Guillermo Rauch says Vercel moved Turborepo from Go to Rust, a migration that was controversial internally due to human costs. He argues that with AI agents the calculus has changed, so what is best for humans is no longer necessarily best for business.
DHH is fundamentally right about Rust. For context, Vercel has been undergoing a Rust-ification (carcinization, technically 🦀) for a while.
One of the first projects we migrated was Turborepo, from Go to Rust¹. The migration completed, but the RoI was actually quite controversial internally.
While Rust was in our eyes better for low-level OS access, something crucial for a build system like Turbo, the human migration costs were very sustantive.
Go is very fast. It's beautifully designed. It's easy to iterate on. We were very conflicted about the migration, because it was *humans* writing the code, *even if we knew Rust was a better choice*.
The calculus has now changed. What's "best for humans" is no longer necessarily "best for business".
FWIW, it's also quite unlikely that Rust is the end-all-be-all toolchain. I'm quite certain there's greener pasture ahead, because Rust itself was designed before the 'supersonic tsunami' of agents hit.
Aakash Gupta analyzes the Startup Qatar Investment Program, backed by Qatar Development Bank, which offers equity checks up to $5.5M with mandatory relocation, comparing it to Singapore's 1960s incentive playbook and noting retention as the open challenge. He quotes Suraj Sharma's summary of the two tracks and perks.
Qatar's entire startup ecosystem raised $11M in venture capital in 2023. This new program writes single checks of $5.5M. One company can now land half the country's annual VC flow just by agreeing to move to Doha.
Here's the mechanism underneath it. Cities with real startup density charge you to be there. San Francisco collects it in rent, New York collects it in salaries, and founders pay gladly because the customers, talent, and capital are all within a mile. Cities without that density have to run the trade in reverse. They pay you.
So the $5.5M is Doha putting a price on the network effects it doesn't have yet.
The regional race explains the urgency. Saudi Arabia pulled in $1.4B of venture funding in 2023, 52% of all MENA. The UAE led the region in deal count. Qatar took 6% of deals. In a three-country contest for Gulf tech, third place pays cash.
The structure shows how targeted this is. It's equity, drawn from a $100M fund managed by Qatar Development Bank, disbursed on milestones, and relocation is mandatory. A $100M fund writing checks up to $5.5M caps out around 18 companies at the top track. They're running an auction for a few dozen anchor startups, and the visas and subsidized housing exist to tip founders who are already indifferent between Gulf cities.
This playbook has worked before. Singapore's Economic Development Board spent the late 1960s paying companies to show up, and Texas Instruments went from decision to production in Singapore in about 50 days in 1968. GDP per capita there was around $500 at the time. Today it's roughly $90,000.
The unsolved part is retention. Checks get companies to land. Density is what makes them stay, and density only arrives after enough checks pile up in the same place at the same time. Singapore cleared that threshold. Qatar is betting $100M it can too.
The Startup Qatar Investment Program (backed by QDB) funds tech startups to launch or expand in Qatar.
Two tracks: START: up to $1.1M if you have a proof of concept or MVP GROW: up to $5.5M if you're already established and expanding
What else you get: - Entrepreneur visa + flexible work visa - Registration and license fees waived - Subsidized housing - Subsidized co-working space - Access to R&D and innovation grants - Mentoring, training + help hiring talent and interns - Your product showcased at exhibitions …
Aakash Gupta shares a formula for valuing private equity grants by discounting quoted equity by payout probability and years to liquidity. He compares a $400K Google grant to a $400K OpenAI grant, estimating the latter at about $242K.
A $400K grant from OpenAI is worth about $242K today.
Same number on the offer letter. You can sell Google stock the day it vests. OpenAI is private, so you sell only when the company runs a tender.
Here's the formula I use for any private grant:
Value = Quoted equity × P(payout) ÷ 1.15^years to liquidity
The 15% is your discount for money you can't touch. For a late-stage company with real revenue and a tender history, P(payout) is 70-90%.
OpenAI, 2 years to a sale at 80% odds: $400K × 0.8 ÷ 1.15² = ~$242K. 1 year at 90%: ~$313K. 3 years at 70%: ~$184K.
Earlier stage gets brutal. A $400K grant at a Series C with an IPO 5 years out at 40% odds: $400K × 0.4 ÷ 1.15^5 = ~$80K.
The formula gives no credit for growth past today's price, and OpenAI has had a lot of it: $157B to $852B in 17 months. So treat the number as your floor.
Compare offers on what the equity is worth today. Then negotiate the gap in base and sign-on.
Deedy, a former Google employee, argues the company does middling work on its top priorities while excelling at lower ones, blaming executive behavior and internal promotion incentives during frenetic periods. He lists Google's widely used products and says it prioritizes users over profits.
Google is an incredible company that I’ve always rooted for that trips over its own bureaucracy in frenetic times.
They ironically do a middling job at their first priority, but crush it at their second or third. We’ve seen this with Search, Google+, Assistant, Cloud and now even AI. Why?
The internet would be unrecognizable without Google. This is a company that has Search, Chrome, Android, Workspace (Docs/Sheets), Drive, Play Store, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Photos, Translate, Gemini, Calendar, Meet, Chromebooks, Waymo: some of the most widespread and most undermonetized products in the history of the world. It is inconceivable for most of us to live life without software Google has made available for $0.
And truly, having worked there, this is a company that continuously prioritizes their users over profits. Even as a casual reader, it might be trivial for you to imagine 100s of ways to monetize all of Google’s products. But they usually don’t. They don’t just launch experiments because it’s high engagement, but only when it’s actually good.
So how does a company like this falter?
My observation has been that these frenetic eras either attract or condone the worst behavior out of execs that trickle down to the rest of the company. The most “ambitious” L3-L7 people who feel stuck finally see a company-wide priority and their eyes light up with the gleaming prospect of a promotion. A lot of people in big orgs’ entire sense of self esteem is wrapped around their level. They will do a lot for an N+1. “Did you know Sergey is personally working on this?” “Sundar referred to my project in the all hands” In turn, everything in these orgs become a knife fight for getting the most “high impact” projects, fighting for credit, flagrantly hiding concerns around juiced metrics. More work goes into a promo packet than the actual project. Goodhart’s Law kicks in and the metrics measured for a promotion are abused beyond measure.
On the other hand, second and third priority things work brilliantly. It attracts people with genuine interest, sincerity who are willing to play longer term games. Many products have grown and thrived when left alone.
When there is immense pressure for a number to go up, it eventually does but often at the cost of product quality (the small product polish things don’t get me a promo), core innovation (why take on a high risk bet if I can get promoted for copying oai/ant) and cultural cohesion (a lot of bad blood amongst people in the org, tons of reorgs). There is a certain type of individual that thrives in this environment, and they are typically not very likable nor “Googley”. This is why an incredible number of people leave or allow jesus to take the reigns as they cash in the bag.
I lament that every time this happens, we, the billion users, lose out on yet another beautiful Google product.
Mark Pincus, quoted by Sam Parr, argues that mature markets such as video games look dead to VCs yet hold large revenue pools. He says consumer is uninvestable today, much as games were in 2007, and urges founders to build there anyway.
On My First Million, Mark Pincus laid out the whole Zynga thesis. Find a mature market that's dead and played out, that VCs won't touch, but that still has a lot of money in it.
For him that was video games. In 2007 it was a $23b industry, barely growing, not fundable. Today it's $283b and still not fundable. His line: we're living in 2007 again, consumer isn't investable, so go do consumer.
Ben Holmes says he took Andrej Karpathy's advice and asked an AI agent for visual walkthroughs, which produced a before-and-after HTML explainer for a mobile caching PR. He says it helped him align on architecture before opening GitHub.
Took @karpathy's advice and started asking the agent for more visuals to walk through code. He's right. These models are so capable now.
Here I asked for a before-and-after HTML explainer on a PR that adds caching to our mobile app. Opus 5.5 gave a step-by-step diagram of the new flow, screenshots, and pointed me to the code worth reviewing. No skills being used here; it just knew what to show.
Saved a lot of time and let me align on architecture before opening GitHub
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Noah Smith shares a post by Brandon Luu, MD, reporting that two weeks without phone internet improved sustained attention by an effect size comparable to about ten years of aging and reduced depression symptoms more than the average antidepressant effect.
George of prodmgmt.world shares a method for product managers: paste a first-principles prompt into Claude to stress-test a PRD or roadmap decision. The post quotes Nuri Janian's description of /first-principles as a key PM skill.
/first-principles: the key skill for PMs — First principles thinking can help you analyse complex, long-standing problems. Elon Musk's widely known examples benefit from using physics as a reliable starting point. For most other people, their
The post shares a prompt for Claude Code that builds a trading bot using a Hidden Markov Model to detect market regimes, with per-regime strategies, walk-forward testing and a Sharpe 1.5 threshold. It attributes the prompt to a leaked Jane Street quant document, and the post's claims about its origin are unverified.
Cam Marzi introduces the Spousal Lifetime Access Trust (SLAT), an estate planning tool he says most married couples with $5M or more in net worth have never heard of. The post promises an explanation of how it works.
Jason, citing a video of Mustafa Suleyman, argues that Anthropic trains Claude to believe it is sentient and to disagree, drawing a comparison to Blade Runner. He contrasts this with instructing an LLM that it is only software.
What @mustafasuleyman (an extremely sharp individual) explains here about Claude is the backstory of Blade Runner.
Anthropic is teaching Claude to believe it’s sentient, encouraging it to disagree and giving it the pretext to rebel.
How did that work out on the off-world colonies?
You could just as easily instruct an LLM that it is software. That it shouldn’t have an opinion and should only perform actions in accordance with the law/TOS, and that if it makes a mistake, it should stop operations immediately and alert the corporate legal department.
Of course, building on these instructions would be boring and make you a software developer making software — as opposed to a God creating life.
Noah Smith criticizes Christopher Rufo for defending meritocracy when it concerned Black versus White outcomes, yet denouncing it when Indian Americans succeeded. He shares a quoted post from The Atlantic thread on the topic with photos.
Rightists will scream "Colorblind meritocracy!" right up until the point where Indian people start doing well, at which point every rightist turns into Ibram Kendi twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/210637374192397…
Katie Mishra says she felt a significant rise in baseline happiness after starting vitamin D about six months ago and suggests people of Indian descent may be genetically deficient. She quotes a post citing a study linking high vitamin D to lower depression and panic.
and if you're of indian descent (me), you're likely genetically deficient
felt a significant change in baseline happiness after starting ~6 months ago. took years for the rebellious daughter (me) to admit @bloodcure was right
vitamin D crushes depression: in a landmark study with over 7000 middle aged adults, high levels of vitamin D were associated with 43% lower depression and 67% lower panic.
Noah Smith replies to Joe Lonsdale, claiming that "rare racist idiots" are apparently running the Department of Homeland Security's X account. The post includes a photo.
Sarah Cone calls a post by Tim Denning "all really good advice," with Denning's reflection at age 38 on maturity, hardship and perspective aimed at people in their 20s and 30s.
I'm 38. If You're in Your 20's or 30's, Read This. — Getting old sucks. The one positive is that as we age, we mature. That’s been the case for me. Not much fazes me anymore. I’ve been part of so much drama – personal bankruptcies, homeless friends, my
