Where Ideas Thrive

The WSJ recently published a pair of articles (here and here) talking about where the US is growing and shrinking — through charts. The three components of this are domestic migration, international migration, and births minus deaths. One of the key themes for the year ending in June 2025 is that the country is seeing significantly less international migration. According to the WSJ, more people moved out of the US than moved in last year for the first time since the Great Depression.Internati...

A fully functional upgrade that brings native privacy to data, identity, and computation to mainnet alpha.

Gameweek 31 was dominated by non-EPL football as Manchester City and Arsenal locked horns in the Carabao Cup final. However, while most eyes were on Wembley, so many EPL games played out in very interesting fashion. European chasers secured crucial victories, relegation stragglers continued the battle for survival, and we had another Tyne-Wear derby. Here are all the winners and losers from a fascinating gameweek of football.Losers: Tottenham Hotspur F.C.Yeah, so here is the thing: Tottenham ...

A New Benchmark for AI Fluent OrganizationsYesterday, the team at Zapier released their new AI fluency rubric.Wade Foster@wadefoster Today we released our new AI Fluency Rubric. We use it for every hire, focusing on what they’ve actually built. Last May we open-sourced V1. Hundreds of companies used it to screen candidates and develop teams. It worked. But the floor moved fast. An updated look at the 32:00 PM · Mar 31, 2026 · 9.49K Views4 Replies · 11 Reposts · 114 Likes A few things you’ll n...

The First VolunteersShanidar 1 couldn’t have survived without help. He suffered a severe blow to the head, lost his right arm at the elbow, sustained damage to his right leg, and experienced progressive, profound deafness. There were no pain meds. Only cold, and cave bears looking for easy prey. And yet, Shanidar 1 lived to around fifty years old, which in the Ice Age made him ancient. He could not hunt. He could not carry. He probably could not even chew tough meat. And yet, morning after mo...

Our mission is to build a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. In 2025, we set out to grow this economy across five pillars: builders, apps, ownership, markets, and bringing everyone onchain. We processed over $17T in stablecoin volume across 26 local currencies and 17 countries. We became the #1 onchain venue for BTC spot trading. We launched and grew the Base App in 140+ countries. We funded 50+ teams through Base Batches and saw new crypto native markets emerg...

Last year i built an ai biographer for my parents. I wanted to capture their life stories and learn about ai voice. With my friend Avi, we built an agent that would talk to my mom and dad on the phone and it was trained to ask them personalized questions about their life. After each “chapter” was completed a separate agent would write it up Walter Isaacson style for everyone to read so people could follow along as the stories were told. Since then we have been experimenting with new ways to c...

In the olden days here in Toronto, approved development land used to sell for a premium compared to unapproved land. This was true because approved land meant you could start construction much sooner. And since time has value, this was worth something. Today, this is far less valuable to developers (if at all) because, in most cases, the market does not support new construction. So, the land may be approved, but what does one do with it? Rather than speed, I would say that the most valuable f...

Adopting an Engineering MindsetOver the past 2 years, I’ve been aggressively leaning AI. While a lot of people might presume that this means I’m simply throwing myself into the newest tools of the day, I’ve found that the bigger benefit has not been about learning new tools — or even the productivity gains. It’s been learning how to think like an engineer. Here are the four core skills that I’ve noticed myself applying more liberally than ever before in my career:Decomposition: Taking a big p...

I no longer have a home on the internet. My online identity exists in fragments spread across various platforms, most of which are walled gardens. My home first existed in AOL and my AIM profile. My friends and I loved them and it’s how we’d express who we were online. Then it shifted to MySpace. Then Facebook. Then Tumblr. Then Twitter. Then Instagram. Then my blog. Also LinkedIn. It’s everywhere. I don’t have a single place I can drive people to. It used to be my blog, but that’s just the t...

Aave V4 is now live for over 20 assets across three initial liquidity hubs. The launch includes a new interface called Aave Pro.

As I write these words, sitting across from me is a man worth billions. He’s in a plain white t-shirt, black shorts, and sandals, sipping a three-dollar coffee, no different from mine....

Back in the MTV days, a "music video" meant a six-figure check, a crew of forty, and three months of post-production hell. Now those types of budgets are quickly ending.

29 Seconds of Farcaster ... What did you miss this weekend? @nickysap released a new Farcaster client with built-in audio spaces | https://farcaster.xyz/rish/0xb56d9f83 @unooo.eth is headed in a different direction from Farcaster client to Makechain client. I'd love to explain what that means, but I can't 🤷‍♂ | https://farcaster.xyz/christopher/0xc6cb67c2 Farcaster Agentic Bootcamp starts today, who's in? | https://farcaster.xyz/limone.eth/0xc2eef950 Degen NFTs were revealed ... saw some on ...

Our portfolio company Tasklet is a platform for making agents that do things for you. USV uses it to create agents that automate a lot of work for us. This post, which I mentioned last week, explains how USV uses Tasklet. Recently, Tasklet launched a feature called Task Computer which is a Linux computer in the cloud that can do things for you and automate them. My wife, The Gotham Gal, is using Task Computer to log into her Instagram account, go to her Instagram Collections, and pull out all...

Bruno Carvalho has just published a new book that is right in the wheelhouse of this blog. It's called The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World. The book starts in the mid-18th century with cities like Lisbon, Paris, and London. However, more than being just a history of cities, it is (from what I've read) the story of how city builders throughout history have tried to predict and create the future, only to often get it wrong. In the words of Carvalho (via CityLab)...

A dozen years ago, a guy named Paul started walking the earth and writing letters. This isn’t biblical though. It’s a NatGeo mashup of anthropology and slow journalism. Beginning in Ethiopia, he recently made it to the far North of the Americas. This travelogue isn’t any old walk mind you, but an effort to retrace the steps homo sapiens took out of Africa across the other major land masses that make up our terrestrial existence on our home planet. Every few months, I’ll poke my head into that...

I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff? But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built. It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the...

Dreamer which launched just a month ago by Hugo Barra and David Singleton got execu-hired by Meta and joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs. I'm also very piqued by Littlebird with its 'agent-on-a-shoulder' approach via 'screen reading'. Whilst Anthropic definitely impacted its fans by tightening Claude's usage during peak hours, both OpenAI and Zhipu responding with increased rate limits and in the case of Zhipu launch of GLM-5.1 exclusively for now via its coding plan and showing via its ben...

This week I'm studying Ukrainian Drone Development, and how rapid learning is life or death.