personal update: i’ve joined elevenlabs as an ambassador been using their music and sound effects in my recent game tests and they are best ones tbh eleven labs got best voice tools, but they have video features with seedance and other video models too always wanted to play with ai video models too, so expect more video content from now on

America, this one is for the people who keep your country running. Find your job. In Japan, we bow to say thank you. I can't bow to all of you through a phone screen. So this is the next best thing. Truck drivers: There's a saying, "If you bought it, a truck brought it." I'd add: and somebody missed dinner to do it. Nurses: You hold a stranger's hand on the worst day of their life, then go buy groceries in your scrubs like it was nothing. Teachers: You've spent your own paycheck on pencils, granola bars, and winter coats, and you've never once mentioned it. Farmers: You bet everything on the weather every single year, and you call it "a living." Welders: Half of America is held together by your seams, and almost nobody ever sees them. Waitresses: You remember a regular's order, his grandkids' names, and that his wife passed. His coffee is refilled before he looks up. Mechanics: You can hear what's wrong with a car before it finishes pulling in. Firefighters: Everyone runs out. You run in. Small-town deputies: You know which kids need a ride home and which ones need a talking-to. Sometimes it's the same kid. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Guardsmen: You signed your name to a promise most people will never be asked to make. Military spouses: You've moved eleven times, and you still find the good grocery store within a week. Garbage collectors: You show up before dawn, in the heat and the cold, and the only time anyone notices is when you don't. Electricians: You work on the thing that can kill you, so the rest of us can flip a switch and never think about it. Plumbers: Nobody has ever called you on a good day. Roofers: July. Black shingles. Forty feet up. Cashiers: You've been yelled at about prices you didn't set, and you still said, "Have a nice day." Overnight stockers: The shelves were full at 7 a.m. because you were there at 2. School bus drivers: Forty kids every morning. You know every one of them by name, and somehow you still have your hearing. Volunteer coaches: Every Saturday, for kids who aren't yours, for zero dollars. Pastors: You get the 3 a.m. phone call. Every time. EMTs and paramedics: Somebody's worst day is your Tuesday, and you treat them like they're your own mother. Road crews: Every highway I've ever been on, somebody stood in the heat holding a sign so nobody would get hurt. Loggers and commercial fishermen: Your jobs are on every "most dangerous" list in the country, and you go back on Monday. Ranchers: Calving season means sleeping in your boots. Snowplow drivers: When everyone's told to stay home, you're the reason they can leave tomorrow. Home health aides and CNAs: You bathe, feed, and laugh with people whose own families stopped visiting. Hospice workers: You hold the hand at the very end, so the last thing a stranger feels is kindness. Small business owners: You put your house on the line to open your doors, and you still sponsor the Little League team. Large-animal vets: You'll drive to a barn at 2 a.m. for a cow that isn't yours. Librarians: In a lot of towns, you're the last place that's warm, quiet, and free, and you guard it like a fortress. Stay-at-home moms and dads: No breaks, no pay, no days off, and you'd do it for free. You are doing it for free. Grandparents raising grandkids: You were supposed to be retired. You said, "Bring them here." The news will never put most of you in a headline. So I'm putting you in one. Every job on this list is the reason your country works. From Japan: thank you. Now please, go get some sleep.

My coworker Tanaka is the most serious man in Japan. He apologizes to the copy machine. Once, he apologized to me for the weather. For nine years, he has kept a resignation letter in his desk drawer, "just in case." Every April, he updates it. Last year, our American office sent us Patty. Patty is 61. From Oklahoma. She has survived three tornadoes, two teenage sons, and one husband. ("God rest him. He tried.") She sat next to Tanaka for a year. Week one, Tanaka hit "reply all" on an email meant for one person. It went to 312 people. Including a client. He turned the color of rice. He opened the drawer. Patty leaned over, read the email, and said: "Well. Nobody died." Tanaka had never heard this sentence in his life. He stared at her like she had spoken in tongues. Week three, he knocked his coffee onto a signed contract. He stood up. He bowed to the contract. "Hon," Patty said, handing him a napkin. "It'll buff out." "It's paper." "Everything buffs out, sugar. Give it time." Week seven, the projector died in the middle of Tanaka's presentation to our company president. In Japan, this is the kind of thing people quietly move to another city over. Tanaka froze. Patty stood up, said, "Well, folks, looks like we're doing this the old-fashioned way," and drew the entire sales chart on the whiteboard. Badly. With a cow in the corner. For no reason. The president laughed. Out loud. Nobody had heard him laugh since 2019. That night, Tanaka finally asked her the question he'd been carrying for weeks. "Why are you never afraid?" Patty put down her coffee. "Oh, honey. I've been afraid. I've watched a tornado take my roof off with my boys in the bathtub. I've sat eleven days in a hospital next to my husband. I know what afraid is for." Then she pulled a sticky note off the pad and wrote three lines. Is everybody breathing? Is everybody fed? Does everybody know they're loved? "If it's yes, yes, yes," she said, "it's a good day. Everything else buffs out." Tanaka stuck the note on his monitor. Something changed. Slowly. Month four, he only apologized to the copy machine twice. Month six, someone announced at the Monday meeting that we had missed a deadline. Silence. Then Tanaka said, very quietly, in Japanese: "Well. Nobody died." The whole room turned to look at him. Like a dog had started talking. By December, half the department was saying it. Our manager told a client, "It'll buff out." The client said it back. On Patty's last day, Tanaka opened his drawer, took out his resignation letter, nine years and nine versions, and handed it to her. She read the whole thing. She fixed two typos. Then she fed it into the shredder, and the two of them stood there and watched it go, like a small funeral. "Nobody died," Tanaka said. "Nope," Patty said. "Somebody just got lighter." Patty is back in Oklahoma now. The sticky note is still on Tanaka's monitor. It's faded. Last week, I broke the office printer. There was a little smoke. Tanaka looked at me for a long, very serious moment. "Is everybody breathing?" I said yes. "Then it'll buff out." So if you're carrying something heavy tonight, here's Patty's list. Is everybody breathing? Is everybody fed? Does everybody know they're loved? If it's yes, yes, yes, it's a good day. Everything else buffs out.

Allegro x ElevenLabs 🇵🇱 Amazing to bring our work with @Allegro_Group - Poland's leading e-commerce platform - to 20M+ shoppers, helping them get instant answers when they call about a delivery. I've been a power user myself since growing up in Poland :)

I'm Japanese. I live in Tokyo. I have never been to America. For the past month, I've been writing stories here about Americans. Some of you laughed. A lot of you cried. Some of you asked me if they were true. Honest answer: they're inspired by real moments. I change names and details. But this post is different. Every word of this one is true. Because this one is about you. Thousands of you replied to those stories. I read them late at night in my apartment in Tokyo, one by one. And somewhere along the way, I realized something. You were telling me better stories than I was telling you. Here are some of the things Americans told a stranger in Japan this month. A pilot told me he once helped shut down an entire airport so a mother duck and her six babies could cross the runway. He coordinated with air traffic control. For ducks. He told me like it was a normal Tuesday. A father told me he has four daughters, and one of them is walking around with his left kidney. That was the whole reply. Eleven words. Like a fun fact. A woman told me she was rescued from a hurricane by strangers in their own boats. Nobody called them. They just came. All she wrote was: "God bless people with boats." A soldier told me he once sat down for lunch at the Dallas airport in uniform. One stranger bought his table a round. Another bought their lunch. A third bought another round. He never found out who any of them were. A man from Brazil told me he was once filming a video about how kind Americans are. In the middle of filming, a stranger walked up and offered him a beer. A woman told me that Dolly Parton's father couldn't read. So Dolly grew up and started sending free books to children. A woman corrected me. I had written that American dads can't braid hair. She told me her father braided hers every single morning, all through elementary school. She was right. I have never been so happy to be wrong. A man told me that at the Boston Marathon, the crowds thin out near the end, but somebody always stays until the very last runner goes by. A woman told me her mother had Alzheimer's. For years, her father told her mother the story of their life together, over and over, so she wouldn't lose it. And a woman told me that just today, she was too tired to lift something into the trunk of her car. A young couple walked by. She asked. The young man helped. Just today. You also made me laugh until I couldn't breathe. I asked for the most American sentence in five words. You gave me "Hold my beer. Watch this." You gave me "That's not enough ranch." One woman broke the rules and wrote, "How about three? God Bless America." Nobody complained. Not one American said, "That's only three." One woman reports her tissue count on every story. "OK, that's three tissues so far today." Then, on the next one: "Four. Dang." One man told me, "I'm never deleting this app." One woman said Japanese people are a blessing, and she will personally "have words" with anyone who says otherwise. I have never felt so safe in my life. One of you called me "Sensei." I'm not a teacher. You are. And one woman told me that she has actually said, out loud, in real life: "There's a bald eagle sitting on my truck." Here's what I noticed. Almost none of you told me about yourselves. You told me about your father. A stranger with a boat. A pilot. The people who stayed for the last runner. The young man at the trunk. And the few of you who did the good thing yourselves? You told it like it was nothing. You gave away a kidney and described it in eleven words. You are a country that remembers every kind thing anyone ever did for you, and forgets every kind thing you ever did yourself. So I'll remember them for you. A lot of you wrote some version of the same sentence. "I needed this." "It's hard to be an American right now." "I don't know if we're still good." One woman wrote to me late at night. She couldn't sleep. She had been reading all the awful news. She said she might be a little discouraged, but she will never stop being an American who loves her country. Another woman told me she cries after every story. She thinks it's because she's carrying old grief. Then she wrote, "I guess that means I'm alive." I read that one at 3 a.m. in Tokyo. And I cried too. I started writing these stories to cheer you up. I never expected you to cheer me up. So, thank you. To the pilot who stopped an airport. To the dad with one kidney. To the people with boats. To the strangers at the Dallas airport. To the dad who braided hair before work. To the ones who stay for the last runner. To the husband who kept telling the story. To the young man at the trunk. To the woman counting tissues. To the woman who can't sleep and still loves her country. To the bald eagle on the truck. Thank you. And to everyone who asked me if Americans are still good: I'm Japanese. I've never been to America. I'm not the right person to answer that. But I know who is. Scroll down. That's America.

Jony Ive: "I believe we sense when there's care taken with a product” In the clip below, Jony shares that one of the things he has come to feel really strongly is that customers can sense when care has been taken with a product: “I can’t articulate why, but I believe we sense when there’s been care taken with a product. Just in the same way we sense carelessness.” Jony believes that most of our manufactured environment today sadly testifies to a degree of carelessness: “It testifies to: get it built fast, make it cheap, make it look different. There’s just that sort of carelessness. And I just think it’s one of the things that we can strive to do for humanity, and it’s a way that we can serve: is to take care.” This philosophy may have been instilled by Steve Jobs. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, there’s a story of the time Jobs insisted that every element of the Macintosh computer be beautiful—down to the circuit boards inside: “Look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.” When the computer was finally perfected, Jobs had the engineers’ names engraved inside each one. “Real artists sign their work,” he told them. Isaacson comments: “No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible.” Source: @VanityFair (Oct 2014)

I am the Senior Vice President of Workforce Architecture at Cloudflare and I need to tell you about the best decision this company has ever made. We posted $639.8 million in quarterly revenue. 34% year-over-year growth. Record net retention. The strongest quarter since IPO. And then we fired 1,100 people. Not because of the quarter. During the quarter. I need you to understand the sequence because the sequence is the whole point. My team built the model that made this possible. We call it CIRRUS: "Capacity-Indexed Reduction and Reallocation for Upside Scaling". CIRRUS took our revenue trajectory, our margin targets, and our board's stated appetite for what they called "structural boldness," and it determined that the optimal time to execute a 20% headcount reduction is at the exact moment of peak financial performance. Not during a downturn. Not during a miss. During a beat. The logic is simple. When revenue is surging, the market reads a cost reduction as discipline. When revenue is falling, the market reads the same reduction as panic. Same action. Same 1,100 people. Completely different stock reaction. CIRRUS identified a seven-day window where the earnings momentum and the layoff announcement would compound rather than cancel. I found the math beautiful. I still do. We deactivated 1,100 badges between 9:00 and 9:04 AM Pacific on a Monday. People Analytics determined this was the four-minute window of lowest Slack activity. We called it a "clean cutover." Someone in Infrastructure suggested "zero-downtime deprecation" but Legal thought it sounded too much like a product feature. I thought it sounded exactly like a product feature, which is why I liked it. But I deferred to Legal. I always defer to Legal. That is one of the things that makes me good at this job. The people we cut were not underperformers. I want to be very clear about that because clarity is a Cloudflare value. Sixty-two percent had received exceeds-expectations in their most recent review cycle. Fourteen had been promoted in Q3. One engineer in our Austin office — I'll call him Marcus, though that is not his name and the reason I'm not using his name is not that I've forgotten it — had shipped the caching optimization that directly contributed to $14 million in new enterprise contracts. His manager nominated him for the Raygun Award, which is our internal recognition for outsized impact, six days before I added him to the CIRRUS list. He won the award on Wednesday. His access was revoked the following Monday. The ceremony and the termination were planned by different teams in the same building and neither team knew about the other. I don't think this is ironic. I think this is how large organizations work. The left hand builds. The right hand optimizes. Both hands are attached to the same body and the body is performing well. We let Marcus keep the trophy. It's a small acrylic prism etched with a lightning bolt. It costs us about eleven dollars. His annual cost-to-company was $312,000. CIRRUS selected the 1,100 based on three variables. I'm going to share them because I believe in the methodology. First: salary band. Employees in bands 6 through 8 offered the highest savings-to-replacement-risk ratio. Second: visa dependency. Employees on sponsored visas have a 60-day window to find new employment or begin departure proceedings. This creates what CIRRUS categorizes as "low-friction separation" — the compliance timeline is externally enforced, which reduces our administrative burden. I presented this variable to HR and they requested I rename it from "visa dependency" to "mobility factor" in all future documentation. I agreed. The math didn't change. Third: managerial tenure. Employees whose direct manager had been at the company less than eighteen months were 73% less likely to generate a negative Glassdoor review, because the manager-employee bond hadn't fully formed. CIRRUS weighted this at 15% of the selection score. We call it the "attachment coefficient." We told the market the layoffs were an AI workforce pivot. We said artificial intelligence was making certain roles redundant. We said we were reallocating resources toward our AI gateway products. This was a communications strategy. Not a workforce strategy. The AI framing was my team's recommendation and I'm proud of it because it worked. Two analysts upgraded us the same week. The stock moved 8% in five sessions. The entire AI narrative was four paragraphs in a press release that took my comms partner and me an afternoon to write. Four paragraphs. 1,100 people. 8%. I don't know what the per-paragraph return on that is but I think about it sometimes. The actual AI initiative employs thirty-seven people. We cut 1,100 to fund 37. The ratio is not in any of our public materials. There is a Slack channel called #bright-futures# that our Head of People Experience created for the remaining employees. It posts an automated message every morning at 8:45 AM: "You are the ones we chose to keep." The message includes a rotating motivational quote. Last Tuesday it was a Winston Churchill quote about perseverance. The channel has a custom emoji called :survivor: that the Culture team designed. It's a small cartoon phoenix. Nine hundred people have used it unironically. I find this genuinely moving. I think it shows resilience. My wife says it shows something else but she works in education and I think the frameworks are different. The severance was calculated using a model we licensed from the same consulting firm that built our customer pricing tiers. Median payout: eleven weeks. We benchmarked against industry and landed at the 50th percentile exactly, which our CHRO described as "fair by design." The 1,100 will burn through their severance while our stock price digests a 20% cost reduction applied to a revenue base that was already growing 34%. By the time the last check clears, the savings will have funded the first full quarter of the AI initiative. The one with thirty-seven people. My performance review is next month. I've been told informally that I'm on the COO track. The criteria include "demonstrated ability to execute at scale with minimal organizational disruption." The 1,100 people are the execution. The stock price is the scale. The four-minute badge window is the minimal disruption. I meet all three criteria. I designed all three criteria. Not the review criteria. The outcomes. I keep the CIRRUS model on my laptop in a folder called "Workforce Planning FY26." It sits next to a subfolder called "Offsite Photos — Maui" from the leadership retreat we took in January, where we set the annual targets that the 1,100 people spent four months hitting before we terminated them for hitting them. Marcus's desk in Austin has been reassigned. I don't know to whom. The acrylic prism is probably in a box somewhere. Or maybe whoever cleaned out the desk kept it. It catches the light nicely. I noticed that once, when I visited the Austin office to present the CIRRUS methodology to the regional leadership team. They gave me a standing ovation. The prism was on a desk near the back of the room, refracting a small rainbow onto the wall behind me. I didn't mention it. I stayed on my slides. I'm proud of the work we've done here. I think when people look back at this quarter, they'll see it as the moment Cloudflare became a different kind of company. I think they'll be right. I think the 1,100 people would agree, if you explained the math to them carefully enough.

Things I've overheard American tourists say in Japan this month: At a traditional inn in Kyoto: "There are special slippers just for the bathroom. I wore the bathroom slippers into the dining room. The grandmother made a sound I will never forget." On a Tokyo train at 8 a.m.: "Nobody is talking. Nobody. I'm whispering, and I'm still the loudest thing in this city." At a ramen shop: "Wait. You're SUPPOSED to slurp? My mother spent eighteen years telling me not to. I'm calling her. I'm calling her right now." In a department store food hall: "That melon costs a hundred and fifty dollars. Who is this melon? What has it done?" On a street in Osaka: "There are no trash cans anywhere in this entire country, and it's the cleanest place I've ever been. I've been carrying this empty can since breakfast. We're close now." On the bullet train: "Babe. The seats turn around. The whole row just spun. I thought it was a ride. I clapped." On the subway: "That little girl is riding the subway by herself. She's maybe six. Her backpack is bigger than she is. She just gave me directions." And then there's the one I didn't overhear. I just watched it. At Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, there are always school groups. Japanese kids on field trips have a famous assignment: find a foreign tourist and interview them in English. They carry little notebooks with ten questions written out. Most of them are terrified. A boy, maybe eleven, walked up to a huge American man in a Texas Rangers cap. He held up his notebook. His friends hung back behind him, giggling. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. His face went red. His friends laughed harder. He looked like he wanted the temple to swallow him. The man didn't laugh. He got down on one knee, right there on the stone steps, so his eyes were level with the boy's. And he said, very gently: "Take your time, buddy. I got all day." The boy read the first question. One word at a time. "Where. Are. You. From?" "Texas!" the man said, like it was the best question anyone had ever asked him. He answered all ten. Slowly. Clearly. Favorite food: "Brisket. And now, ramen." Favorite thing about Japan: "Kids who are brave enough to do this." Then he asked the boy one question back, in Japanese so bad I almost laughed out loud. "Namae wa?" Your name? The boy told him. The man repeated it twice until he got it right. Then he signed the notebook, shook the boy's hand like they had just closed a business deal, and said: "You know what, man? I couldn't do this in Japanese. You're braver than me." Then he turned around and yelled, "Y'all, get over here!" And his wife and their three kids lined up behind him on the temple steps, one by one, to be interviewed too. That boy walked back to his class with five interviews. More than anybody. His teacher bowed to the man. The man bowed back, too deep, and his cap fell off. As the boys walked away, I heard the shy one whisper to his friend, in Japanese: "Americans are so kind." He said it like he'd just found out something about the world. I've watched a thousand school trips at that temple. I've never seen a kid walk down those steps standing that tall.