Yesterday I was in Austin, TX to announce the Airbnb Housing Accelerator, a $250 million commitment to help get more homes built. Airbnb started because of a housing problem. My roommate and I couldn’t afford our San Francisco rent, so we rented out airbeds in our apartment. Today, housing is unaffordable for millions of people around the world. If you step back and ask why housing has become so expensive, the biggest problem is pretty simple: we don’t build enough of it. America is short more than five million homes, more than all the housing in New York City and Los Angeles combined. We build fewer homes today than we did in 1950, even though the population has doubled. Airbnb has been part of the housing debate, and we understand why communities have concerns. Dedicated Airbnb listings are a small share of the housing supply—about 0.5% here in Austin and 0.3% across the U.S. Restricting short-term rentals is an understandable response, but the evidence shows it doesn’t address the underlying problem. New York City effectively banned Airbnb, and rents have risen about 30% since then. Austin took a different approach and passed reforms that made it easier to build more housing. Rents there are down 18%. Every city is different, but Austin is a clear success story. We believe building more homes is essential to making housing more affordable. So we asked ourselves: what can Airbnb can do to help? We found a few places where we can. Today, around 750,000 homes in the U.S. are ready to break ground, but are stuck because they can’t get the final piece of financing. That’s where we can help. We’re doing four things: 1. Putting $250 million behind housing projects that unlock $5 billion in development. 2. Supporting local housing advocates working to modernize zoning, speed up permitting, simplify building codes and reduce unnecessary costs. 3. Creating a $5 million Housing Innovation Prize for technologies that can make homes faster and cheaper to build. 4. Launching the Airbnb City Index to make it easier to see which cities are building housing, becoming more affordable and adopting policies that work. Our first project is in Austin. We’re investing $6.4 million to help build 201 affordable apartments in St. John, a neighborhood where the land has sat empty for nearly 20 years. The community fought to turn this lot into affordable housing and won. But construction stalled for nearly five years because the developer was a few million dollars short. Airbnb came and played a small part to unlock this project. None of these Austin apartments will ever be on Airbnb. Short-term rentals aren’t permitted. We’re investing anyway, because the goal is simple: help build more housing. We’re starting in the U.S. because it’s the market we know best. I want to prove this works here before taking it further. But housing affordability is a global problem, and I hope we can eventually take what we learn here and apply it globally. This is new for us. We’ll get some things wrong. And $250 million won’t close a five-million-home gap on its own. I know there will be skepticism about this, and that's okay. Airbnb only works if communities trust us and feel good about our presence in them. We can’t ask people for that trust. We have to earn it. The best way to do that is to help solve problems in the communities where we operate. That’s what the Housing Accelerator is about. Brian

Before you let Hermes build your idea, have it try to break the plan first. `/grill-me` takes the Grill Me concept popularized by Matt Pocock and pushes it further. Use it when you’re about to hand Hermes something bigger than a simple task: An app you want built. A workflow you want automated. A multi-agent system you’re designing. A migration or major change. A business process you want rebuilt. Or even a rough idea you know isn’t fully thought through yet. The original Grill Me idea is great because the AI keeps questioning the plan until the important decisions are exposed. Hermes adds another layer. It maps which decisions depend on others, then works through them in the right order. If a question depends on something you haven’t decided yet, it waits. If Hermes can answer something by researching your files, codebase, configuration, or available information, it’s supposed to investigate that itself instead of making you do the homework. And when it does need your judgment, it can give you its recommendation and explain why. So instead of: “Here are 15 things I need you to answer.” It becomes more like: “Here are the decisions we can resolve now. I researched what I could. Here’s what I recommend. Once we settle these, we can move to the decisions that depend on them.” It also deliberately looks for edge cases, failure modes, bad assumptions, rollback problems, and things you may have forgotten to define. Then it hands the resolved plan back before the actual build starts. That’s why I like this beyond coding. The bigger the job you’re about to hand an AI agent, the more valuable it becomes to make the agent challenge the plan before it starts executing it.

🇩🇰 Hackers just got their hands on the names, addresses and national ID numbers of about 8.8 million people in Denmark's central population register. That's more people than actually live in Denmark, since the register also covers the dead and those who moved abroad. The CPR number is Denmark's version of a Social Security number, used for pretty much everything from banking to doctor's visits. They didn't even need to break in. They abused a private Danish company's legal access to the system and quietly pulled the data all through September. Denmark is far from the only one, with government databases from France to Japan getting raided this year and millions of citizens' details ending up for sale online. Governments keep asking for more of our data, and they keep losing it. Source: Danish CPR Administration / Writer: Julie

A decade ago, when Facebook and Uber were at the height of their powers, the halls of Silicon Valley were inscribed with two brash injunctions: “Move fast and break things” and “Seek forgiveness, not permission.” As the industry’s center of gravity shifted to A.I., a folksy new motto emerged: “You can just do things.” And, it seems that certain people and organizations can, in fact, just do things: companies like OpenAI and Anthropic move even faster than their Silicon Valley predecessors. Why, then, can’t these same people just do the things that prevent extinction? Lewis-Kraus asks. He considers the recent surge of fears about superintelligence, an emerging A.I. populism, and the maddening lack of communication between our tech overlords:

keep seeing people say "$6b hack and bitcoin only down 2%" as a bullish thing believe ppl are fundamentally misunderstanding the difference to how bitcoin trades now versus years ago $BTC used to be the primary driver for retail speculation in crypto, we were all aping leveraged positions on perps in 2017, alts were also part of the speculation but btc much moreso than now this changed in 2020/21 when retail mostly were trading alts as their way of going down the risk curve, the new traders on uniswap did not care at all about bitcoin even moreso in 2023 cycle & now, transition more to onchain because the altcoins on centralized exchanges performed much worse so less ppl speculating on perps than in the trenches, its how memecoins became a lot more popular, & now with equity perps we have even more degens trading other instruments rather than lev longing btc believe that this has had a significant impact on how bitcoin trades bc it is less apes smashing longs and shorts on the btc chart, you can see this appear in the price action with how bitcoin ripped extremely aggressively on every all time high break in 2017 but every top in 2021 post-saylor's aping in 2020 was the subtle ath failed breakout and then breakdown and much choppier price action even more apparent in 2023-2025 where we spent several months in compressed ranges & then also topped in jan 2025 & sept/oct 2025 with slightly higher high & failed breakout when 10/10 liquidation happened, $BTC barely moved compared to alts, this is because of what im stating above, the degens are not longing bitcoin, it traded above $100k for weeks after 10/10 and did not make substantially lower lows until november while alts got wiped in one candle so i dont think because there is not an immediate reaction to the downside it means the downtrend will not continue, the sellers are just more passive, & there are less apes to get liquidated on leverage

Europe could get pretty interesting for Tesla over the next few months! 🇪🇺 @JOBhakdi points to political shifts happening in eastern Germany, while nearby Brandenburg has already talked about a possible Tesla autonomous pilot for rural areas. But the big date is October 6. Tesla currently has support representing less than 10% of the EU population, and it needs 65% for EU-wide approval. That means Germany and France could make or break the vote! And even if the EU says no, Jo thinks individual countries may still have ways to move forward. Europe might not open the door to Tesla autonomy all at once. It could happen country by country instead. $TSLA

I was the biggest skeptic of AI video editing. Until recently. So I asked one of the most talented creators I know (@cinkotweets) to break down exactly how AI can support the entire video process. The guy cooked. Here are the high-level notes: The tl;dr Right now AI mostly solves two genres. The video essay and the tutorial. Both have a straightforward outline, a script you stick to, and a one-shot record that AI can chop against. Other formats still lean heavily on craft. Easy Mode: research and ideas without losing your voice The gist: Use AI to find opportunities and pull source material from tools and team discourse. You still decide what is worth saying. Don't outsource final sign-off. Pro tips: - Marketplace is huge. Type YouTube and you will see VidIQ, TubeBuddy, and a pile of others. If your company shows a “request” button, go bug the admin. Do not wait on the queue. - Hook Ahrefs into Claude (and Notion) and ask something like: use the Ahrefs connector to find AI content opportunities this week, and tell me if videos already sit in the top five. - Tribal Knowledge is the other half. It is a skill that scrapes every connector he has (Slack, Notion, meetings) and surfaces real conversations around a topic so the idea comes from work talk. - Turn that into a personalized daily brief for the kind of content you make. Anthony built a content planning app with Codex. Every day it drops a brief, proposes video topics, and lets him queue the ones he likes. Notion is the shared backend so the org can see the same database without living in his app. Even on Opus, a daily brief runs about 8 cents. Hard Mode: script and first edit with AI assistants The gist: AI helps you outline and cut. You keep the words, the takes, and the judgment. Editing is not just the blade button. It is taste. If you are an editor, you have an advantage. If you have vision but not technical chops, you can still leverage these tools. Pro tips: - Create the outline as a human. Anthony still believes you should not let AI one-shot structure. His format is three columns: dialogue, visuals (what is on screen while you talk), and sound effects. - Then use the Scriptwriter skill. Point it at a topic (he demoed “what is an MCP”) and it interviews you through the whole creative process so you speak like yourself. Short-form or long. You can ramble, go out of order, contradict yourself. It sorts after. - Beat by beat it spits your words back as bullets. You react raw in the moment. Those reactions become the real script. It also prompts visuals and SFX while you talk (day-to-night, crickets, rooster) so creativity stays in the loop. Hooks are hard. You can ask it to interview you into a better hook without handing it the whole voice. *Film it yourself* - Split editing into phases. Baseline “radio cut” (dialogue paced). Then VFX / archival / B-roll. Then audio (dialogue mix, SFX, music). - Codex + Final Cut: pointed it at the footage and the script, asked for a baseline cut. First pass had half-second gaps of silence. One follow-up (“every clip is consistently half a second off”) and it produced a fluid cut with no awkward pauses, dropped straight into Final Cut. Cost: two prompts burned a big chunk of a 5-hour context window (100% down to 14%), but against weekly Codex usage (decks, research, more content) he still had about 53% left. - Codex in Final Cut won the radio cut. Descript was faster on the clock and worse on taste cleanup. God Mode: polish stack plus a measurement loop Definition: hand off the laborious extras (B-roll, motion, music, reporting). Keep the taste calls. Close the loop so you know if the work is working. Pro tips: - B-roll / archival / VFX: Anthony spun an “archival finder” agent. He gave it a vibe (internety, clicky, fun) and a reference (simple, warm, approachable using shows, TV, movies). It came back with taste. - It also downloaded clips, filed them, dropped them on the timeline, and added a paper texture background he had asked it to design. All via the Final Cut connector plus computer use. - Motion graphics: Remotion (free, open source) plus an agent. Dump everything in your head. Ask for a plan and structure first. He asked for an Apple liquid glass ultra-clean feel. Plan, approve, tweaks, then it popped into the Final Cut timeline in about 9 minutes 10 seconds. That used to be a brief to a VFX designer (timing, seconds, design, wait for turnaround). - Music and SFX: Epidemic Sound via MCP (Artlist and free-sound options exist too). Same pattern: send the URL if you need to install, give it a creator reference (he used Zoe), iterate because you are picky about music. It dropped tracks into the timeline and used Epidemic’s crop/trim so the music was cut for the edit. Mix sat under vocals instead of overpowering them. Not just music. Mouse-click SFX timed to B-roll. Full episode:

So-called age verification for social media is spreading across the world, framed as an effort to create a safer internet for children. In reality, age verification lays the foundation for a fully controlled internet. The age verification rush must be slowed down, and politicians need to recognize the consequences of different types of legislation and systems. Age verification is the wrong approach to fix “the social media problem” The big tech social media companies are bad. Their business model is bad; it is based on mass surveillance and manipulation, and they cooperate with governments in mapping entire populations. But age verification is fundamentally the wrong approach to preventing children from using big tech social media platforms. Introducing age verification is based on coercion; the state forces social media companies to verify their users’ identities. But the big tech social media platforms already know which of their users are children. Their business model depends on knowing this. They know how old users are, and they know exactly what type of person they are. As age verification is based on coercion, politicians could instead force platforms to stop doing the things politicians consider harmful to children, or force them to block children (again, they know who they are) from using their services. But instead, politicians seek to massively invade everyone’s privacy and undermine democratic rights on a global scale. In other words, the latter is the real objective – they do not want to protect children; they want to impose control. Slippery slope of age verification It is undeniable that age verification threatens freedom of expression, risks increasing mass surveillance, and is likely to lead to censorship. It will not only shrink the online world and reduce young people’s right to privacy (for example, if VPN services were to be restricted); but also risks becoming a significant step toward a controlled internet for everyone. Most age verification is identity verification Most countries are now considering introducing age verification systems, meaning that everyone would have to identify themselves either to the service/website they want to use or to a third party capable of linking them to their activity on that service or website. This is not age verification but identity verification, and the consequence is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. This is a major problem in countries like the UK and Germany where the police conduct raids on people’s homes for posting content on social media that the authorities dislike. Or in the United States, where authorities are trying to pressure tech companies into revealing the identities behind accounts protesting ICE. Social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous. Restrictions on app store or operating system level Some countries are looking to impose identity verification at the app store level or even within the operating system itself. This is an exciting experiment, since this is possible to circumvent using open-source operating systems. Some countries are already looking to include open-source systems. Since open-source systems cannot be controlled, politicians would ultimately need to ban devices that are not controlled by the state. The end point: telescreens like those in Orwell’s 1984, devices that both monitor you and broadcast only the information approved by the state. The Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) alternative and the EU The EU has presented its own age verification app as “completely anonymous”. The idea is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is currently designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time. Read more on our site.

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things: • Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be? • Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it. • It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development. • @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums? • I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated. • While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts. • We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.) • In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

I've reached 900k followers, thank you everyone! Just some reflection, it's actually a nightmare at higher counts... Which is new to me, since I started at almost nothing earlier this year. 1. Threats of safety, which I don't enjoy. - Random new accounts sending personal threats - Mysterious foreign accounts, sending coercive messages the moment I mention a foreign ticker If I hold an opinion about a stock, I'd prefer not to have anyone show up on the street with a knife at night since it's safety risk at this point... Never felt like I'd have to take that into consideration for holding an opinion. 2. Egregious media narratives - Lot of outlets try to dismiss my ideas like $RPI or $SIVE as "meme stocks" or me as "meme trader" when I talk about supply chain chokepoints or fundamental catalysts to revenue due to AI. Without ever covering the core ideas or hyperscaler mapping I've done. I let success validate my ideas, but it's annoying when they can just pretend their claims like "___ will imminently crash as a fact" which ends up not happening. Or that "___" is just a retail meme stock without mentioning $JBL, Ayar, $GFS or others for CPO scale up or pluggables. I'm grateful to some outlets, like in Belgium for $XFAB coverage, but many others try and paint their own narrative rather than covering a very nuanced thesis objectively. - When I mention a ticker in a foreign market, some try to frame me as some "adversarial account"! I'm just sharing ideas, and I'll always disclose positions/financial interest if I have them. If I say I have none, they just make up some narrative that I'm some foreign institution or random group inside their country that does. Some have even tried hilariously forging screenshots of me to harm my reputation, which was annoying to deal with. Since it's easier to textedit a photo and spread it around than it is to dispel disinformation. Lot of institutions know me personally by now. I just don't go broadcasting my identity to random people in the media/public, since personal security gets expensive and I just want to live about my day. 3. Endless X bot spam - I have endless hundreds of comments a day trying to link external communities pretending they're me. I manually delete, and block thousands of these accounts, sometimes hit regular people by accident. And it's extremely exhausting to the point my fingers cramp certain days. Even if I give the most blatant warnings in bio, people still get scammed and think it's me. Then I get blamed for it too. I actually had a conversation where someone asked if a scammer was me. I said no verbatim, then they double checked like 2-3 more times because they didn't believe I said no because someone had the same username on another scam platform. In another world, maybe we'll get automod type tools. But until then, it's mentally exhausting dealing with all of this. But I do so anyways since I don't want my followers to get scammed. 4. Endless engagement baiting - I have tons of people making up fake stuff about me, tagging me in posts, randomly bashing my ideas while missing any technical nuance in order to get me to comment or farm views. It's a catch 22 since the moment I reply, they get a lot of views, which was their goal. And if I don't reply it just looks like I'm avoiding something (which is not true). I'm very transparent, I always try and entertain people who disagree first. But when it gets into personal attacks or leading questions/disinformation rather than substance then I don't engage. It's a little sad though when people I've interacted with end up caring more about engagement over relationships down the road. 5. People missing the nuance - I share ideas pretty often and I always maintain I don't want people to copytrade or blindly follow, which is why I haven't set up any copytrading apps. Before it was just posting with a few $RDDT friends on ideas like $AXTI, $NBIS, or $ALAB, and people were more knowledgeable traders. Then seeing if markets validate my guesses like with InP substrate bottlenecks. But because many turned out directionally right, to the point it became a central talking point between China/US trade relations, lot of random folks started to follow my account last few months. But many of them miss nuances with float dilution, or material updates along the way such as rate hikes, and I get blamed if a thesis changes. Now since there's so many random people, even if I share an idea about $CBRS last Friday. At market open I had people panicking over a 2% drop, asking me if I did something to a $44B+ company, even if it went up 20%+ today. Now I have compliance review for posts, which delays things a lot but makes sure people don't get the wrong idea. And I have to be careful about my timing, so I post new ideas when markets close. Before, it was just sharing ideas the moment I had them during lunch or in the shower, so this is becoming a headache. 6. I post my core ideas for free. And I've always said this from the start. I actually made my subscribers chat literally by accident, and set the bare minimum amount on purpose since I didn't want to take people's money. But kept it so I could avoid the bots and not spam the main timeline with random thoughts/scrapped research. I think me becoming the #1# most subscribed to person on X was literally by accident. But lot of weird narratives out there when media or others don't believe that I just genuinely want to share my ideas for free. And that people shouldn't need to pay $300 in a paywalled community to see them. _ Not sure if people want to read it all, but just some things I've gone through. It's not as much fun at higher numbers and it would be nice to go back to when I was smaller. Regardless, I'd rather not turn this into a job, or make it feel like one. Will probably take a break when I hit 1M as a milestone and do something else that will help out the community like sharing my research pipelines and such. Think a lot of my friends at 10-50K follower counts, seem to experience some of these issues too. But problems get magnified a lot at this level. I never needed the X creator fees or anything, just wanted to share ideas for fun if people wanted to listen. And didn't expect any popularity, but it's nice to see that people find my ideas compelling.