Notes from
the operating table.
Long-form thinking on the stuff we live in when we’re not shipping for clients — crypto, AI, and tech. Operator-grade analysis, not hot takes.
Home Assistant went from 69,000 installs to 660,000. The board it runs on went from $120 to $305.
Operators who can now write their own software need somewhere to run it that they own, and the demand is measurable. So is the obstacle: the same AI buildout that made the software nearly free is bidding against them for the memory to run it. Raspberry Pi's price increase works out to exactly $5 per gigabyte.
Kalshi bans athletes from trading their own games. Nobody has written the rule for a company that can make it rain.
Every prediction market bars the people who can move the outcome. That rule has always worked because influence left a record. A funded weather-modification industry breaks the assumption — not because seeding is powerful, but because its effect is invisible at exactly the resolution a contract settles at. You cannot prove you made it rain. You also cannot prove you didn't.
Humane raised $230M and shipped 10,000 units. A $600K Indiegogo is still selling e-paper phones.
The AI hardware that tried to replace your software is dead. The hardware that reshapes software you already run is a business. What changed isn't the silicon — the software layer went free, so the only thing left to sell is a physical decision about what the device will not do.
Your bank pays 0.38%. The same dollar, elsewhere, holds four jobs at once.
A savings account gives your money one job and pays 0.38% for it. On Coinbase that same dollar can earn passthrough Treasury yield, get lent at credit risk, secure a loan you never sold to take, or buy a house — sometimes at the same time. What each one pays, where it comes from, and what Congress is doing about it.
Agent skills run with your permissions. Nobody's checking them.
We ran 32 of the most-starred agent skills through a security scanner. Popularity told us almost nothing about safety — and there's no trust layer for any of it. Here's what we found, and why it's a category waiting to happen.
The open-source signal — and the market data hiding behind no API
We read GitHub's trending charts like a dashboard. This month they're screaming one thing — and there's a platform with no official API quietly sitting on a market-moving data feed.
Marketing automation without enterprise pricing
You don't need HubSpot, Marketo, or a six-figure annual contract to automate your marketing. Here's how we build a full stack priced around what each client actually uses.