crediful @crediful]

@chamath Washington has rejected an income tax at the ballot box 10 times. The legislature passed it anyway and included language to block a referendum. That part of the story deserves more attention.

[aviel @aviel]

Given that we're now hours away from a vote that will forever change Washington State, I might as well do some truthmaxxing.

The income tax is not a doomsday job destroyer. Those jobs are going away whether or not this bill passes. The only real choice is whether we manage the transition well or employ bad tax policy to make it near impossible.

With AI, what's collapsing isn’t just "knowledge work", it’s "process work". A huge number of jobs (and even companies) existed to serve workflows, not outcomes.

In the age of software, busy work changed and knowledge work expanded. In the age of AI, busy work will be gone and knowledge will be democratized. That’s the nuance too many people are missing... and it's huge.

This transition is going to be brutal. The workforce will be smaller and many careers built around managing process rather than producing outcomes are already ending. This is happening now.

And cities like Seattle are especially exposed. Bad policy has already begun pushing out innovators and now our biggest employers are no longer AI durable business, but instead are universities and healthcare systems who have a huge concentration of process-heavy work that is under serious pressure.

I still think that there’s a way through this and that the democratization of knowledge work will unlock a new wave of innovation, but places that try to tax, regulate, or moralize their way around this instead of helping people transition are going to get crushed. That transition is also NOT through increased government spending from higher taxes.

Let's please not get crushed.

[adam (6’4) 🇺🇸 @personofswag]

i am taking up drinking because of claude code

i need my brain to be able to surf manifolds in latent spaces which remain inscrutable to LLMs

[GeekWire @geekwire]

Trending: In new letter to governor, Seattle tech leaders say income tax proposal will hurt region’s AI innovation https://t.co/xfeqoo9CJB

[Matt McIlwain @mattmcilwain]

My life’s work has been to maximize the size of the pie for the innovation economy: better, bigger outcomes for founders, company builders, and the entire region. For 26 years, I’ve strived to build a vibrant startup ecosystem here in Washington, and I’m very concerned that a state income tax would not only crush the innovation economy that Washington has come to take for granted but also fail to achieve its stated goals.

Today, I published an op-ed in @GeekWire laying out my concerns in detail.

First, we need to clear the air on the narrative being used. The term “millionaire’s tax” itself is inaccurate. Let’s be clear: this new tax is an income tax. No income tax in history has ever stopped at just high earners. The legislature is trying to convince you otherwise, but their own track record proves otherwise: they’ve raised gas taxes, payroll taxes, revenue (B&O) taxes, and capital gains taxes. In Olympia, it’s never enough! They are trying to claim that an income tax won’t broadly expand in a future “emergency,” but it is folly to trust them on something with such severe risks.

My inspiration for expanding the pie is derived from my own direct life experiences. My mom never went to college, and my dad was the first in his family to attend college. They met in the U.S. Army, and both worked incredibly hard to provide an opportunity for our family, which paved the way for me to study and work hard. Twenty-six years ago, I took the greatest risk of my life to move our young family from Georgia to Seattle to join a fledgling investment firm backing founders right as the dot-com bubble burst! Our firm, Madrona, helped founders prioritize, cut costs, and survive a true economic crisis exacerbated by 9/11. Founder resilience produced amazing success stories that contributed back to Washington state in countless ways. Now, many of those entrepreneurs have left the state for other regions that are more supportive of their contributions.

Everyone deserves an opportunity to realize their full potential in life and earn the benefits from their hard work and risk-taking. Most who succeed choose to be very generous with their time, talents, and resources in the communities where they live.

If state political leaders try to paper over bad economic policy with yet more taxes, those taxpayers will simply leave for a different state, meaning the state still won’t get the additional tax revenues they seek, and the innovation economy will be much worse for it.

Ultimately, this income tax would serve to divide the pie rather than expand it. It would drive innovators away from Washington and leave us significantly weaker — and poorer!

Sadly, that is not a narrative but a reality the state will have to live with forever if they create an income tax today.

https://t.co/MR8fw53Nhj

[Baxter Black @webpug]

@genericaf123 @kimmonismus i feel similarly

[Rahul Sood 🏴‍☠️ @rahulsood]

https://t.co/lqII4S7fPh

[Vivek Ramaswami @vivekramaswami]

So cool to see what's possible in Recraft V4 📸

A model with exceptional visual taste, prompt accuracy, and aesthetic judgment, its the ONLY AI model that generates editable vector files from a prompt.

More below!

[Baxter Black @webpug]

@itsalltruffles decentralized compute paradigm was first introduced to me by @realGeorgeHotz through tinygrad/box -- excited to see someone taking the torch and runnning toward a more affordable (usable too i assume) consumer version

[aviel @aviel]

Friends, Washington State SB 6229 (removes QSBS) is moving forward. No matter where you stand on raising income for the State, we cannot let this move forward as it will both decrease funding and damage an already struggling startup ecosystem. Our legislature is trying to kick us while we're down (startup formation is already in an absolute free fall) and we need your help to make sure that they know that.

Please email Senators and their legislative aides. Below are links to a sample letter and their contact information.

Personal outreach matters. Tell your startup story:

Why did you choose Washington?
Why this company?
How long have you been building it?
What does it mean to you and your team?
How would a 9.9% tax on QSBS impact your future here?

Senators: https://t.co/kO77ZWYRgO

Sample Letter: https://t.co/6YcLotSOtf

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Today, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding: the ruling that served as the basis for limits on tailpipe emissions and power plant rules. Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.

[Ed Elson @edels0n]

The Dow just fell below 50,000

[Matt McIlwain @mattmcilwain]

We’re excited to announce that we have led Scala’s Seed round today as the company emerges from stealth. We’ve known @rajeev_singh and Ardie Sameti for years.

Across multiple companies and operating roles, Raj has demonstrated judgment and vision at scale. His ability to navigate complexity, build durable systems, and grow companies amid technological shifts. Ardie brings deep operator experience inside large-scale contact center environments, with firsthand insight into how fragmented tools obscure understanding and make decisive action harder than it should be. Scala grew out of lived experience inside the systems it is now reimagining, not from abstract theorizing.

Contact centers are becoming one of the earliest proving grounds for how humans and AI will operate together inside real organizations. As AI accelerates the speed and scale of work, complexity increases rather than disappears. Leaders have more data than ever, yet less shared understanding of what is actually happening across systems, teams, and automation. Against this backdrop it has never been more valuable to have an intelligence layer that helps people reason about their operations — and enable deliberate action.

Scala is building that layer and we are excited to join our friends at Fuse in backing them at day 1.

In an era defined by reasoning systems and rapidly compounding change, founders who combine domain insight with technological imagination matter more than ever. We’re proud to partner with Ardie, Raj, and the Scala team for the long journey ahead.
https://t.co/KMIoeUA70v

[Pedro Domingos @pmddomingos]

Culture does not grow over Zoom.