molsongolden

There are much cheaper ways to acquire a bank charter though?

Agreed and I think the author agrees with this too. One of the ideas is that the devs should be discussing and documenting their intent outside of the code then letting AI tools generate the code as specified. "Engineering" should occupy the time that was previously occupied by "coding" and the context and writing should exist as intentional written context, not just poorly documented code.

I wonder if the reception is so variable due to differing exposure to 1) infra as code and 2) engineering teams that don't produce any artifacts outside of their code.

When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and their human docs. What problem was the system originally built to solve? What was the original design, and what were its biggest problems? Who is currently using it? If you know these, reading the code is much easier because you can guess why things were done the way they are.

This is the way but plenty of engineering teams don't have any human docs at all. Decisions are made in one engineer's head or in a chat that isn't saved. The spec was just a few notes in a ticket that was deleted during cleanup or lost when the team changed trackers. There's no map of the codebase or features, no ADRs, minimal observability. All you have is the code. You read the code to try and figure out what is going on then ping an engineer who made a recent commit to a specific area to ask if they remember why something was done the way it was. Someone makes a change and it breaks something on the other side of the codebase that they thought was totally unrelated, etc.

I think the point is that there are better engineering artifacts to review instead of lines of code. Encoding the decisions, structure, requirements, testing, monitoring, then reviewing those and having AI generate and regenerate code based on them. The code itself doesn't matter if enough thought and rigor has gone into the structure that produces the code.

What does "ideal" mean here? When I was growing up "show your work" was the rule for all examinations. Why? Because we're working to improve mental models and thought processes for the next generation, not just products we will release tomorrow.

They're saying that the mental models and thought processes are incredibly important but that code is not the place for that work to live.

Has anyone seen evidence of lower levels in other countries? I searched for recent studies and it sounds like Canada and the EU have also reported similar findings but there isn't much widespread testing or totally comparable testing across locations.

Have online worlds become the last free places for children?

[...]This evidence tells us something important about human development: children want to explore together and build independent peer cultures that are partially distinct from the ways of adults. Yet since the early 1970s, many Western countries have increasingly limited the social and physical independence of children.

In physical spaces, we restrict the movement of children and refuse to let them play and explore without us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t look for ways to escape.

In the past two decades, children have found a new place to roam: the endless jungle of the internet.

https://psyche.co/ideas/have-online-worlds-become-the-last-f...

A lot of these articles and social media discussions miss by not contemplating the fact that by increasing productivity and incomes we have also increased the cost of leisure.

In the vein of The Harried Leisure Class, the more opportunities that are available to you, the more likely you are to feel like you are wasting time, need to optimize everything, etc. People are also pushed to be even more individualistic because the cost of slowing down and interacting with the community has increased.

There are many other factors at work but this one seems pretty clear but doesn't seem to see enough discussion.

Many AI initiatives have had massive ROI though. The implementation problems are similar to any pre-AI tech rollout and hugely expensive non-AI tech implementations fail all the time.

Zulip is awesome \m/

Another component or view of this is that automating the rote work is "eliminating the boring parts" (I love this and have worked extensively on this) but it is also eliminating the less cognitively demanding work.

Once you have automated extensively, all of the remaining work is cognitively demanding and doing 8 hours of that work every day is exhausting.

Scraping these from the city violations DB was a cool idea.

In 2022, Brex shifted away from SMB to refocus their offering. They cut "tens of thousands" of SMB customers who didn't fit their new ICP. They announced this in June 2022 and gave all of those customers 2mo to find a new provider and move their funds.

The new qualifications to be a Brex customer at that time were:

Received an equity investment of any amount (accelerator, angel, VC or web3 token);

More than $1 million a year in revenue;

More than 50 employees;

More than $500k in cash;

Tech startups who are on a path to meeting the criteria above, and are referred by an existing customer or partner.

It could definitely be a niche thing with me squarely in the niche. It was my top pick for our mix of activities in the mountain west.

Pretty surprised here and I think it was really just bad marketing or I guess unsustainable unit economics.

Price out the cheapest F-150 (XL) with a supercrew cab and 4x4 and you are looking at $50k. Trucks are just expensive. The Lightning is expensive but not that much more than any other truck and the Ford incentives + EV credit brought it down quite a bit. The Lightning Flash (extended range) was routinely selling OTD < $60k with 0% financing.

I'd put off buying a pickup for a decade because I couldn't find the right one and the Lightning is awesome. I was skeptical at first due to range concerns but there are chargers in the middle of nowhere in 2025.

I think a lot of the other commenters might change their thoughts if they drove one for a bit.

Edit: I get somewhere around 50mpg (dollar equivalent when charging at home) in a full-size truck that fits my whole family and our gear + handles better in the snow than any ICE truck + can do plenty of hauling and light towing.

They also might be least aware of the consequences as they've grown up during the least violent time in US and human history.

I need to read books like this with extra intentionality or it all just flows through and I might retain a couple of key concepts if I'm lucky.

1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.

2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.

Sounds like they're getting paid based on his note to employees:

"The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders [...] The exceptional team here has been the key to our success, so I'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution."

https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/1933328165306577316

I'll also note that I have multiple Mercury accounts and part of the way they have mitigated the risk of easier account opening and taking on higher risk customers is that they impose fairly low transaction limits on new customers and limit the ability to write checks without going through their platform. There are probably other similar limitations that I haven't hit yet.

These are annoying, especially if you don't know you are going to encounter them and a transaction gets held up, but they make sense for offsetting risk while speeding up account opening and expanding the profiles of customers you take on.

Lol, what triggered this absolute hatchet job targeting Mercury? I haven't read other posts from the author but are all of them of this style?

Most of it reads like a Muddy Waters style short-seller exposé. The author whirlwinds through a bunch of hot gossip, paints a customer-experience focus as some sort of evil scheme, dredges up a handful of old issues most of which seem to have been since remediated, cherry picks a handful of transactions out of millions, seems to blame Mercury for the actions of multiple other businesses and individuals, references a wire transfer doc that was pulled from some random Synapse server without knowing what else might have accompanied that doc in the original workflow and so on and on and on.

Banking, payments, and money movement are hard and absolutely ridden with fraud. Any company that moves money will encounter fraud, money laundering, all of this.

The focus on consent orders as proof that Mercury is breaking the law seems like fluff. Most of the banks that were willing to partner with fintechs at the start, and maybe still most of the banks doing this, are local or small regional banks that don't have the robust BSA/AML programs that larger banks have so some growing pains are expected here. The FDIC issued consent orders for 25 banks in 2024, at least 13 of those were for BSA violations and/or fintech partner oversight.

The request to make an exception for OnlyFans without changing the terms for all adult entertainment businesses does not seem at all damning? Immad calls out that they are a "very big specific client and they have a very strict content policy". That seems true and possibly exception-worthy when there's a blanket policy disallowing a specific type of customer?

The Axis Consulting invoice callout is pretty random and unsubstantiated. It's just a screenshot of an invoice then commentary saying "purports to be" and "no trace of 'Axis Consulting' at the listed address". With one minute of searching it is possible to see that Axis Consulting, LLC was registered with the New Mexico Secretary of State and the company that formed the entity does appear to be a marketing agency.

I'm sure there are issues at Mercury and they probably did cut some corners while growing rapidly and push some limits trying to streamline things for customers but what in the world is this post. It reads like a man scorned and on a rampage.

If this were actual journalism or research there would be some sort of "compared to what". What is Mercury doing today that is bad and why is it bad? What laws or regulations apply to their business and what are they failing to do properly?

Have you adjusted the lighting around your monitor/office? This seems to have a big impact on my eye strain.

Muddy Waters has been around for a while and had some high profile hits.

This sounds similar to a small private school in the USA. Public schools here do not allow or enable discipline or the backing of the school.

Not a restriction of the 83b election but a restriction of when you can exercise. Without early exercise you are stuck exercising as you vest so there’s more likely to be a taxable spread between your option strike price and the value of the stock. With early exercise you are exercising and making the 83b election when there’s no taxable spread.

Sorry, separate concepts executed at separate times.

Early exercise (yep, 83b in the US) when options are issued then allowing employees to sell shares down the road, outside of fundraising events (Forge, EquityZen, sales to angel SPVs, etc.).

I’d also push for allowing early exercise along with secondary sales restricted only by a short right-of-first-refusal period.

This isn’t really true though. Plenty of founders are early career and don’t have the experience or chops to pull that kind of salary.

Many founders are not very impressive but what they have is confidence (however blind) in their ability to do the thing.

Lump the individuals into “Angels” or “F&F” or “Employees” then you can still disclose and discuss the terms that each group of investors received.

This is not uncommon across the border in the Indian territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Some years have seen dozens of connectivity blackouts with the stated goals of maintaining peace and order or disrupting terrorism.

“Cybersecurity today is like if we’d asked London building owners to install their own anti-aircraft guns during the Blitz.”

Just a quote from a friend.

This is a forever problem. It’s difficult to judge the competency or skill of a professional without also being a professional in the same space. Word of mouth is the usual solution.

Another approach is to pick a few lawyers (read things they’ve written, online reviews, etc.) then do intro calls and pick the one who clicks best. Do a couple of low stakes projects with them to feel out their competency.

I’ll note that it can be worthwhile to match the professional to the task. No reason to pay top dollar to a specialist if all you need is some common boilerplate that any lawyer can do. You’ll also need to line up separate commercial and criminal lawyers.