Brandon Kent Wang

An argument for the application layer.

“Imagine you want to start a business in AI. What layer of the stack do you target? Do you want to compete on infra? Good luck beating NVIDIA and the hyperscalers. Do you want to compete on the model? Good luck beating OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg. Do you want to compete on apps? Good luck beating corporate IT and global systems integrators. Oh. Wait. That actually sounds pretty doable!”

With the return of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, the .io domain name — a tech favorite — will likely cease to exist. The fall of domain names is a fascinating story intertwined with history, Communism, and more.

“Which leads me to one final word of advice: Never lose your shared bit. In the absence of regular physical time together doing activities (which is really time spent acquiring primary material for future bits, isn’t it?), a successful [long distance friendship] requires an acute understanding of the location-agnostic binding glue that keeps two people interested and enthusiastic about staying in each other’s lives that isn’t just catching up over drinks until we all die.”

Jobs was the quirk; Cook is the predictability: John Gruber's great take on where Apple goes from here.

This is a popular PG essay making the rounds, defining and contrasting a “founder” way of operating a larger business to the delegated-management model that conventional wisdom thinks is best.

You've seen a reversible lane where digital signs indicate which way the lane is going. Or a movable barrier, like on the Golden Gate Bridge, to physically give an extra lane to one direction of travel.

But there aren't many situations where the *entire* road switches directions (zero people going the other way). The only one I can find is DC's Rock Creek Parkway, and it presents a strange mandate for the local Park Police.

Mark Zuckerberg's internal email on how he thought about Facebook Messenger's monetization in 2014. Almost none of this happened 10 years later, but it's still a fascinating read into his clarity of thought.

United Airlines inherits a 1968 flight from Honolulu that makes 5 stops in Micronesia before arriving in Guam. And one of the stops is a military base! The “island hopper” is such a weird quirk of modern aviation.

A story straight out of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom. The WSJ's go-ahead is their reporter's eye, watching with binoculars for Gershkovich to step off the plane. Meanwhile, Bloomberg goes early, publishing before the Americans clear Russian airspace— and then bragging about it.

My coworker shared with me this clever Chrome extension. Take my data! Whatever. I'll just be in the corner playing with my collection of buttons.