I'm squarely in the camp of believing that there is an insatiable demand for software, and until that stops, software engineers are going to be in overwhelmingly short supply in the long term. AI is forcing companies to recalibrate their resources (we're all seeing that now with layoffs and freezes), but once AI is more-or-less saturated among most companies, hiring more engineers will, once again, be the only way to build more product than the competition. And yes, being better than the competition is all that matters. Not being better than the competition 2 years ago. The pre-AI world is gone and not coming back. Readjust your expectations. Companies that think they'll be able to last with tiny headcounts are going to get crushed by the companies who choose to grow and force AI adoption across large teams. Yes, there's a brief period where adoption hasn't fully hit yet, but once it has, the low water mark for productivity will adjust and you still need more people to build more product, unless you have some secret AI sauce that no one else has access to (indie solopreneur building saas products, that's not you!).

Amazed Silicon Valley (the show) didn't call this one. Would've been a great episode.

You can go to a rural Polish town, 50 miles outside of Kraków, and the cab driver will be playing Taylor Swift (and humming along!). There are more McDonald's per capita in Qatar than there are in the UK. Every cosmopolitan area in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Beijing looks like it could be NYC. Pretty much everything high status there is from the U.S. Europe probably most of all! English is the dominant language worldwide. America has won a complete cultural victory. Yet, while people play American music, buy American products, use American software, those same people think of America as some sort of dystopia. All the while, Europeans tithe >50% of their paychecks to the government so everyone who stopped working 30 years ago can afford their flat in the middle of Paris while hardworking parents with kids scrape by, live in apartments 30 miles outside the city and commute 2 hours to work every day. Crime everywhere. Seeing any specialist M.D. requires sitting on a waitlist for 6+ months. So if someone says they "hate America", they either: 1) have never been to the U.S. and/or have no idea what they're talking about 2) are secretly jealous but it's cool to hate America, so they put on an act 3) have been brainwashed (sadly this applies to a lot of Americans as well, who seem to hate themselves...I will never understand this) If more people around the world embraced American ideals, it would be a far more prosperous, ambitious, and optimistic place.

I think we're going to look back on this as the top.

Oh my.

I always enjoy checking out WSB on days like these. Someone YOLO'd $10m on $RDDT right before earnings. …they've lost about $5m.

Exhibit 1823749 re: why software engineers don't have to worry about being replaced. I was offhandedly describing to a friend how we have systems in place to detect when things break in production. Their response was "wait, why would anything break?" Oh, my sweet summer child.

I would strongly consider uninstalling any third party js right now if I were you. Especially if it comes from a startup. Analytics, monitoring, etc are all massive site takeover risks. If you use a tracking script from a third party SaaS, then if they get hacked the hackers have total control over your site too. This is what took down Polymarket today. They used a tiny script from a SaaS that tracks page load speed. That company got hacked, and the hackers subsequently stole millions from Polymarket users. If you want to use analytics safely, I would use a product that lets you pin the tracking script and control when it changes. Most of the mature products support this, e.g. Sentry, Amplitude, PostHog, Mixpanel, Heap. If not, you need to trust the company behind it a lot... Railway got hacked last week. Railway! That's a very competent team, with particularly strong infra chops. The agent swarms are on another level. A typical analytics company is nowhere near as sophisticated. You should ask yourself: do I trust this company's security more than Railway? I was an analytics CTO in a past life, and I will be the first to admit: we had some great people but we were not on this level. We (Detail) just uninstalled our session replay, which was a product I loved but is not worth the risk right now. I hate to write this because I spent a good chunk of my 20s benefitting from product teams taking a chance on a nothing startup and installing our js on their site. But in the past two weeks this risk vector has exploded. It's better for the ecosystem if we move away from third party js as fast as we can.

I might just be bearish Google for how bad Google Ads is as an advertiser. It's almost like the product is designed to be your enemy. They provide a "optimization" score that's totally arbitrary. If you apply one of their suggestions, score go up. You might think: "Oh, this score going up must be good for me." NO. That would be WRONG. You shouldn't focus on this score at all. If you did, you would bankrupt yourself. Usually, the recommendations are obscene. For example, I just got one the other day that flagged that I'm losing traffic in a certain campaign. The suggestion? Reduce tROAS to 80% from 200%. Like, duh, of course I could do that, but then I would lose a shit ton of money. Oh, but my optimization score would go up 5%?! Sounds like a great deal. Or, a week ago, Google Ads suggested I raise my budget on one of our campaigns to $440 to make sure we don't miss spikes in traffic. Ok, fine. It's a tROAS campaign, so whatever. It probably won't hit the budget anyways. Today I find out that campaign's status is now "Eligible (Limited) - Limited by Search Volume". Can you guess what Google wants me to do? They now want me to make all my keywords broad match, because the campaign is not able to spend the budget without expanding its reach… Literally can't make this up. It's so dumb. And all the people from Google who try to help you will probably make everything worse. Everything we've done based on their suggestions has tanked our performance compared to what we've discovered or done internally. I don't know what's going on over there, but it seems to be pretty broken.

Good reminder that ~all of generative AI is in some sense adversarially optimized for you to think it is better than it is (via pre-training, via RLHF, via hill-climbing benchmarks). or as nostalgebraist puts it:

Without looking it up, can you circle where Proxima Centauri is in this photo of the Alpha Centauri star system? Please don't look in replies unless you have a guess. Some hints: it's a red dwarf, and the binary system consisting of Alpha Centauris A and B is the bright blue in top left. (tbh this probably won't help you 🤣)

The Boorong clan (an indigenous tribe in Australia) named the Alpha Centauri system after two brothers named Bermbermgle, who speared and killed a giant, flesh-eating emu named Tchingal. Now what I don't understand is how they knew that this star system was binary. The distinction between Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman is indistinguishable to the naked eye. You can barely even tell it's a binary system with high fidelity instrumentation! Did people who lived for generations in the Australian outback somehow hone their night vision to such an extent where they could tell this big blue star was actually a binary system? (also, myths are weird. i find it really interesting that one of their deepest fears was being eaten by an emu…)

Hearing a lot less chatter about companies growing revenue quickly. Probably nothing.

This is a bit of a meta comment, but I find it funny that there are still some people who number their tweet threads like it's 2016.

$GOOG missed EPS targets by 28%. Getting hit hard in after hours.

This is a list of the richest people in 1989. I would never have guessed a single one outside of Sam Walton. The world has changed a lot in 40 years.

Anyone else feel like Cursor marketing has died since the SpaceXAI acquisition? I see mentions way less often on the timeline. Also haven't seen an in-house model release since Composer 2.5, which was released May 18, 2026. And hardly any new notable features. Everything ok over there?

Despite all of Harvey/Legora’s success, Ive never seen slower/poorer service from lawyers This is consistent across every GP I speak with…AI isnt producing a better output Given legal is furthest ahead in vertical AI adoption, itll be interesting to see if this holds elsewhere

These people are psychopaths. lesswrong.com/posts/9PiLfo6i…