“The Pixar guys had an Oscar, but only now were they getting an education in the real workings of Hollywood.” When they asked Disney’s accountant why he needed a safe 😬

Things were not going great for Steve Jobs in 1989, as both NeXT and Pixar were money pits with huge burn rates:

607: Sam Altman vs Demis Hassabis, Fairfax, USA Electricity Bottleneck Overstated?, Gemini 3 Flash, 160 Days on a Submarine, and Tony Hawk www.libertyrpf.com/p/607-sam-al...

Leonard Cohen in 1995

Steve Jobs the poet: "You've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting." 😅🥮

Everyone makes mistakes, the question is how much we learn from them

Every time

Today's FREE Edition is out, with explosive content: 606: Alpha School, Housing Affordability Moonshot, ChatGPT Image 1.5, Ford Kills the F-150 EV, Novo Nordisk vs Eli Lilly, Claude Code, DeepMind, Zach Dell, and Flea www.libertyrpf.com/p/606-alpha-...

In the early days, Pixar considered making computers for the medical community 👨🏻‍⚕️

Today's FREE Edition is out, with explosive content: 606: Alpha School, Housing Affordability Moonshot, ChatGPT Image 1.5, Ford Kills the F-150 EV, Novo Nordisk vs Eli Lilly, Claude Code, DeepMind, Zach Dell, and Flea www.libertyrpf.com/p/606-alpha-...

Tonight’s family film, the tradition continues, we gotta get our Marley & Marley and Michael Caine to be in the holiday spirit 🎄

When Steve Jobs used to visit Pixar in the early days:

Today's Edition is out, and it's bursting with goodies: 605: 'Good Enough AI' Consumer vs Enterprise, Mark Miller Interview, GPT-5.2 Strikes Back, Blackwell Breakdown, Amazon’s Starlink Rival, Waymo, Blake Scholl, and Sweden’s Gripen www.libertyrpf.com/p/605-good-e...

"Disney making $1 billion investment in OpenAI, will allow characters on Sora AI video generator" 🤔

Today's FREE Edition is out, full of cool sci-fi stuff: 604: Data Centers in Space, Hock Tan’s Coffee, Xiaomi vs Tesla, Nvidia vs China, Guy Gottfried & TerraVest, James Dyson, Boom Turbines, Base Power, and Comfort Films www.libertyrpf.com/p/604-data-c...

How Pixar got its name after Steve Jobs bought it from Lucasfilms:

It’s officially the season for

Today's FREE Edition is out, jammed packed: 603: Gemini vs Claude vs GPT, Code Red, Mark Chen on OpenAI’s Plan, Sundar Interview, TPU Pressure & Nvidia Equity Discounts, Trainium 3, Creatine, and James Cameron www.libertyrpf.com/p/603-gemini...

I’m listening to ‘Seychelles’ by Masayoshi Takanaka. Fun stuff I decided to look up photos to see what he looks like. Did not expect this surfboard guitar! 🏄 🎸

In the mail 📖

Music biopic opening weekend box office:

Today's FREE Edition is out, jammed packed: 603: Gemini vs Claude vs GPT, Code Red, Mark Chen on OpenAI’s Plan, Sundar Interview, TPU Pressure & Nvidia Equity Discounts, Trainium 3, Creatine, and James Cameron www.libertyrpf.com/p/603-gemini...

Yep, it’s that time of the year. The tradition continues. Skinny Santa is back in my house! 🎅 🎄

Online holiday spending in the U.S. 🛒💳🎁🎄

Here’s your song of the day 🎶 Really striking production, I love his Tom Waits-adjacent voice too

Tonight I saw episode 1 of ‘Task’, the HBO show. Someone told me it was the same creator as ‘Mare of Easttown’ and that was enough to convince me to check it out. Very promising so far, deliberate pacing, great cinematography (those shadows!) and strong, lived in characters.

Today's FREE Edition is out, stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey: 602: Nvidia vs Google TPU/ASICs, Nvidia Q3, Nano Banana Pro, Google + Meta, Anthropic’s Magnum Opus, France's Forgotten Role in the Depression, and Project Hail Mary www.libertyrpf.com/p/602-nvidia...

“Nvidia’s free cash flow has mushroomed from $3.8 billion in the year to January 2023 to an estimated $96.5 billion in the year ending this coming January… That revenue growth represents a compound annual growth rate of 194%.” 😗

If the Beatles broke up today, their first album would have come out in 2018. 🤯

Nano Banana Pro: Plausible Deniability-as-a-Service 📸🍌

One of life’s little pleasures is cutting things with a freshly sharpened knife 🔪 🧅 🍅 🥩

"Google starts rolling out ads in AI mode; the ads look similar to the citations in AI answers but with a 'sponsored' label" 🤔

My first podcast 🎧 in a while! A really fun and wide-ranging conversation with Tinkered Thinking and Dylan O'Sullivan about the great book 'White Mirror' 🦾🪞📖🦋 and how to reboot your childlike wonder: www.libertyrpf.com/p/white-mirr...

Today's FREE Edition is out, and it's the Google special: 601: Gemini 3.0!, AI Love Triangle of Anthropic, Microsoft & Nvidia, Satya Nadella Interview, Google TPU v7, Malaria, WWI, and Woodstock '99 www.libertyrpf.com/p/601-gemini...

Today's FREE Edition is out, and it's the Google special: 601: Gemini 3.0!, AI Love Triangle of Anthropic, Microsoft & Nvidia, Satya Nadella Interview, Google TPU v7, Malaria, WWI, and Woodstock '99 www.libertyrpf.com/p/601-gemini...

Today's Edition is out, with a whole buffet of goodies: 600: Nadella's AI Strategy for Microsoft, Constellation Software, Azure Explosion?, Anti-Gentrification is BS, ChatGPT-5.1, Vibe Hacking, Meta Omnilingual, and PLUR1BUS www.libertyrpf.com/p/600-nadell...

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie on the Fairwater 2 datacenter: “to put it in perspective in the number of optics, the network optics in this building is almost as much as all of Azure across all our data centers two and a half years ago.” 🤯

Today's FREE Edition is out, packed with facts and emotions: 599: Anthropic & OpenAI Strategic Divergence, Nvidia's China Ban, Buffett’s Last Letter, Pareto Dating, Gigawatt Datacenters & Nuclear Plants, and Sarah Paine www.libertyrpf.com/p/599-anthro...

"Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave Meta in the coming months to found his own startup; a source says he is in early talks to raise funds" tbh, I would've expected that to happen sooner. Maybe he was waiting for some RSUs to vest?

Three inches of snow are falling here today. All of a sudden, the light quality of even a cloudy day is completely different. There are many downsides to snow, but I love how much it brightens things up ❄️☃️

"OpenAI, Alphabet, and Perplexity offering free access to their paid tiers in India suggests the country may be the biggest and safest bet for broad AI adoption" 🤔

On the aesthetics of the NeXT Cube, Steve Jobs’ non-Apple computer, “the Death Star of computers”:

“Job cuts for October totaled 153,074, a 183% surge from September and 175% higher than the same month a year ago. It was the highest level for any October since 2003 and has been the worst year for layoffs since 2009.” 🤔

Today's FREE Edition is live, fresh from the farmer's market: 598: Thinking About Bubbles, Neo's Wizard-of-Oz Problem, Zuck's $60bn Models, Europe, OpenAI + AWS, Cursor 2.0 vs Anthropic, Why Humanoids, and Cel Animation www.libertyrpf.com/p/598-thinki...

Today's FREE Edition is live, fresh from the farmer's market: 598: Thinking About Bubbles, Neo's Wizard-of-Oz Problem, Zuck's $60bn Models, Europe, OpenAI + AWS, Cursor 2.0 vs Anthropic, Why Humanoids, and Cel Animation www.libertyrpf.com/p/598-thinki...

One of the huge perks of working at a software company is, when there's something about the product that bothers you personally, you can get your hands dirty and find out why it's basically impossible to get fixed

Some languages have minimal vocabulary to describe colors: 🎨

Mornings like this, I kinda just want to put my head under my espresso machine and press “brew”, have it pour straight down my gullet 🥱 ☕️

Saturday morning rereading: 📖 ☕️

This is a good idea. Let’s have a moratorium on putting faces of politicians on stuff for a while and instead let’s just feature inventors and builders and creators. The Cray coin is sick, I want it 🪙