I spent $1.5M building our office after raising a seed round. My co-founder thought I was crazy. Here's what changed his mind... 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭: After our seed round, I looked at our team. Mostly immigrants. Working 6-day weeks. Building something incredibly hard. The office wasn't just where they worked. It was becoming their home. So I made a bet, what if we actually designed for that? The requirements I gave our real estate agent: - Shower (for ocean swims between meetings) - as close to the beach as possible, ability to quickly go surfing/kiting etc. - Big enough kitchen for a chef - Room for an actual sauna People thought I was building a vacation house, I thought: I am building a place worth the sacrifice. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤: - Found one of SF's best real estate lawyers. Negotiated hard. - Negotiated Tenant Improvements + First year for free - Effective cost: $250k (not $1.5M) Then I was extremely prescriptive with design and construction. No endless back-and-forth. I drew what I wanted. Told them to build it. Cut iteration time by 80%. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭: - Nordic vibes (keeping our European souls) - Industrial kitchen - Sauna room (yes, like our product: sauna.ai) - Ocean access - Space that feels like home Conclusions: - This "expensive" decision already paid for itself. - In SF, recruiters charge $100k per engineer. We've closed multiple hires -because candidates walked in and said: "I want to work here." But the real ROI isn't only financial. It's this: - We do Friday AMA as a BBQs on the beach. - People actually use the surfboards. - The team's lifestyle supports the intensity of the work. EVERYONE WANTS IN, doesnt matter if events, hiring or using the space as coworking (@bertie_ai and I open it up for our portfolio companies) My co-founder's response after 3 months: "You were right." Some founders optimize for low burn rate. I optimize for: Can great people sustain this pace for years? Because great companies aren't built in one sprint. They're built by people who can go the distance. We're hiring: wordware.ai/careers (Comment if you want intros to our real estate agent, lawyers or construction team - happy to connect)

I spent $1.5M building our office after raising a seed round. My co-founder thought I was crazy. Here's what changed his mind... 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭: After our seed round, I looked at our team. Mostly immigrants. Working 6-day weeks. Building something incredibly hard. The office wasn't just where they worked. It was becoming their home. So I made a bet, what if we actually designed for that? The requirements I gave our real estate agent: - Shower (for ocean swims between meetings) - as close to the beach as possible, ability to quickly go surfing/kiting etc. - Big enough kitchen for a chef - Room for an actual sauna People thought I was building a vacation house, I thought: I am building a place worth the sacrifice. 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤: - Found one of SF's best real estate lawyers. Negotiated hard. - Negotiated Tenant Improvements + First year for free - Effective cost: $250k (not $1.5M) Then I was extremely prescriptive with design and construction. No endless back-and-forth. I drew what I wanted. Told them to build it. Cut iteration time by 80%. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭: - Nordic vibes (keeping our European souls) - Industrial kitchen - Sauna room (yes, like our product: sauna.ai) - Ocean access - Space that feels like home Conclusions: - This "expensive" decision already paid for itself. - In SF, recruiters charge $100k per engineer. We've closed multiple hires -because candidates walked in and said: "I want to work here." But the real ROI isn't only financial. It's this: - We do Friday AMA as a BBQs on the beach. - People actually use the surfboards. - The team's lifestyle supports the intensity of the work. EVERYONE WANTS IN, doesnt matter if events, hiring or using the space as coworking (@bertie_ai and I open it up for our portfolio companies) My co-founder's response after 3 months: "You were right." Some founders optimize for low burn rate. I optimize for: Can great people sustain this pace for years? Because great companies aren't built in one sprint. They're built by people who can go the distance. We're hiring: wordware.ai/careers (Comment if you want intros to our real estate agent, lawyers or construction team - happy to connect)

👀 Animals have been assigned. Scheduled to print fall 2026! We have iterated on this with over 3k students (and continue to do so). We give our students access to the full draft as part of our evals course (link in bio).

If you live in an HTTP world use HTTP caching - that’s ETags and conditional requests. The query you never see is free.

I learned this when I was 20. It's not hard to start. There are 2 types of queries: reads and writes. Most of your queries are reads, handle those first. Do this, in order: 1/ Reduce reads - Cache, cache, cache. Use read-thru and write-thru caching. Use Redis. 2/ Optimize slow reads - Add indexes. Fix your N+1 queries. Add limits. Sort responsibly. Alert on slow queries. 3/ Scale hardware - Add read replicas. Upgrade memory & I/O. 4/ Split up data - Shard when you have to. Partition writes when needed (you won’t need it). Understand “good enough”. A single write instance is fine for most people. And if it's not slow, leave it alone!

I have no understanding of database scaling. How many queries is too many, 1k/second? 10k/s?

Excited to announce the release of pg_lake which lets you: - Manage Iceberg tables directly in Postgres - Query raw data files in your data lake - Flexibly data import/export Repo at: github.com/snowflake-labs/pg… Announce post: snowflake.com/en/engineering…

Always give your opponent respect (even though you think they are an idiot)! You wanna crush them but you should also always expect them to play the best move! No hope chess.

New Stanford+Anthropic paper shows long step-by-step prompts can break model safety and trigger harmful answers. 😟 Long reasoning can quietly neutralize safety checks that people assume are working. The trick adds a benign puzzle and long reasoning before the harmful ask, plus a final answer cue. This shifts attention to the puzzle tokens, so the harmful span gets less weight. The internal safety direction weakens, and the refusal behavior drops. Middle layers carry safety strength, later layers carry the final decision, both shrink with longer chains. Switching off key attention heads lowers refusals further, which matches the theory. On a public model, short reasoning hit 27% attack success, long reasoning reached about 80%. Across frontier systems, the method hits up to 99% success. So scaled reasoning boosts accuracy but also opens a new jailbreak path. ---- Paper – arxiv. org/abs/2510.26418 Paper Title: "Chain-of-Thought Hijacking"

We used Kafka + Flink + ScyllaDB for a project that emitted 1 record every 5 minutes instead of Spring + Postgres Why? so we could flex our "realtime data stack" and get promoted faster It worked.

Today at 2pm EST, Boston will consider becoming the first major city in the world to ban fully autonomous vehicles based entirely on vibes. Waymo is involved in 5X fewer injury-causing collisions than humans, and employment in SF's taxi and limo industry grew by 7% last year!

the only correct take [and incoming essay] on the dbt + fivetran merger

So today i had to completely reinstall my laptop for reasons. I started installing following Arch (btw)'s user guide, and as always, bumped into various issues. Then I decided to let gpt5 guide me. It's been the easiest arch install I've had. We're truly living in the future!

Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) is getting into nicotine. "Basically, America smoked its way to being the dominant hyperpower. It kept people focused, it kept people fit. It's an appetite suppressant. "I'm becoming more and more convinced that the health benefits of not smoking have not been properly traded against the health problems caused by the resulting eating." "I think the crazy version of this is we'd all be better off with lung cancer eventually, but fit until then." "Is vaping worse than being fat? I don't know. I struggle. Based on the evidence I've seen."

You can't keep doing this.