It seems the SaaSpocalypse isn't a myth after all. Starbucks is planning to reduce their $400M in software costs by vibe coding replacements for software from Microsoft and IBM used for tracking inventory and managing equipment maintenance. I'm curious, if they can pull this off and start a trend.

“Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal.” - John Carmack on the Microsoft layoffs impacting Id Software

Another great chart from Lenny Rachitsky’s survey of how tech workers feel about their jobs. That the fear of AI’s impact on their jobs is more that they will be overworked following layoffs (52%) than that AI will take their jobs (22%) totally resonates given my observations.

I saw someone who said they quit their job in tech and now make 7 figures as an entrepreneur. What do they do? Coach people on how to quit their jobs and make 7 figures as an entrepreneur.

To answer the question below, asking experienced employees who didn’t make it to L68 (FAANG L7/M2) to retire is a managed decline not a turnaround. A turnaround requires the people who know how stuff works and the change is to point them in the right direction. This is just AI folly.

Netflix execs are worried because its customers are beginning to watch its shows less. Netflix is now exploring ways to boost engagement such as adding live TV or bundling other subscription services like Peacock.

Anthropic and OpenAI seeing how low the API token prices are for Grok and Meta’s Muse Spark APIs.

Meta has jumped into the paid AI API race with a focus on coding and agentic tasks. Muse Spark at $1.25/M in and $4.25/M out undercuts Grok and is far below Claude/GPT pricing. If models become interchangeable, aggressive pricing will turn AI from a frontier lab moat into cloud margin warfare.

A group of marketing consultants once gave our leadership team at Microsoft Ads the following advice that I think about often. ~~ There are 3 ways to durably differentiate your brand. You have 1. The best product 2. The best price 3. The best customer service Everything else is middle of the road.

There’s a thin line between creating a positive sense of urgency and management making their anxiety everybody’s problem.

There are people getting rich by being ahead of everyone in figuring out what parts of the data center supply chain haven’t made it into the news yet and buying stock. For example, it’s obvious in hindsight that if there’s huge demand for GPUs then there’d also be similar for memory and hard drives

Correlation isn’t causation but…

In the first half of 2026, more than 140 homes in San Francisco sold for at least $1M above their asking price. San Francisco is not a real place.

“Last year, Microsoft made $101 billion in profits, got a $12.5 billion tax break from Trump & paid its CEO $96 million. This year, it’s raising the price of an Xbox by $150 & eliminating 3,200 jobs. Please don’t tell me corporate tax breaks create jobs. It never trickles down.” - Bernie Sanders

AI has enabled the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world.

Friend: Did you see the latest story about Grok? Me: Which one?

On the heels of GTA 6 announcing it won’t have physical discs, Sony announced it is ending physical disc production and moving entirely to downloads for PlayStation by January 2028. The era of owning entertainment content is ending and we now perpetually rent our movies, music and games.

On the heels of GTA 6 announcing it won’t have physical discs, Sony announced it is ending physical disc production and moving entirely to downloads for PlayStation by January 2028. The era of owning entertainment content is ending and we now perpetually rent our movies, music and games.

A Brown economics professor gave his students a take-home midterm this spring after students expressed anxiety following a school shooting. The majority of the students got near-perfect or perfect scores. He decided to have finals in-person; 18 dropped the class, 7 skipped the finals, the rest...

The movement to ban Chinese models to preserve the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI continues apace. It’s just a matter of time before we hear that paying high AI token prices for Mythos and Fable is important for national security instead of using GLM or Qwen.

After over 3 years of layoffs, I’ve felt this year was the tipping point where it seems most people in tech are now burned out on the industry. AI is the missing ingredient which has now made working in tech simultaneously exciting and an excruciating ordeal. It looks like the feeling is widespread

$80B buying game studios and owning some of the biggest hits in the world including MineCraft, Skyrim and Call of Duty with nothing to show for it besides layoffs. GamePass launched with a goal of reaching 77M subscribers by 2026, it’s at 30M. 4M less than it had in 2024. Satya’s biggest failure.

“I spoke to Mitch McConnell for just shy of 20 minutes today and he doesn’t think your memes are funny”

Samsung’s chip division made more profits selling chips this quarter than its past FORTY YEARS of profits combined. The amount of money tech companies are spending on GPUs and memory chips for AI is insane.

Later this month, new rules in China targeting AI companions that take on human-like personas have caused ByteDance and Alibaba to take down their AI companion chatbot features. The rules are intended to reduce the risk of people forming unhealthy emotional attachments to AI chatbots. Good policy.

The Chinese government has had talks with top Chinese AI companies about restricting access to their most advanced AI models by foreign users. Given the significant interest in Chinese open weight models as AI token costs have risen, this would be huge hit to AI adoption if they follow through.

Silicon Valley has realized bragging about how AI will cause mass unemployment is terrible marketing. Given the backlash which has led to data center buildouts being blocked and the fact you can’t actually replace workers with Claude, the pitch has softened to AI augments versus replaces workers.

Going from tokenmaxxing to tokenminning is no longer just for developers. Microsoft is allegedly updating the AI models used by Excel and Outlook from OpenAI & Anthropic's models to their homegrown AI models to reduce costs. I suspect this is likely more about dogfooding internal models than costs.

“If they [Belgium] beat us, we’ll just say it was rigged just like the 2020 Election.” - Donald Trump — He loves to brag about his accomplishments in mendacity.

Reading Asha Sharma’s email about the layoffs at XBox and I’m struck by how there’s little difference in this email about layoffs & flattening because the XBox business is struggling and layoffs & flattening because “AI changes everything” we saw in announcements from Block, Cloudflare and others.

The Supreme Court won’t hear a challenge to the Texas law requiring app stores to verify the age of users and require parental consent for minors to install apps. It’s notable that conservatives are now proponents of the nanny state they used to criticize unless you want to regulate guns.

“I also want to be direct that the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI...At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.” - Amy Coleman, Microsoft's Chief People Officer ~~ Striking the balance of doing layoffs because of AI but not replacing people with AI.

As part of its defense that using copyrighted data to train AI is fair use, Midjourney is asking courts to force Hollywood studios to reveal their internal AI usage. The company argues that Hollywood studios also use AI trained on other people’s content and so they also see it as fair use.

It’s the end of an era. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a classic instance of “fake it until you make it.” Instead of faking artificial intelligence by hiring people in low income countries to perform basic data entry or data processing tasks, it’s now cheaper to perform those tasks with AI using LLMs.

The Guardian is reporting neither OpenAI nor its partner NScale visited Cobalt Park, a key Stargate UK site. Only Nvidia did months later. Also £20B of the £30B investment the UK government touted appears to be hypothetical. The massive UK data center announcement now seems to be vaporware.

The billionaire co-founder of AirBnB wants you to blame the babies of undocumented immigrants for starter homes being unaffordable.

Happy 250th birthday America. Home of the brave and land of the free.

MAGA tried to dunk on Mamdani for saying people should set their thermostat to 78° during a heat wave so as not to overload the grid. When it was pointed out that this is just standard advice from the Department of Energy, the Trump administration deleted 6,000 pages of docs from the DoE website🤦🏾‍♂️

CFOs realizing replacing workers with AI means going from a predictable expense with known ROI (employee payroll) to a usage based cost whose ROI is mostly vibes (AI tokens).

Google just released an ad reimagining the Founding Fathers using AI tools to draft the Declaration of Independence.

This is an interesting long read on DeepMind’s resident philosopher. It sounds like a frivolous role at first. However given the proliferation of LLMs in our lives, questions like what kind of personality should AI chatbots have (sycophantic?) or their biases from training data is actually critical

AI bros on social media like to say that the release of ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 video model meant Hollywood was cooked. In reality, Hollywood is a business and studios are quietly embracing the technology that promises to make VFX and making movies in general much cheaper.

That the mainstream Democratic Party has more smoke for Zohran Mamdani and these policies than John Fetterman is something I think about a lot.

The inevitable consequence of prediction markets is manipulating the real world to win the bet. Spotify just wiped 500K streams from a chart-topping song because the plays were faked to win bets on Kalshi. They are also now demanding Kalshi and Polymarket stop using their logos.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that most big tech companies underreport how much water their data centers use. They often disclose water used for cooling but omit what the power plants supplying them consume. Meta is rare in counting both; 19B gallons in 2024 was 20x its direct use.

Levels.fyi plotted 24 months of big tech comp and layoff data to find the best place for software engineers. Anthropic is the standout with $800K average comp and no layoffs. It’s ironic the company most vocal about engineers no longer writing code by hand pays them the most.

Over the past two years, quant funds have had a comeback in China after a dismal 2024 where they were blamed for market volatility. In 2025, thanks to AI, Chinese quant funds beat human stock pickers by 20 percentage points. The biggest surprise to me is that human asset managers are still popular

My LinkedIn is full of posts by former Microsoft colleagues who accepted the voluntary retirement offer. I counted at least 9 posts from people I worked with in the past. For some reason, it felt even sadder than layoff posts. It was hard to put into words until this post from a now ex-Microsoftie.

Multiple tech CEOs have said it outright, the goal is replacing employees with AI agents. If you're talented or lucky enough, you survive as a supervisor of those agents. So what does career planning look like then? Plan your exit or get very good at managing a fleet of Claude and OpenClaw agents?

The Iran War has been good for Tesla as rising gas prices have led to a resurgence in buying their EVs with deliveries up 25% year over year. It handily beat Wall Street expectations of 406K deliveries with a significant beat of 480K. The stock dropped -7.5% on the news but is still +6% this week