David Heinemeier Hansson

Air purifiers are a simple answer to allergies

2025-03-05T10:38:11Z

I developed seasonal allergies relatively late in life. From my late twenties onward, I spent many miserable days in the throes of sneezing, headache, and runny eyes. I tried everything the doctors recommended for relief. About a million different types of medicine, several bouts of allergy vaccinations, and endless testing. But never once did an allergy doctor ask the basic question: What kind of air are you breathing?

Turns out that's everything when you're allergic to pollen, grass, and dust mites! The air. That's what's carrying all this particulate matter, so if your idea of proper ventilation is merely to open a window, you're inviting in your nasal assailants. No wonder my symptoms kept escalating.

For me, the answer was simply to stop breathing air full of everything I'm allergic to while working, sleeping, and generally just being inside. And the way to do that was to clean the air of all those allergens with air purifiers running HEPA-grade filters.

That's it. That was the answer!

After learning this, I outfitted everywhere we live with these machines of purifying wonder: One in the home office, one in the living area, one in the bedroom. All monitored for efficiency using Awair air sensors. Aiming to have the PM2.5 measure read a fat zero whenever possible.

In America, I've used the Alen BreatheSmart series. They're great. And in Europe, I've used the Philips ones. Also good.

It's been over a decade like this now. It's exceptionally rare that I have one of those bad allergy days now. It can still happen, of course — if I spend an entire day outside, breathing in allergens in vast quantities. But as with almost everything, the dose makes the poison. The difference between breathing in some allergens, some of the time, is entirely different from breathing all of it, all of the time.

I think about this often when I see a doctor for something. Here was this entire profession of allergy specialists, and I saw at least a handful of them while I was trying to find a medical solution. None of them even thought about dealing with the environment. The cause of the allergy. Their entire field of view was restricted to dealing with mitigation rather than prevention.

Not every problem, medical or otherwise, has a simple solution. But many problems do, and you have to be careful not to be so smart that you can't see it.

Human service is luxury

2025-03-03T08:05:08Z

Maybe one day AI will answer every customer question flawlessly, but we're nowhere near that reality right now. I can't tell you how often I've been stuck in some god-forsaken AI loop or phone tree WHEN ALL I WANT IS A HUMAN. So I end up either just yelling "operator", "operator", "operator" (the modern-day mayday!) or smashing zero over and over. It's a unworthy interaction for any premium service.

Don't get me wrong. I'm pretty excited about AI. I've seen it do some incredible things. And of course it's just going to keep getting better. But in our excitement about the technical promise, I think we're forgetting that humans need more than correct answers. Customer service at its best also offers understanding and reassurance. It offers a human connection.

Especially as AI eats the low-end, commodity-style customer support. The sort that was always done poorly, by disinterested people, rapidly churning through a perceived dead-end job, inside companies that only ever saw support as a cost center. Yeah, nobody is going to cry a tear for losing that.

But you know that isn't all there is to customer service. Hopefully you've had a chance to experience what it feels like when a cheerful, engaged human is interested in helping you figure out what's wrong or how to do something right. Because they know exactly what they're talking about. Because they've helped thousands of others through exactly the same situation. That stuff is gold.

Partly because it feels bespoke. A customer service agent who's good at their job knows how to tailor the interaction not just to your problem, but to your temperament. Because they've seen all the shapes. They can spot an angry-but-actually-just-frustrated fit a thousand miles away. They can tell a timid-but-curious type too. And then deliver exactly what either needs in that moment. That's luxury.

That's our thesis for Basecamp, anyway. That by treating customer service as a career, we'll end up with the kind of agents that embody this luxury, and our customers will feel the difference.

AMD in everything

2025-02-27T09:02:00Z

Back in the mid 90s, I had a friend who was really into raytracing, but needed to nurture his hobby on a budget. So instead of getting a top-of-the-line Intel Pentium machine, he bought two AMD K5 boxes, and got a faster rendering flow for less money. All I cared about in the 90s was gaming, though, and for that, Intel was king, so to me, AMD wasn't even a consideration.

And that's how it stayed for the better part of the next three decades. AMD would put out budget parts that might make economic sense in narrow niches, but Intel kept taking all the big trophies in gaming, in productivity, and on the server.

As late as the end of the 2010s, we were still buying Intel for our servers at 37signals. Even though AMD was getting more competitive, and the price-watt-performance equation was beginning to tilt in their favor.

By the early 2020s, though, AMD had caught up on the server, and we haven't bought Intel since. The AMD EPYC line of chips are simply superior to anything Intel offers in our price/performance window. Today, the bulk of our new fleet run on dual EPYC 9454s for a total of 96 cores(!) per machine. They're awesome.

It's been the same story on the desktop and laptop for me. After switching to Linux last year, I've been all in on AMD. My beloved Framework 13 is rocking an AMD 7640U, and my desktop machine runs on an AMD 7950X. Oh, and my oldest son just got a new gaming PC with an AMD 9900X, and my middle son has a AMD 8945HS in his gaming laptop. It's all AMD in everything!

So why is this? Well, clearly the clever crew at AMD is putting out some great CPU designs lately with Lisa Su in charge. I'm particularly jazzed about the upcoming Framework desktop, which runs the latest Max 395+ chip, and can apportion up to 110GB of memory as VRAM (great for local AI!). This beast punches a multi-core score that's on par with that of an M4 Pro, and it's no longer that far behind in single-core either. But all the glory doesn't just go to AMD, it's just as much a triumph of TSMC.

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. They're the world leader in advanced chip making, and key to the story of how Apple was able to leapfrog the industry with the M-series chips back in 2020. Apple has long been the top customer for TSMC, so they've been able to reserve capacity on the latest manufacturing processes (called "nodes"), and as a result had a solid lead over everyone else for a while.

But that lead is evaporating fast. That new Max+ 395 is showing that AMD has nearly caught up in terms of raw grunt, and the efficiency is no longer a million miles away either. This is again largely because AMD has been able to benefit from the same TSMC-powered progress that's also propelling Apple.

But you know who it's not propelling? Intel. They're still trying to get their own chip-making processes to perform competitively, but so far it looks like they're just falling further and further behind. The latest Intel boards are more expensive and run slower than the competition from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm. And there appears to be no easy fix to sort it all out around the corner.

TSMC really is lifting all the boats behind its innovation locks. Qualcomm, just like AMD, have nearly caught up to Apple with their latest chips. The 8 Elite unit in my new Samsung S25 is faster than the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro in multi-core tests, and very close in single-core. It's also just as efficient now.

This is obviously great for Android users, who for a long time had to suffer the indignity of truly atrocious CPU performance compared to the iPhone. It was so bad for a while that we had to program our web apps differently for Android, because they simply didn't have the power to run JavaScript fast enough! But that's all history now.

But as much as I now cheer for Qualcomm's chips, I'm even more chuffed about the fact that AMD is on a roll. I spend far more time in front of my desktop than I do any other computer, and after dumping Apple, it's a delight to see that the M-series advantage is shrinking to irrelevance fast. There's of course still the software reason for why someone would pick Apple, and they continue to make solid hardware, but the CPU playing field is now being leveled.

This is obviously a good thing if you're a fan of Linux, like me. Framework in particular has invigorated a credible alternative to the sleek, unibody but ultimately disposable nature of the reigning MacBook laptops. By focusing on repairability, upgradeability, and superior keyboards, we finally have an alternative for developer laptops that doesn't just feel like a cheap copy of a MacBook. And thanks to AMD pushing the envelope, these machines are rapidly closing the remaining gaps in performance and efficiency.

And oh how satisfying it must be to sit as CEO of AMD now. The company was founded just one year after Intel, back in 1969, but for its entire existence, it's lived in the shadow of its older brother. Now, thanks to TSMC, great leadership from Lisa Su, and a crack team of chip designers, they're finally reaping the rewards. That is one hell of a journey to victory!

So three cheers for AMD! A tip of the hat to TSMC. And what a gift to developers and computer enthusiasts everywhere that Apple once more has some stiff competition in the chip space.

The New York Times gives liberals The Danish Permission to pivot on mass immigration

2025-02-26T11:35:03Z

One of the key roles The New York Times plays in American society is as guardians of the liberal Overton window. Its editorial line sets the terms for what's permissible to discuss in polite circles on the center left. Whether it's covid mask efficiency, trans kids, or, now, mass immigration. When The New York Times allows the counter argument to liberal orthodoxy to be published, it signals to its readers that it's time to pivot.

On mass immigration, the center-left liberal orthodoxy has for the last decade in particular been that this is an unreserved good. It's cultural enrichment! It's much-needed workers! It's a humanitarian imperative! Any opposition was treated as de-facto racism, and the idea that a country would enforce its own borders as evidence of early fascism. But that era is coming to a close, and The New York Times is using The Danish Permission to prepare its readers for the end.

As I've often argued, Denmark is an incredibly effective case study in such arguments, because it's commonly thought of as the holy land of progressivism. Free college, free health care, amazing public transit, obsessive about bikes, and a solid social safety net. It's basically everything people on the center left ever thought they wanted from government. In theory, at least.

In practice, all these government-funded benefits come with a host of trade-offs that many upper middle-class Americans (the primary demographic for The New York Times) would find difficult to swallow. But I've covered that in detail in The reality of the Danish fairytale, so I won't repeat that here.

Instead, let's focus on the fact that The New York Times is now begrudgingly admitting that the main reason Europe has turned to the right, in election after election recently, is due to the problems stemming from mass immigration across the continent and the channel.

For example, here's a bit about immigrant crime being higher:

Crime and welfare were also flashpoints: Crime rates were substantially higher among immigrants than among native Danes, and employment rates were much lower, government data showed.

It wasn't long ago that recognizing higher crime rates among MENAPT immigrants to Europe was seen as a racist dog whistle. And every excuse imaginable was leveled at the undeniable statistics showing that immigrants from countries like Tunisia, Lebanon, and Somalia are committing violent crime at rates 7-9 times higher than ethnic Danes (and that these statistics are essentially the same in Norway and Finland too).

Or how about this one: Recognizing that many immigrants from certain regions were loafing on the welfare state in ways that really irked the natives:

One source of frustration was the fact that unemployed immigrants sometimes received resettlement payments that made their welfare benefits larger than those of unemployed Danes.

Or the explicit acceptance that a strong social welfare state requires a homogeneous culture in order to sustain the trust needed for its support:

Academic research has documented that societies with more immigration tend to have lower levels of social trust and less generous government benefits. Many social scientists believe this relationship is one reason that the United States, which accepted large numbers of immigrants long before Europe did, has a weaker safety net. A 2006 headline in the British publication The Economist tartly summarized the conclusion from this research as, “Diversity or the welfare state: Choose one.”

Diversity or welfare! That again would have been an absolutely explosive claim to make not all that long ago.

Finally, there's the acceptance that cultural incompatibility, such as on the role of women in society, is indeed a problem:

Gender dynamics became a flash point: Danes see themselves as pioneers for equality, while many new arrivals came from traditional Muslim societies where women often did not work outside the home and girls could not always decide when and whom to marry.

It took a while, but The New York Times is now recognizing that immigrants from some regions really do commit vastly more violent crime, are net-negative contributors to the state budgets (by drawing benefits at higher rates and being unemployed more often), and that together with the cultural incompatibilities, end up undermining public trust in the shared social safety net.

The consequence of this admission is dawning not only on The New York Times, but also on other liberal entities around Europe:

Tellingly, the response in Sweden and Germany has also shifted... Today many Swedes look enviously at their neighbor. The foreign-born population in Sweden has soared, and the country is struggling to integrate recent arrivals into society. Sweden now has the highest rate of gun homicides in the European Union, with immigrants committing a disproportionate share of gun violence. After an outburst of gang violence in 2023, Ulf Kristersson, the center-right prime minister, gave a televised address in which he blamed “irresponsible immigration policy” and “political naïveté.” Sweden’s center-left party has likewise turned more restrictionist.

All these arguments are in service of the article's primary thesis: To win back power, the left, in Europe and America, must pivot on mass immigration, like the Danes did. Because only by doing so are they able to counter the threat of "the far right".

The piece does a reasonable job accounting for the history of this evolution in Danish politics, except for the fact that it leaves out the main protagonist. The entire account is written from the self-serving perspective of the Danish Social Democrats, and it shows. It tells a tale of how it was actually Social Democrat mayors who first spotted the problems, and well, it just took a while for the top of the party to correct. Bullshit.

The real reason the Danes took this turn is that "the far right" won in Denmark, and The Danish People's Party deserve the lion's share of the credit. They started in 1995, quickly set the agenda on mass immigration, and by 2015, they were the second largest party in the Danish parliament.

Does that story ring familiar? It should. Because it's basically what's been happening in Sweden, France, Germany, and the UK lately. The mainstream parties have ignored the grave concerns about mass immigration from its electorate, and only when "the far right" surged as a result, did the center left and right parties grow interested in changing course.

Now on some level, this is just democracy at work. But it's also hilarious that this process, where voters choose parties that champion the causes they care about, has been labeled The Grave Threat to Democracy in recent years. Whether it's Trump, Le Pen, Weidel, or Kjærsgaard, they've all been met with contempt or worse for channeling legitimate voter concerns about immigration.

I think this is the point that's sinking in at The New York Times. Opposition to mass immigration and multi-culturalism in Europe isn't likely to go away. The mayhem that's swallowing Sweden is a reality too obvious to ignore. And as long as the center left keeps refusing to engage with the topic honestly, and instead hides behind some anti-democratic firewall, they're going to continue to lose terrain.

Again, this is how democracies are supposed to work! If your political class is out of step with the mood of the populace, they're supposed to lose. And this is what's broadly happening now. And I think that's why we're getting this New York Times pivot. Because losing sucks, and if you're on the center left, you'd like to see that end.

Stick with the customer

2025-02-21T08:05:16Z

One of the biggest mistakes that new startup founders make is trying to get away from the customer-facing roles too early. Whether it's customer support or it's sales, it's an incredible advantage to have the founders doing that work directly, and for much longer than they find comfortable.

The absolute worst thing you can do is hire a sales person or a customer service agent too early. You'll miss all the golden nuggets that customers throw at you for free when they're rejecting your pitch or complaining about the product. Seeing these reasons paraphrased or summarized destroy all the nutrients in their insights. You want that whole-grain feedback straight from the customers' mouth!

When we launched Basecamp in 2004, Jason was doing all the customer service himself. And he kept doing it like that for three years!! By the time we hired our first customer service agent, Jason was doing 150 emails/day. The business was doing millions of dollars in ARR. And Basecamp got infinitely, better both as a market proposition and as a product, because Jason could funnel all that feedback into decisions and positioning.

For a long time after that, we did "Everyone on Support". Frequently rotating programmers, designers, and founders through a day of answering emails directly to customers. The dividends of doing this were almost as high as having Jason run it all in the early years. We fixed an incredible number of minor niggles and annoying bugs because programmers found it easier to solve the problem than to apologize for why it was there.

It's not easy doing this! Customers often offer their valuable insights wrapped in rude language, unreasonable demands, and bad suggestions. That's why many founders quit the business of dealing with them at the first opportunity. That's why few companies ever do "Everyone On Support". That's why there's such eagerness to reduce support to an AI-only interaction.

But quitting dealing with customers early, not just in support but also in sales, is an incredible handicap for any startup. You don't have to do everything that every customer demands of you, but you should certainly listen to them. And you can't listen well if the sound is being muffled by early layers of indirection.

When to give up

2025-02-20T08:53:33Z

Most of our cultural virtues, celebrated heroes, and catchy slogans align with the idea of "never give up". That's a good default! Most people are inclined to give up too easily, as soon as the going gets hard. But it's also worth remembering that sometimes you really should fold, admit defeat, and accept that your plan didn't work out.

But how to distinguish between a bad plan and insufficient effort? It's not easy. Plenty of plans look foolish at first glance, especially to people without skin in the game. That's the essence of a disruptive startup: The idea ought to look a bit daft at first glance or it probably doesn't carry the counter-intuitive kernel needed to really pop.

Yet it's also obviously true that not every daft idea holds the potential to be a disruptive startup. That's why even the best venture capital investors in the world are wrong far more than they're right. Not because they aren't smart, but because nobody is smart enough to predict (the disruption of) the future consistently. The best they can do is make long bets, and then hope enough of them pay off to fund the ones that don't.

So far, so logical, so conventional. A million words have been written by a million VCs about how their shrewd eyes let them see those hidden disruptive kernels before anyone else could. Good for them.

What I'm more interested in knowing more about is how and when you pivot from a promising bet to folding your hand. When do you accept that no amount of additional effort is going to get that turkey to soar?

I'm asking because I don't have any great heuristics here, and I'd really like to know! Because the ability to fold your hand, and live to play your remaining chips another day, isn't just about startups. It's also about individual projects. It's about work methods. Hell, it's even about politics and societies at large.

I'll give you just one small example. In 2017, Rails 5.1 shipped with new tooling for doing end-to-end system tests, using a headless browser to validate the functionality, as a user would in their own browser. Since then, we've spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to make this approach work. Far too much time, if you ask me now.

This year, we finished our decision to fold, and to give up on using these types of system tests on the scale we had previously thought made sense. In fact, just last week, we deleted 5,000 lines of code from the Basecamp code base by dropping literally all the system tests that we had carried so diligently for all these years.

I really like this example, because it draws parallels to investing and entrepreneurship so well. The problem with our approach to system tests wasn't that it didn't work at all. If that had been the case, bailing on the approach would have been a no brainer long ago. The trouble was that it sorta-kinda did work! Some of the time. With great effort. But ultimately wasn't worth the squeeze.

I've seen this trap snap on startups time and again. The idea finds some traction. Enough for the founders to muddle through for years and years. Stuck with an idea that sorta-kinda does work, but not well enough to be worth a decade of their life. That's a tragic trap.

The only antidote I've found to this on the development side is time boxing. Programmers are just as liable as anyone to believe a flawed design can work if given just a bit more time. And then a bit more. And then just double of what we've already spent. The time box provides a hard stop. In Shape Up, it's six weeks. Do or die. Ship or don't. That works.

But what's the right amount of time to give a startup or a methodology or a societal policy? There's obviously no universal answer, but I'd argue that whatever the answer, it's "less than you think, less than you want".

Having the grit to stick with the effort when the going gets hard is a key trait of successful people. But having the humility to give up on good bets turned bad might be just as important.

Europe must become dangerous again

2025-02-19T10:29:56Z

Trump is doing Europe a favor by revealing the true cost of its impotency. Because, in many ways, he has the manners and the honesty of a child. A kid will just blurt out in the supermarket "why is that lady so fat, mommy?". That's not a polite thing to ask within earshot of said lady, but it might well be a fair question and a true observation! Trump is just as blunt when he essentially asks: "Why is Europe so weak?".

Because Europe is weak, spiritually and militarily, in the face of Russia. It's that inherent weakness that's breeding the delusion that Russia is at once both on its last legs, about to lose the war against Ukraine any second now, and also the all-potent superpower that could take over all of Europe, if we don't start World Word III to counter it. This is not a coherent position.

If you want peace, you must be strong.

The big cats in the international jungle don't stick to a rules-based order purely out of higher principles, but out of self-preservation. And they can smell weakness like a tiger smells blood. This goes for Europe too. All too happy to lecture weaker countries they do not fear on high-minded ideals of democracy and free speech, while standing aghast and weeping powerlessly when someone stronger returns the favor.

I'm not saying that this is right, in some abstract moral sense. I like the idea of a rules-based order. I like the idea of territorial sovereignty. I even like the idea that the normal exchanges between countries isn't as blunt and honest as those of a child in the supermarket. But what I like and "what is" need separating.

Europe simply can't have it both ways. Be weak militarily, utterly dependent on an American security guarantee, and also expect a seat at the big-cat table. These positions are incompatible. You either get your peace dividend -- and the freedom to squander it on net-zero nonsense -- or you get to have a say in how the world around you is organized.

Which brings us back to Trump doing Europe a favor. For all his bluster and bullying, America is still a benign force in its relation to Europe. We're being punked by someone from our own alliance. That's a cheap way of learning the lesson that weakness, impotence, and peace-dividend thinking is a short-term strategy. Russia could teach Europe a far more costly lesson. So too China.

All that to say is that Europe must heed the rude awakening from our cowboy friends across the Atlantic. They may be crude, they may be curt, but by golly, they do have a point.

Get jacked, Europe, and you'll no longer get punked. Stay feeble, Europe, and the indignities won't stop with being snubbed in Saudi Arabia.

Europe's impotent rage

2025-02-17T10:33:05Z

Europe has become a third-rate power economically, politically, and militarily, and the price for this slowly building predicament is now due all at once.

First, America is seeking to negotiate peace in Ukraine directly with Russia, without even inviting Europe to the table. Decades of underfunding the European military has lead us here. The never-ending ridicule of America, for spending the supposedly "absurd sum" of 3.4% of its GDP to maintain its might, coming home to roost.

Second, mass immigration in Europe has become the central political theme driving the surge of right-wing parties in countries across the continent. Decades of blind adherence to a naive multi-cultural ideology has produced an abject failure to assimilate culturally-incompatible migrants. Rather than respond to this growing public discontent, mainstream parties all over Europe run the same playbook of calling anyone with legitimate concerns "racist", and attempting to disparage or even ban political parties advancing these topics.

Third, the decline of entrepreneurship in Europe has lead to a death of new major companies, and an accelerated brain drain to America. The European economy lost parity with the American after 2008, and now the net-zero nonsense has lead Europe's old manufacturing powerhouse, Germany, to commit financial harakiri. Shutting its nuclear power plants, over-investing in solar and wind, and rendering its prized car industry noncompetitive on the global market. The latter leading European bureaucrats in the unenviable position of having to both denounce Trump on his proposed tariffs while imposing their own on the Chinese.

A single failure in any of these three crucial realms would have been painful to deal with. But failure in all three at the same time is a disaster, and it's one of Europe's own making. Worse still is that Europeans at large still appear to be stuck in the early stages of grief. Somewhere between "anger" and "bargaining". Leaving us with "depression" before we arrive at "acceptance".

Except this isn't destiny. Europe is not doomed to impotent outrage or repressive anger. Europe has the people, the talent, and the capital to choose a different path. What it currently lacks is the will.

I'm a Dane. Therefore, I'm a European. I don't summarize the sad state of Europe out of spite or ill will or from a lack of standing. I don't want Europe to become American. But I want Europe to be strong, confident, and successful. Right now it's anything but.

The best time for Europe to make a change was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. Forza Europe! Viva Europe!

Leave it to the Germans

2025-02-17T08:26:03Z

Just a day after JD Vance's remarkable speech in Munich, 60 Minutes validates his worst accusations in a chilling segment on the totalitarian German crackdown on free speech. You couldn't have scripted this development for more irony or drama!

This isn't 60 Minutes finding a smoking gun in some secret government archive, detailing a plot to prosecute free speech under some fishy pretext. No, this is German prosecutors telling an American journalist in an open interview that insulting people online is a crime and retweeting a "lie" will get you in trouble with the law. No hidden cameras! All out in the open!

Nor is this just some rogue prosecutorial theory. 60 Minutes goes along for the ride with German police, as they conduct a raid at dawn with six armed officers to confiscate the laptop and a phone of a German citizen suspected of posting a racist cartoon. Even typing out this description of what happens sounds like insane hyperbole, but you can just watch the clip for yourself.

And this morning raid was just one of fifty that day. Fifty raids in a day! For wrong speech, spicy memes, online insults of politicians, and other utterances by German citizens critical of their government or policies! Is this is the kind of hallowed democracy that Germans are supposed to defend against the supposed threat of AfD?

As I noted yesterday, even Denmark has some draconian laws on the books limiting free speech. And they've been used in anger too. Although I've yet to see the kind of grotesque enforcement -- six armed officers at dawn coming to confiscate a laptop! -- but the trend is none the less worrying all across Europe, not just in Germany.

I suppose this is why European leaders are in such shock over Vance's wagging finger. Because they know he's dead on, but they're not used to getting called out like this. On the world stage, while they just had to sit there. I can see how that's humiliating.

But the humiliation of the European people is infinitely greater as they're gaslit about their right to free speech. That Vance doesn't know what he's talking about. Oh, and what about the Gulf of America?? It's pathetic.

So too is the apparent deep support from many parts of Europe for this totalitarian insanity. I keep hearing from Europeans who with a straight face will claim that of course they have free speech, but that doesn't mean you can insult people, hurt their feelings, or post statistics that might cast certain groups in a bad light.

Madness.

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
-- Orwell, 1949

Europeans don't have or understand free speech

2025-02-15T20:13:04Z

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics.

Let's start with his points on free speech, because they're the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand "free speech" as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary.

It's quite like how every dictator around the world pretends to believe in democracy. Sure, they may repress the opposition and rig their elections, but they still crave the imprimatur of the concept. So too "free speech" and the Europeans.

Vance illustrated his point with several examples from the UK. A country that pursues thousands of yearly wrong-speech cases, threatens foreigners with repercussions should they dare say too much online, and has no qualms about handing down draconian sentences for online utterances. It's completely totalitarian and completely nuts.

Germany is not much better. It's illegal to insult elected officials, and if you say the wrong thing, or post the wrong meme, you may well find yourself the subject of a raid at dawn. Just crazy stuff.

I'd love to say that Denmark is different, but sadly it is not. You can be put in prison for up to two years for mocking or degrading someone on the basis on their race. It recently become illegal to burn the Quran (which sadly only serves to legitimize crazy Muslims killing or stabbing those who do). And you may face up to three years in prison for posting online in a way that can be construed as morally supporting terrorism.

But despite all of these examples and laws, I'm constantly arguing with Europeans who cling to the idea that they do have free speech like Americans. Many of them mistakenly think that "hate speech" is illegal in the US, for example. It is not.

America really takes the first amendment quite seriously. Even when it comes to hate speech. Famously, the Jewish lawyers of the (now unrecognizable) ACLU defended the right of literal, actual Nazis to march for their hateful ideology in the streets of Skokie, Illinois in 1979 and won.

Another common misconception is that "misinformation" is illegal over there too. It also is not. That's why the Twitter Files proved to be so scandalous. Because it showed the US government under Biden laundering an illegal censorship regime -- in grave violation of the first amendment -- through private parties, like the social media networks.

In America, your speech is free to be wrong, free to be hateful, free to insult religions and celebrities alike. All because the founding fathers correctly saw that asserting the power to determine otherwise leads to a totalitarian darkness.

We've seen vivid illustrations of both in recent years. At the height of the trans mania, questioning whether men who said they were women should be allowed in women's sports or bathrooms or prisons was frequently labeled "hate speech".

During the pandemic, questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab instead of a wet market got labeled "misinformation". So too did any questions about the vaccine's inability to stop spread or infection. Or whether surgical masks or lock downs were effective interventions.

Now we know that having a public debate about all of these topics was of course completely legitimate. Covid escaping from a lab is currently the most likely explanation, according to American intelligence services, and many European countries, including the UK, have stopped allowing puberty blockers for children.

Which brings us to that last bugaboo: Mass immigration. Vance identified it as one of the key threats to Europe at the moment, and I have to agree. So should anyone who've been paying attention to the statistics showing the abject failure of this thirty-year policy utopia of a multi-cultural Europe. The fast changing winds in European politics suggest that's exactly what's happening.

These are not separate issues. It's the lack of free speech, and a catastrophically narrow Overton window, which has led Europe into such a mess with mass immigration in the first place. In Denmark, the first popular political party that dared to question the wisdom of importing massive numbers of culturally-incompatible foreigners were frequently charged with claims of racism back in the 90s. The same "that's racist!" playbook is now being run on political parties across Europe who dare challenge the mass immigration taboo.

But making plain observations that some groups of immigrants really do commit vastly more crime and contribute vastly less economically to society is not racist. It wasn't racist when the Danish Folkparty did it in Denmark in the 1990s, and it isn't racist now when the mainstream center-left parties have followed suit.

I've drawn the contrast to Sweden many times, and I'll do it again here. Unlike Denmark, Sweden kept its Overton window shut on the consequences of mass immigration all the way up through the 90s, 00s, and 10s. As a prize, it now has bombs going off daily, the European record in gun homicides, and a government that admits that the immigrant violence is out of control.

The state of Sweden today is a direct consequence of suppressing any talk of the downsides to mass immigration for decades. And while that taboo has recently been broken, it may well be decades more before the problems are tackled at their root. It's tragic beyond belief.

The rest of Europe should look to Sweden as a cautionary tale, and the Danish alternative as a precautionary one. It's never too late to fix tomorrow. You can't fix today, but you can always fix tomorrow.

So Vance was right to wag his finger at all this nonsense. The lack of free speech and the problems with mass immigration. He was right to assert that America and Europe has a shared civilization to advance and protect. Whether the current politicians of Europe wants to hear it or not, I'm convinced that average Europeans actually are listening.

Serving the country

2025-02-08T11:27:25Z

In 1940, President Roosevelt tapped William S. Knudsen to run the government's production of military equipment. Knudsen had spent a pivotal decade at Ford during the mass-production revolution, and was president of General Motors, when he was drafted as a civilian into service as a three-star general. Not bad for a Dane, born just ten minutes on bike from where I'm writing this in Copenhagen!

Knudsen's leadership raised the productive capacity of the US war machine by a 100x in areas like plane production, where it went from producing 3,000 planes in 1939 to over 300,000 by 1945. He was quoted on his achievement: "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible".

Knudsen wasn't an elected politician. He wasn't even a military man. But Roosevelt saw that this remarkable Dane had the skills needed to reform a puny war effort into one capable of winning the Second World War.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Elon Musk is a modern day William S. Knudsen. Only even more accomplished in efficiency management, factory optimization, and first-order systems thinking.

No, America isn't in a hot war with the Axis powers, but for the sake of the West, it damn well better be prepared for one in the future. Or better still, be so formidable that no other country or alliance would even think to start one. And this requires a strong, confident, and sound state with its affairs in order.

If you look at the government budget alone, this is direly not so. The US was knocking on a two-trillion-dollar budget deficit in 2024! Adding to a towering debt that's now north of 36 trillion. A burden that's already consuming $881 billion in yearly interest payments. More than what's spent on the military or Medicare. Second to only Social Security on the list of line items.

Clearly, this is not sustainable.

This is the context of DOGE. The program, lead by Musk, that's been deputized by Trump to turn the ship around. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and Musk is dropping beats that Knudsen would have surely been tapping his foot to. And just like Knudsen in his time, it's hard to think of any other American entrepreneur more qualified to tackle exactly this two-trillion dollar problem.

It is through The Musk Algorithm that SpaceX lowered the cost of sending a kilo of goods into lower orbit from the US by well over a magnitude. And now America's share of worldwide space transit has risen from less than 30% in 2010 to about 85%. Thanks to reusable rockets and chopstick-catching landing towers. Thanks to Musk.

Or to take a more earthly example with Twitter. Before Musk took over, Twitter had revenues of $5 billion and earned $682 million. After the take over, X has managed to earn $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion in revenue. Mostly thank to the fact that Musk cut 80% of the staff out of the operation, and savaged the cloud costs of running the service.

This is not what people expected at the time of the take over! Not only did many commentators believe that Twitter was going to collapse from the drastic costs in staff, they also thought that the financing for the deal would implode. Chiefly as a result of advertisers withdrawing from the platform under intense media pressure. But that just didn't happen.

Today, the debt used to take over Twitter and turn it into X is trading at 97 cents on the dollar. The business is twice as profitable as it was before, and arguably as influential as ever. All with just a fifth of the staff required to run it. Whatever you think of Musk and his personal tweets, it's impossible to deny what an insane achievement of efficiency this has been!

These are just two examples of Musk's incredible ability to defy the odds and deliver the most unbelievable efficiency gains known to modern business records. And we haven't even talked about taking Tesla from producing 35,000 cars in 2014 to making 1.7 million in 2024. Or turning xAI into a major force in AI by assembling a 100,000 H100 cluster at "superhuman" pace.

Who wouldn't want such a capacity involved in finding the waste, sloth, and squander in the US budget? Well, his political enemies, of course!

And I get it. Musk's magic is balanced with mania and even a dash of madness. This is usually the case with truly extraordinary humans. The taller they stand, the longer the shadow. Expecting Musk to do what he does and then also be a "normal, chill dude" is delusional.

But even so, I think it's completely fair to be put off by his tendency to fire tweets from the hip, opine on world affairs during all hours of the day, and offer his support to fringe characters in politics, business, and technology. I'd be surprised if even the most ardent Musk super fans don't wince a little every now and then at some of the antics.

And yet, I don't have any trouble weighing those antics against the contributions he's made to mankind, and finding an easy and overwhelming balance in favor of his positive achievements.

Musk is exactly the kind of formidable player you want on your team when you're down two trillion to nothing, needing a Hail Mary pass for the destiny of America, and eager to see the West win the future.

He's a modern-day Knudsen on steroids (or Ketamine?). Let him cook.

Servers can last a long time

2025-02-07T14:47:01Z

We bought sixty-one servers for the launch of Basecamp 3 back in 2015. Dell R430s and R630s, packing thousands of cores and terabytes of RAM. Enough to fill all the app, job, cache, and database duties we needed. The entire outlay for this fleet was about half a million dollars, and it's only now, almost a decade later, that we're finally retiring the bulk of them for a full hardware refresh. What a bargain!

That's over 3,500 days of service from this fleet, at a fully amortized cost of just $142/day. For everything needed to run Basecamp. A software service that has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars in that decade.

We've of course had other expenses beyond hardware from operating Basecamp over the past decade. The ops team, the bandwidth, the power, and the cabinet rental across both our data centers. But none the less, owning our own iron has been a fantastically profitable proposition. Millions of dollars saved over renting in the cloud.

And we aren't even done deriving value from this venerable fleet! The database servers, Dell R630s w/ Xeon E5-2699 CPUs and 768G of RAM, are getting handed down to some of our heritage apps. They will keep on trucking until they give up the ghost.

When we did the public accounting for our cloud exit, it was based on five years of useful life from the hardware. But as this example shows, that's pretty conservative. Most servers can easily power your applications much longer than that.

Owning your own servers has easily been one of our most effective cost advantages. Together with running a lean team. And managing our costs remains key to reaping the profitable fruit from the business. The dollar you keep at the end of the year is just as real whether you earn it or save it.

So you just might want to run those cloud-exit numbers once more with a longer server lifetime value. It might just tip the equation, and motivate you to become a server owner rather than a renter.

It burns

2025-01-31T18:26:55Z

The first time we had to evacuate Malibu this season was during the Franklin fire in early December. We went to bed with our bags packed, thinking they'd probably get it under control. But by 2am, the roaring blades of fire choppers shaking the house got us up. As we sped down the canyon towards Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), the fire had reached the ridge across from ours, and flames were blazing large out the car windows. It felt like we had left the evacuation a little too late, but they eventually did get Franklin under control before it reached us.

Humans have a strange relationship with risk and disasters. We're so prone to wishful thinking and bad pattern matching. I remember people being shocked when the flames jumped the PCH during the Woolsey fire in 2017. IT HAD NEVER DONE THAT! So several friends of ours had to suddenly escape a nightmare scenario, driving through burning streets, in heavy smoke, with literally their lives on the line. Because the past had failed to predict the future.

I fell into that same trap for a moment with the dramatic proclamations of wind and fire weather in the days leading up to January 7. Warning after warning of "extremely dangerous, life-threatening wind" coming from the City of Malibu, and that overly-bureaucratic-but-still-ominous "Particularly Dangerous Situation" designation. Because, really, how much worse could it be? Turns out, a lot.

It was a little before noon on the 7th when we first saw the big plumes of smoke rise from the Palisades fire. And immediately the pattern matching ran astray. Oh, it's probably just like Franklin. It's not big yet, they'll get it out. They usually do. Well, they didn't.

By the late afternoon, we had once more packed our bags, and by then it was also clear that things actually were different this time. Different worse. Different enough that even Santa Monica didn't feel like it was assured to be safe. So we headed far North, to be sure that we wouldn't have to evacuate again. Turned out to be a good move.

Because by now, into the evening, few people in the connected world hadn't started to see the catastrophic images emerging from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Well over 10,000 houses would ultimately burn. Entire neighborhoods leveled. Pictures that could be mistaken for World War II. Utter and complete destruction.

By the night of the 7th, the fire reached our canyon, and it tore through the chaparral and brush that'd been building since the last big fire that area saw in 1993. Out of some 150 houses in our immediate vicinity, nearly a hundred burned to the ground. Including the first house we moved to in Malibu back in 2009. But thankfully not ours.

That's of course a huge relief. This was and is our Malibu Dream House. The site of that gorgeous home office I'm so fond to share views from. Our home.

But a house left standing in a disaster zone is still a disaster. The flames reached all the way up to the base of our construction, incinerated much of our landscaping, and devoured the power poles around it to dysfunction.

We have burnt-out buildings every which way the eye looks. The national guard is still stationed at road blocks on the access roads. Utility workers are tearing down the entire power grid to rebuild it from scratch. It's going to be a long time before this is comfortably habitable again.

So we left.

That in itself feels like defeat. There's an urge to stay put, and to help, in whatever helpless ways you can. But with three school-age children who've already missed over a months worth of learning from power outages, fire threats, actual fires, and now mudslide dangers, it was time to go.

None of this came as a surprise, mind you. After Woolsey in 2017, Malibu life always felt like living on borrowed time to us. We knew it, even accepted it. Beautiful enough to be worth the risk, we said.

But even if it wasn't a surprise, it's still a shock. The sheer devastation, especially in the Palisades, went far beyond our normal range of comprehension. Bounded, as it always is, by past experiences.

Thus, we find ourselves back in Copenhagen. A safe haven for calamities of all sorts. We lived here for three years during the pandemic, so it just made sense to use it for refuge once more. The kids' old international school accepted them right back in, and past friendships were quickly rebooted.

I don't know how long it's going to be this time. And that's an odd feeling to have, just as America has been turning a corner, and just as the optimism is back in so many areas. Of the twenty years I've spent in America, this feels like the most exciting time to be part of the exceptionalism that the US of A offers.

And of course we still are. I'll still be in the US all the time on both business, racing, and family trips. But it won't be exclusively so for a while, and it won't be from our Malibu Dream House. And that burns.

Waiting on red

2025-01-21T21:24:55Z

Americans often laugh when they see how often Danes will patiently, obediently wait on the little red man to turn green before crossing an empty intersection, in the rain, even at night. Nobody is coming! Why don't you just cross?! It seems silly, but the underlying philosophy is anything but. It's load bearing for a civil society like Denmark.

Because doing the right thing every time can be put on autopilot, and when most people follow even the basic norms consistently, the second-order effects are profound. Like the fact that Copenhagen is one of the absolute safest major cities in the world.

But the Danes also know that norms fray if they're not enforced, so they vigorously pursue even small infractions. The Danish police regularly celebrating ticketing bicyclists making even minor mistakes (like driving instead of dragging their bike on the sidewalk). And the metro is constantly being patrolled for fare evaders and antisocial behavior.

It's broken windows theory on steroids. And it works.

When we were living in the city for three years following the pandemic, the most startling difference to major US cities was the prevalence of unattended children everywhere, at all hours. Our oldest was just nine years-old when he started taking the metro alone, even at night.

How many American parents would feel comfortable letting their nine-year old take the L in Chicago or the subway in Manhattan? I don't know any. And as a result, you just don't see any unattended children do this. But in Copenhagen it's completely common place.

This is the prize of having little tolerance for antisocial behavior in the public space. When you take away the freedom from crackheads and bums to smoke up on the train or sleep in the park, you grant the freedom to nine-year olds to roam the city and for families to enjoy the park at dusk.

This is the fundamental error of suicidal empathy. That tolerance of the deranged and dangerous few can be kept a separate discussion from the freedom and safety of the many. These are oppositional forces. The more antisocial behavior you excuse, the further families will retract into their protective shell. And suddenly there are no longer children around in the public city space or any appetite for public transit.

Maybe you have to become a parent to really understand this. I admit that I didn't give this nearly the same attention before coming a father of three. But the benefit isn't exclusively about the freedom and safety enjoyed by your own family, it's also about the ambient atmosphere of living in a city where children are everywhere. It's a special form of life-affirming luxury, and it's probably the thing I've missed most about Copenhagen since we went back to the US.

What's interesting is how much active effort it takes to maintain this state of affairs. The veneer of civil society is surprisingly thin. Norms fray quickly if left unguarded. And it's much harder to reestablish their purchase on society than to protect them from disappearing in the first place.

But I also get that it's hard to connect the dots from afar, though. Many liberals in America keep Denmark as some mythical place where all their policy dreams have come true, without ever wrestling much with what it takes to maintain the social trust that allows those policies to enjoy public support.

The progressive Nirvana of Denmark is built on a highly conservative set of norms and traditions. It's yin and yang. So if you're committed to those progressive outcomes in America, whether it's the paternity leave, the independent children, or the amazing public transit system, you ought to consider what conservative values it makes sense to accept as enablers rather than obstacles.

MEGA

2025-01-20T16:21:25Z

Trump is back at the helm of the United States, and the majority of Americans are optimistic about the prospect. Especially the young. In a poll by CBS News, it's the 18-29 demographic that's most excited, with a whopping two-thirds answering in the affirmative to being optimistic about the next four years under Trump. And I'm right there with them. The current American optimism is infectious!

While Trump has undoubtedly been the catalyst, this is a bigger shift than any one person. After spending so long lost in the wilderness of excessive self-criticism and self-loathing, there's finally a broad coalition of the willing working to get the mojo back.

This is what's so exhilarating about America. The big, dramatic swings. The high stakes. The long shots. And I like this country much better when it's confident in that inherent national character.

Of course all this is political. And of course Trump is triggering for many. Just like his opponent would have been if she had won. But this moment is not just political, it's beyond that. It's economic, it's entrepreneurial, it's technological. Optimism is infectious.

As someone with a foot on both the American and European continent, I can't help being jealous with my euro leg. Europe is stuck with monumental levels of pessimism at the moment, and it's really sad to see.

But my hope is that Europe, like usual, is merely a few years behind the American revival in optimism. That it's coming to the old world eventually.

This is far more an article of faith than of analysis, mind you. I can also well imagine Europe sticking with Eurocrat thinking, spinning its wheels with grand but empty proclamations, issuing scorning but impotent admonishments of America, and doubling down on the regulatory black hole.

Neither path is given. Europe was competitive with America on many economic terms as recently as 15 years ago. But Europe also lacks the ability to change course quite like the Americans. So the crystal ball is blurry.

Personally, I choose faith. Optimism must win. Pessimism is literally for losers.

Failed integration and the fall of multiculturalism

2025-01-20T03:18:27Z

For decades, the debate in Denmark around problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully. If not in the first generation, then the second. For much of this time, I thought that was a reasonable thesis. But reality has proved it wrong.

If literally every country in Europe has struggled in the same ways, and for decades on end, to produce the fabled "successful integration", it's not a compelling explanation that it's just because the Danes, Swedes, Norweigans, Germans, French, Brits, or Belgians just didn't try hard enough. It's that the mission, on the grand and statistical scale, was impossible in many cases.

As Thomas Sowell tells us, this is because there are no solutions to intractable, hard problems like cultural integration between wildly different ways of living. Only trade offs. Many of which are unfavorable to all parties.

But by the same token, just because the overall project of integrating many of the most divergent cultures from mass immigrations has failed, there are many individual cases of great success. Much of the Danish press, for example, has for years propped up the hope of broad integration success by sharing hopeful, heartwarming stories of highly successful integration. And you love to see it.

Heartwarming anecdotes don't settle trade offs, though. They don't prove a solution or offer a conclusion either.

I think the conclusion at this point is clear. First, cultural integration, let alone assimilation, is incredibly difficult. The more divergent the cultures, the more difficult the integration. And for some combinations, it's outright impossible.

Second, the compromise of multiculturalism has been an abject failure in Europe. Allowing parallel cultures to underpin parallel societies is poison for the national unity and trust.

Which brings us to another bad social thesis from the last thirty-some years: That national unity, character, and belonging not only isn't important, but actively harmful. That national pride in history, traditions, and culture is primarily an engine of bigotry.

What a tragic thesis with catastrophic consequences.

But at this point, there's a lot of political capital invested into all these bad ideas. In sticking with the tired blame game. Thinking that what hasn't worked for fifty years will surely start working if we give it five more.

Now, I actually have a nostalgic appreciation for the beautiful ideals behind such hope for humanity, but I also think that at this point it is as delusional as it is dangerous.

And I think it's directly responsible for the rise of so-called populist movements all over Europe. They're directly downstream from the original theses of success in cultural integration going through just-try-harder efforts as well as the multicultural compromise. A pair of ideas that had buy-in across much of the European board until reality simply became too intolerable for too many who had to live with the consequences.

Such widespread realization doesn't automatically correct the course of a societal ship that's been sailing in the wrong direction for decades, of course. The playbook that took DEI and wokeness to blitzkrieg success in the States, by labeling any dissent to those ideologies racist or bigoted, have also worked to hold the line on the question of mass immigration in Europe until very recently.

But I think the line is breaking in Europe, just as it recently did in America. The old accusations have finally lost their power from years of excessive use, and suppressing the reality that many people can see with their own eyes is getting harder.

I completely understand why that makes people anxious, though. History is full of examples of combative nationalism leading us to dark edges. And, especially in Germany, I can understand the historical hesitation when there's even a hint of something that sounds like what they heard in the 30s.

But you can hold both considerations in your head at the same time without losing your wits. Mass immigration to Europe has been a failure, and the old thesis of naive hope has to get replaced by a new strategy that deals with reality. AND that not all proposed fixes by those who diagnosed the situation early are either sound or palatable.

World history is full of people who've had the correct diagnosis but a terrible prescription. And I think it's fair to say that it's not even obvious what the right prescription is at this point!

Vibrant, strong societies surely benefit from some degree of immigration. Especially from culturally-compatible regions based on national and economic benefit. But whatever the specific trade-offs taken from here, it seems clear that for much of Europe, they're going to look radically different than they've done in the past three decades or so.

Best get started then.

The social media censorship era is over (for now)

2025-01-07T17:37:02Z

Mark Zuckerberg just announced a stunning pivot for Meta's approach to social media censorship. Here's what he's going to do:

Replace third-party fact checkers with community notes ala X.
Allow free discussion on immigration, gender, and other topics that were heavily censored in the past, as well as let these discussions freely propagate (and go viral).
Focus moderation on illegal activities, like child exploitation, frauds, and scams, instead of political transgressions.
Relocate the moderation team from California to Texas to address political bias from within the team.

This new approach is going to govern all the Meta realms, from Facebook to Threads to Instagram. Meaning it'll affect the interactions of some three billion people around the globe. In other words, this is huge.

As to be expected, many are highly skeptical of Zuckerberg's motives. And for good reason. Despite making a soaring speech to the values of free speech back in 2019, Meta, together with Twitter, became one of the primary weapons for a political censorship regime that went into overdrive during the pandemic.

Both Meta and Twitter received direct instructions from the US government, among other institutions, on what was to be considered allowable speech and what was to be banned. The specifics shifted over those awful years, but everything from questioning the origins of the Covid virus to disputing vaccine efficacy to objections on mass migration to the Hunter Biden laptop leak all qualified for heavy-handed intervention.

The primary rhetorical fig leaves for this censorship regime was "hate speech" and "misinformation". Terms that almost immediately lost all objective content, and turned into mere descriptors of "speech we don't like". Either because it was politically inconvenient or because it offended certain holy tenants of the woke religion that reigned at the time.

But that era is now over. Between Meta and X, the gravity of the global discourse has swung dramatically in favor of free expression. I suspect that YouTube and Reddit will eventually follow suit as well. But even if they don't, it won't really matter. The forbidden opinions and inconvenient information will still be able to reach a wide audience.

That's a momentous and positive moment for the world. And it's a particularly proud moment for America, since this is all downstream from the country's first amendment protection of free speech.

But it's also adding to the growing chasm between America and Europe. And the United Kingdom in particular. While America is recovering from the authoritarian grip on free speech in terms of both social media policies and broader social consequences (remember cancel culture?), the Brits are doubling down.

Any post on social media made in Britain is liable to have those cute little bobbies show up at your door with a not-so-cute warrant for your arrest. The delusional UK police commissioner is even threatening to "come after" people from around the world, if they write bad tweets.

And Europe isn't far behind. Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner, spent much of last year threatening American tech companies, and Elon Musk in particular, with draconian sanctions, if they failed to censor on the EU's behest. He has thankfully since been dismissed, but the sentiment of censorship is alive and well in the EU.

This is why the world needs America. From the UK to the EU to Brazil, China, Russia, and Iran, political censorship is very popular. And for a couple of dark years in the US, it looked like the whole world was about to be united in an authoritarian crackdown on speech of all sorts.

But Elon countered the spell. His acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was the pivotal moment for both American and global free speech. And if you allow yourself to zoom out from the day-to-day antics of the meme lord at large, you should be able to see clearly how the timeline split.

I know that's hard to do for a lot of people who've traded in their Trump Derangement Syndrome diagnosis for a Musk Derangement Syndrome variety (or simply added it to their inventory of mental challenges). And I get it. It's hard to divorce principles from people! We're all liable to mix and confuse the two.

And speaking of Trump, which, to be honest, I try not to do too often, because I know how triggering he is, credit is still due. There's no way this incredible vibe shift would have happened as quickly or as forcefully without his comeback win.

Now I doubt that any of his political opponents are going to give him any credit for this, even if they do perhaps quietly celebrate the pivot on free speech. And that's OK. I don't expect miracles, and we don't need them either. You don't need to love every champion of your principles to quietly appreciate their contributions.

Which very much reminds me of the historic lawsuit that the Jewish lawyers at the ACLU (in its former glory) fought to allow literal nazis to match in the streets of Skokie, Illinois. That case goes to the crux of free speech. That in order for you to voice your dissent on Trump or Musk or whatever, you need the protection of the first amendment to cover those who want to dissent in the opposite direction too.

That's a principle that's above the shifting winds and vibes of whoever is in power. It's entire purpose is to protect speech that's unpopular with the rulers of the moment. And as we've seen, electoral fortunes can change! It's in your own self interest to affirm a set of rules for participation in the political debate that live beyond the what's expedient for partisan success in the short term.

I for one am stoked about Meta's pivot on censorship. I've historically not exactly been Mark Zuckerberg's biggest fan, and I do think it's fair to question the authenticity of him and this move, but I'm not going to let any of that get in the way of applauding this monumental decision. The world needs America and its exceptional principles more than ever. I will cheer for Zuckerberg without reservation when he works in their service.

Now how do we get the UK and the EU to pivot as well?

Delusional dreams of excess freedom

2025-01-06T16:07:54Z

Jim Carrey once said that he hoped everyone could "...get rich and famous and do everything they dreamed of so they can see that it is not the answer". And while I sorta agree, I think the opposite position also has its appeal: That believing in a material fix to the problem of existence dangles a carrot of hope that's depressing to go without.

What made me think of Carrey's quote was this tale of the startup founder behind Loom, who made out with a $60m windfall when his business was sold, and is still working his way through the existential crisis that created. It's harder than you think to suddenly have all the freedom you ever desired land in your lap. You may just realize that you don't actually know what to do with it all!

And this predicament isn't reserved for successful entrepreneurs either. You see miniature revelations of this in many stories of retirement. Workers who after a long life toiling away suddenly arrive at the promised land of unlimited time, the basics taken care of, and full freedom from all responsibilities and obligations. Some literally wither away from all that excess freedom.

One of the Danish newspapers I read recently published a series on exactly this phenomenon. Pensioners who realize that life without work can be a surprisingly difficult place to find meaning in. That being needed, being useful is far more attractive than leaning back in leisure. And, as a result, more and more senior Danes are returning to the workforce, at least part time, to reclaim some of that meaning.

I think you can even draw a connection to the stereotype of rich kids who grow up never being asked to do contribute anything, busy bossing the help around, and as a result end up floundering in a vapid realm of materialism. Condemned rather than blessed.

Yes, this all rhymes a bit with that iconic scene from The Matrix where Cypher is negotiating a return to blissful ignorance with Agent Smith: I don't want to remember nothing! Because once you know that the material carrot is just like the spoon that bends because it doesn't actually exist, you're condemned to a life of knowing that what you imagine as nirvana probably isn't.

What beautiful irony: That the prize for catching the carrot is the realization that chasing it was more fun.

The premise trap

2024-12-16T23:25:39Z

The hardest part for me about collaborating with junior programmers, whether it's in open source or at work, is avoiding the premise trap. That's where the fundamental assumptions baked into the first draft of the code aren't questioned until you've already spent far too long improving the implementation. It's the same with AI.

Because AI at the moment is like a superb junior programmer. One with an encyclopedic knowledge about syntax and APIs, but also one saddled with the same propensities to produce overly-complicated, subtly-defective solutions.

You could read this as a bullish signal for the future of AI programming. That the current trajectory is tracking with the human programmer's progression tree, and that eventually, like the best juniors, it'll graduate to senior levels of competence in the fine details of code aesthetics, novel problem reasoning, and architectural coherence. I hope that's the case.

But that doesn't change the fact that, as of right now, I've yet to see any of the AI models I've been using for the past year produce great code within domains that I'm very familiar with. Occasionally there'll be a glimmer, just like with promising junior programmers, but taken as a whole, the solutions almost always need material amounts of rework.

Which is when that premise trap claps!

I've seen this repeatedly with both the Ruby and JavaScript code that comes out of the AI, so I doubt it's that particular to one language over another. But the propensity to pull in needless dependencies, the overly-verbose presentation, and the architectural dead ends are there all the time.

This is what I hear from people who are trying to use AI to write entire systems for them without actually being capable programmers themselves. That it's an incredible rush to see a prototype come to life in mere minutes, but that actually moving this forward to something that works reliably often turns into a one-step-forwards-two-steps-backwards dance. (Not unlike the many stories someone might have getting catfished by a barely qualified junior programmer on Upwork!).

While that's frustrating, it makes perfect sense when you consider the training data that has been teaching these models. The endless stream of basic online tutorials, Stack Overflow simplified answers, and the unfortunate reality that a fair chunk of internet programming content is made by the blind leading the blind.

Senior human programmers all got started on the same information diet, but eventually graduated to higher levels of understanding and mastery by working on proprietary code bases. Where all the trade-offs that are absent in tutorial-style code reveal themselves and demand to be weighed with finesse.

I think the next big leap for these models under the current paradigm probably isn't likely to happen until they're exposed to a vast corpus on proprietary, corporate code. And how that's going to happen isn't entirely clear at the moment.

So in the mean time, as a senior programmer, you'd do well to treat AI as you would a junior programmer. It's rarely going to save you time asking it to produce an entire system, or even subsystem, if you care about the final quality of the architecture or implementation. Because to verify the assumptions that have been baked into its path will require spending as much time to understand the choices as it would doing the work yourself.

I remain bullish on AI writing code for us all, but also remain realistic about its current abilities. As well as alert to the danger of luring more senior programmers, including myself, into signing off on slop, while it saps our stamina for continued learning, as we lean too much on AI writing for us rather than teaching how.

May this piece age badly within a few short years!

Jaguar is lost but Volvo knows the way

2024-11-21T18:37:23Z

Jaguar's new rebrand is getting murdered online, and for good reason. The clichés are as thick as the diversity pandering is dated. CREATE EXUBERANT. LIVE VIVID. DELETE ORDINARY. You'd think these were slogans from a Will Ferrel bit about insufferable marketing trons, but nope, that's the 2024 campaign for a car maker that won't be selling any cars until 2026. Utterly tone-deaf, out of tune with the vibe shift, and quite likely the final gasp of a storied but dying British brand. SAD!

Contrast this with the advertisement for Volvo's latest EX90. It's a 3:45-minute emotional cinematic ride that illustrates to perfect what it means to have a strong brand. To stand for something, and actually mean it.

It's not even that original! They did a variation of the same theme six years ago for the same car, but that detracts nothing from its brilliance. In fact, the opposite. Brand is like culture: It's all about repetition and authenticity. Being who you say you are, over and over.

Volvo is safety, safety is paramount to parents, so Volvo is for parents. It's that simple, and it's that powerful. But only because it's actually true! You couldn't run this branding campaign for, say, Toyota, and see the same success. Toyota has their roots in reliability. That's their story.

But Volvo literally does care. Their history includes giving away the patent to the seatbelt. In Sweden, they have a crash response team that goes to the scene of accidents involving Volvo cars to learn how they can become safer (and they've been doing this since the 70s!!). And in the UK, the XC90 had no official deaths recorded since the car was introduced in 2004 (at least per 2018).

Volvo also does safety quite differently than most auto makers. They're not just studying and optimizing for the crash-ratings tests, which is what it seems drive most other manufacturers. Their cars do very well when the test expands to include new scenarios because it's designed to be best-in-reality not just best-in-test.

All that is to say that the branding strength of Volvo rests on congruence, consistency, and commitment to doing the same thing, a little better every year, for basically an eternity. It's incredibly inspiring.

Frankly, it makes me want to buy a Volvo! Even though by all sorts of natural inclinations (speed/design/heritage), I should be interested in a new Jaguar. But I wouldn't be caught dead in a Jaguar now. That's the power of advertisement: To lift and to diminish.

Cold reading an ADHD affliction

2024-11-20T21:19:39Z

I'm sure there are truly pathological cases of ADHD out there, and maybe taking amphetamines really is a magic pill for some folks. But there clearly is also an entire cottage industry cropping up around convincing perfectly normal people that they suffer from ADHD, and that this explains many unwanted aspects of the human condition.

Take this thread I stumbled across on X today by an "ADHD coach": The ADHD Basics. It lists five primary symptoms:

Forgetfulness.
High standards / perfectionism.
Attraction to novelty.
Lack of consistency.
Difficulty establishing/breaking habits.

No wonder we've seen an explosion of ADHD diagnosis. This list applies to most humans at least part of the time! I would even say that all five applies to me much of the time. So does this mean I suffer from ADHD and should start taking Adderall? Come on.

This is usually when the hand waving starts: "Sure, you may recognize all those symptoms, but for true ADHD sufferers, they're just, like, worse!". Okay, but what kind of diagnostic standard is that?!

The official presentation of ADHD symptoms as listed on Wikipedia isn't much better than what the five from the ADHD coach either. It includes markers such as:

"Frequently overlooks details or makes careless mistakes"
"Often cannot quietly engage in leisure activities or play"
"Often talks excessively"
"Often has difficulty maintaining focus on one task or play activity"
"Is frequently easily distracted by extraneous stimuli"

Again, I can recognize myself in several of those from time to time. And if you include the entire list of markers from the DSM-5, I'm sure I can rack up the five+ necessary to earn an official designation of ADHD. That's just ridiculous.

It's even worse when it comes to kids, but Abigail Shrier already covered that topic expertly in Bad Therapy, so I won't repeat that here. If only to marvel at the collective insanity where being loud or animated during play is a pathological marker for children! Now that's crazy.

But I know this is a touchy subject for plenty of parents of kids who struggle in ways that might fall under some of these rubrics. So let's leave the kids out of this for a minute and focus on the adults instead.

A total of 45 million Adderall prescriptions were written in the US in 2023. That's up from 35 million in 2019. A great many of these were surely made to people who got convinced that being "forgetful" or "attracted to novelty" isn't just part of being human, but an affliction requiring amphetamines to mitigate.

What this reminds me of is the concept of cold readings. Where a psychic slyly prods for revealing details from their subject while vaguely throwing out potential hooks left, right, and center. The subject is induced to ignore the vagueness that doesn't apply to their situation, but focus on the inevitable hits that convince someone that what they desperately want to hear is true.

I think a lot of people desperately want to hear that there's a medical reason for why they sometimes can't focus, don't feel motivated, forget things, or find breaking bad habits hard (and not something as boring as you need better sleep, regular exercise, and an improved diet). So when ADHD coaches show up to make them feel better with a medical label, it's compelling to partake in the cold reading, and get the answer you were hoping for.

But that's nonsense. You don't need a diagnosis to be a flawed human. It goes for all of us. So if you want to supercharge your morning's productivity routine by popping a pill or two of amphetamines, own it! Don't hide behind some label (or think you're immune to the long-term effects of taking speed either).

Joining the Shopify board of directors

2024-11-19T18:15:34Z

I've known Tobi for over twenty years now. Right from the earliest days of Ruby on Rails, when he was building Snowdevil, which eventually became Shopify, to sell snowboards online. Here's his first commit to Rails from 2004, which improved the ergonomics of controller testing. Just one out of the 131 commits he made to the framework from 2004-2010 -- a record still good enough to be in the top 100 all-time contributors to Rails!

But Tobi's contributions to Ruby on Rails extend far beyond his individual commits to the framework, creating Active Merchant and the Liquid templating system, or serving on the Rails Core Team back in the early days. With Shopify, Tobi more or less single-handedly killed the zombie argument that Rails couldn't scale by building the world's most popular hosted e-commerce platform and routing a sizable portion of all online sales through it.

In the process, Tobi built an incredible technical organization to support this effort. Shopify employs a third of the Rails Core Team, developed the YJIT compiler for Ruby, and contributed in a billion other ways. They are without a doubt the most generous benefactor in the Ruby on Rails world.

So when Tobi asked me whether I'd be interested in joining Shopify's board, I needed no pause to consider the invitation. OF COURSE I WOULD!

But to be honest, it wasn't just a reflexive answer to service the gratitude I've felt toward Shopify for many years. It was also to satisfy a selfish curiosity to wrestle with problems at a scale that none of my own work has ever touched.

Both in terms of the frontier programming problems inherent in dealing with a majestic monolith clocking in at five million lines of code, and the challenge of guiding thousands of programmers to productively extend it, Shopify deals with a scale several orders of magnitude beyond what I do day-to-day at 37signals. That's interesting!

So too is the sheer magnitude of the impact Shopify is having on the world of commerce. While much of the web is decaying to enshitification and entropy, Shopify stores stand out by being faster to browse, quicker to checkout, and easier to trust. That's enabling a vast array of individual entrepreneurs and businesses to have a competitive shopping experience against the likes of Amazon, without needing huge teams to do it.

It's always a delight when I find a cool store, and I learn that it's running on Shopify. As I spoke with Tobi about on the announcement show, this was really hammered home after I got into mechanical keyboards. Seemingly every single vendor of thocky and clicky keyboards use Shopify! And when I see that, not only am I sure that buying won't be a hassle, but I also know I'm not going to get scammed. That's the Shopify magic: Leveling the commercial playing field between some obscure keyboard maker and the consolidated titans of e-commerce.

And now I get to help further that mission from the inside! What a treat. Thanks Tobi!

Obsessive problem solving followed by aimless wandering

2024-11-13T18:55:08Z

I haven't felt any urge to tinker with my Linux setup in months. This after spending much of the spring and into summer furiously and obsessively trying every PC out there to find the perfect replacement for the Mac, diving deep with Ubuntu, and codifying my findings in the Omakub project. But now it's done, and I'm left enjoying the Apple-free spoils of a new, better place without any recurring work.

It was the same experience getting out of the cloud. For months, I spent all my time building Kamal, examining server components, and plotting our path. But then we did it, and then it was done.

Ditto with Rails 8. Huge push to get the Solid Trifecta to line up with a release that included Propshaft and the authentication generator, and the rest of all the amazing steps forward I covered in the Rails World keynote. Now that's done too, and all new Rails apps enjoy the compressed complexity.

At the company level, most of our work is a marathon. That's how you stay in business for twenty years and beyond. By sticking with it. But at the executive level, almost all big leaps forward are sprints inspired by a hunch. They have to be sprints, because the level of intensity required to get that hunch over the hill is just too high to sustain for long (unless, I guess, you're Elon!).

That to me is the best argument for making sure my plate isn't full of half-eaten commitments. That my calendar isn't clogged with an endless ream of recurring meetings. Such that my mind remains an open, blank slate when one of those obsessive opportunities flutter by.

See, I've come to accept that my best work is a series of sprints punctuated by periods of wandering. It was a knee-jerk protest to the stultifying and abusive App Store bureaucracy that eventually lead me to Linux. And it was discovering Linux that lead to Omakub, and making the open source operating system the default for new technical staff at 37signals.

It was a deep dive into Docker, originally without any clear mission beyond curiosity, that lead to Kamal, and our path out of the cloud. Oh, and getting enamored by the speed of Gen 4 SSDs was what planted the seed for the Solid Trifecta.

I couldn't have planned any of this even if I wanted to. But I also don't want to. There are few things more satisfying to me than following a hunch and seeing where it leads, without a commitment to a specific, final destination.

It's a little like writing. Half the joy of composing these paragraphs come from discovering the arguments as the piece develops. Every essay starts with a hunch, but the final shape is rarely clear until the mind has been left to wrestle with the words for a while.

So that's why my answer to the usual question of "what's next?": I don't know! Because if I did, I'd already be half-way done doing it. And then it wouldn't really be next, it'd be now.

Finding the next now is the art of wandering, and wandering well takes practice and patience. Don't rush it.

House rules in Fortnite

2024-11-12T19:00:52Z

We play a lot of Fortnite at our house. It's a great game for teaching kids cooperative discipline, and in a remarkably wholesome setting to boot (no blood, cartoon styling). I've had no qualms involving all three of our boys from an early age in the family squad, including our two youngest from around age four.

Since we started playing, I've just had two primary house rules:

Stay together.
No complaining.

Sounds simple, but it's ever-so tempting to stray from the squad to chase your own goal of getting better gear, and it comes easy to blame your brother when the other team gets you. Especially when you're still a preschooler!

But that's why Fortnite is such an effective tool for teaching discipline. Because if you want to win in a team-based context like that, you have to work together as a team, and you'll quickly realize that sticking to the rules makes that way more likely.

It's also teaches you how to lose gracefully. If you get all pissy and blamey when you're knocked out, the session ends, because nobody wants to listen to that (especially dad!). So if you want to play more, and get better, you better start tempering your frustrations. Wonderful life skill to develop early.

Equally, it's a delightful game to beat together. Unlike something like Mario Kart or Smash Brothers, which pits the family against itself (also fun, but less learning!), Fortnite puts us all on the same team, striving for the same objective, and in line to celebrate together when we're successful.

When you add it all up, it's one of my favorite activities with the kids. It's highly rewarding to see them internalize both the big life lessons mentioned above, as well as the nitty-gritty tactical insights, like always seeking higher ground, securing cover, and having proper backup before engaging.

All screen time is not created equal.

Too much therapy at work

2024-11-11T17:57:46Z

Many years ago, Jason and I hired a COO at 37signals, but ended up letting them go after just a year (many reasons, another story). This happened not long before one of our company meet-ups, so we thought it fitting to discuss the matter in-person. What a mistake. The session turned into a group therapy session lasting hours, with a free-flowing out-pour of every anxiety under the sun.

Some might look at group therapy, with its sharing of emotional stories and vulnerability, as a good thing. And I'm sure it can be, in the right setting. But that setting is not work. Especially not with the entire company present as participants.

But that's where a therapy-infused corporate culture and language often leads. It's a natural extension of "holding the space", of too much navel-gazing "mindfulness", of a posture of nurture and care that borders the patronizing.

It's okay to be disappointed or frustrated or anxious at work. That's part of the experience working with and especially for other people! But where things go astray is when there's an expectation that these emotions always need to be processed during the 9-5 by your manager (rather than after hours with a licensed therapist).

It's also based on a fundamental misconception that everything can be made better for everyone by talking more about it. For some people, men especially, the better way out of a bad situation is to feel useful. There's a whole meme dedicated to "men would rather X than go the therapy", which is posited as a point of derision rather than recognizing taking some/any/all actions as a legitimate coping strategy.

See, there's another one of those therapy words: coping. Belonging to the same lexicon as trauma, rumination, and self-care. I'm sure these are all useful and helpful labels in the right therapeutic context, but again, that just isn't work.

There's a reason licensed therapists are bound by a whole host of ethical boundaries when working with clients. They can't be intertwined with the client's friends or family or colleagues. They must be competent in the specific areas where they recommend interventions. There are all sorts of healthy constraints on the relationship.

Those constraints can't apply at work when you're treating the 1-1 as an hour on the Freudian couch or turn the all-hands into a group therapy session. It's the same problem with the excessive pathologizing of children that Abigail Shrier covered so well in her book Bad Therapy (one of my favorite reads from 2024!).

It's easy to read all of the above as cold or dismissive, but please don't. It's possible to share the same genuine care for people while disagreeing on the methods and the context that's due to serve them best. And it's also possible to look at the increase in therapy thinking, language, and methods in the workplace as an abject failure of modern corporate culture. An increase that's making people more fragile, more precious, more incapable of coping with the most basic expectations of disappointments or adversity on the job.

That to me is as sound of a theory for trying something else as you could ever have. What we've been doing for the last couple of decades is busted, and it's time to accept that. Get therapy out of the office and let's hand it back to the shrinks.

The spells are spent

2024-11-06T14:50:33Z

They just don't work any more, those baseless accusations that anyone we disagree with is a racist, misogynist, fascist. After being invoked en masse and in vain for the better part of the past decade, their power to shock and awe is finally gone. All that's left is a weak whimper. Good fucking riddance.

The problem with accusations like that is that they eventually have to be backed by proof or they'll bounce like a rubber check. And when even the most mundane political or moral positions were able to earn one of those *ist-y labels, the entire enterprise of throwing them around was bound to go bankrupt. And now it has.

Whatever controversy calling the peak of DEI might have garnered two years ago is certainly gone now. Being professionally offended by every little thing, seeing micro-aggressions around every corner, and rendering the entire world through a narrow oppressed/oppressor lens is back to the niche disposition once more.

This particular preference falsification, where people just go along with what's in vogue to keep their head down, has left the zeitgeist. For a hot minute, it really did seem like everyone was immersed in critical-theory thinking and the rest of the woke orthodoxies. But that was shadows on the wall, distorted to thrice their size from the angle of the light.

Now the angle has changed, so the shadows have shrunk. That big scary mob that once was has been reduced to near impotence in most arenas, including the biggest of all, the US presidential election. That's a win for everyone whether they like Donald Trump or not.

What you know that just ain't so

2024-11-05T18:11:22Z

The fun bit about business is in all the answers you don't have. Should we be priced higher or lower or leave it alone? Should we chase these customers over here or those customers over there? Should we add more features or polish the ones we have? There's endless variation in every one of those questions, and you can't reason your way to conclusion. Only testing against reality will really give you an answer. And even then, reality can be "wrong".

Meaning that even valid results of your experiments can steer you astray. Maybe you ran your pricing test too short to know what the second-order effect of losing sign-ups in favor of a higher revenue-per-customer will be, even if it nets out positively for the first year. Maybe presenting your new features came with a new website design, and the latter was what actually moved the needle. It's very hard to reduce any interesting question in business to a perfect experiment. Best you usually get is more or less confidence.

Which is fine! We don't need to know everything for sure before taking action. In fact, the hallmark of a good business person is their ability to make calculated bets based on half a story and a hunch.

But the key is to remember that what you won was a bet, not a trophy made of truth. And while you can to be grateful for the good outcome, you need to remember that whatever conclusions you draw from it need to remain suspect.

This is just as true when you lose the bet. That's when you're liable to believe that "we tried that, didn't work" represents some universal statement of fact. When in reality, the lesson is more like "we tried SOMETHING and that SOMETHING didn't work". In order to remember that "we could try SOMETHING ELSE and THAT might work".

Because if you don't, you'll eventually become a prisoner to every bet you've made. Convinced that half the opportunities in the world just don't apply to your situation and the other half is a slam dunk. Nonsense.

It's okay to collect your winnings even if you aren't exactly sure why you won. It's okay to take some losses even if you can't explain exactly where it went wrong. In fact, it's better than okay to resist coming up with a definitive story either which way. Because as soon as you write that story down, it tends to become rigid rather than open to reinterpretation.

An open mind is always willing to let the story twist, willing to revisit the setup, and willing to test everything from timing to premise on another day.

Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years

2024-10-17T18:56:37Z

We finished pulling seven cloud apps, including HEY, out of AWS and onto our own hardware last summer. But it took until the end of that year for all the long-term contract commitments to end, so 2024 has been the first clean year of savings, and we've been pleasantly surprised that they've been even better than originally estimated.

For 2024, we've brought the cloud bill down from the original $3.2 million/year run rate to $1.3 million. That's a saving of almost two million dollars per year for our setup! The reason it's more than our original estimate of $7 million over five years is that we got away with putting all the new hardware into our existing data center racks and power limits.

The expenditure on all that new Dell hardware – about $700,000 in the end – was also entirely recouped during 2023 while the long-term commitments slowly rolled off. Think about that for a second. This is gear we expect to use for the next five, maybe even seven years! All paid off from savings accrued during the second half of 2023. Pretty sweet!

But it's about to get sweeter still. The remaining $1.3 million we still spend on cloud services is all from AWS S3. While all our former cloud compute and managed database/search services were on one-year committed contracts, our file storage has been locked into a four(!!)-year contract since 2021, which doesn't expire until next summer. So that's when we plan to be out.

We store almost 10 petabytes of data in S3 now. That includes a lot of super critical customer files, like for Basecamp and HEY, stored in duplicate via separate regions. We use a mixture of storage classes to get an optimized solution that weighs reliability, access, and cost. But it's still well over a million dollars to keep all this data there (and that's after the big long-term commitment discounts!).

When we move out next summer, we'll be moving to a dual-DC Pure Storage setup, with a combined 18 petabytes of capacity. This setup will cost about the same as a year's worth of AWS S3 for the initial hardware. But thanks to the incredible density and power efficiency of the Pure flash arrays, we can also fit these within our existing data center racks. So ongoing costs are going to be some modest service contracts, and we expect to save another four million dollars over five years.

This brings our total projected savings from the combined cloud exit to well over ten million dollars over five years! While getting faster computers and much more storage.

Now, as with all things cloud vs on-prem, it's never fully apples-to-apples. If you're entirely in the cloud, and have no existing data center racks, you'll pay to rent those as well (but you'll probably be shocked at how cheap it is compared to the cloud!). And even for our savings estimates, the target keeps moving as we require more hardware and more storage as Basecamp and HEY continues to grow over the years.

But it's still remarkable that we're able to reap savings of this magnitude from leaving the cloud. We've been out for just over a year now, and the team managing everything is still the same. There were no hidden dragons of additional workload associated with the exit that required us to balloon the team, as some spectators speculated when we announced it. All the answers in our Big Cloud Exit FAQ continue to hold.

It's still work, though! Running apps the size of Basecamp and HEY across two data centers (and soon at least one more internationally!) requires a substantial and dedicated crew. There's always work to be done maintaining all these applications, databases, virtual machines, and yes, occasionally, even requesting a power supply or drive swap on a machine throwing a warming light (but our white gloves at Deft take care of that). But most of that work was something we had to do in the cloud as well!

Since we originally announced our plans to leave the cloud, there's been a surge of interest in doing the same across the industry. The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s – all-cloud, everything, all the time – seems to finally have peaked. And thank heavens for that!

The cloud can still make a lot of sense, though. Especially in the very early days when you don't even need a whole computer or are unsure whether you'll still be in business by the end of the year. Or when you're dealing with enormous fluctuations in load, like what motivated Amazon to create AWS in the first place.

But as soon as the cloud bills start to become substantial, I think you owe it to yourself, your investors, and common business sense to at least do the math. How much are we spending? What would it cost to buy these computers instead of renting them? Could we try moving some part of the setup onto our own hardware, maybe using Kamal or a similar tool? The potential savings from these answers can be shocking.

At 37signals, we're looking forward to literally deleting our AWS account come this summer, but remain grateful for the service and the lessons we learned while using the platform. It's obvious why Amazon continues to lead in cloud. And I'm also grateful that it's now entirely free to move your data out of S3, if you're leaving the platform for good. Makes the math even better. So long and thanks for all the fish!

Capture less than you create

2024-10-14T20:19:11Z

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It's beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I've spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life's work realized.

But it's also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! What missteps along the way must I have made to deserve life as merely a rich software entrepreneur, with so few direct, personal receipts from the work on Rails?

This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you'll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that's never quite right between what you've helped create and what you've managed to capture. If you let it, it'll haunt you forever.

So don't! Don't let the success of others diminish your satisfaction with your own efforts. Unless you're literally Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, there'll always be someone richer than you!

The rewards I withdraw from open source flow from all the happy programmers who've been able to write Ruby to build these amazingly successful web businesses with Rails. That enjoyment only grows the more successful these business are! The more economic activity stems from Rails, the more programmers will be able to find work where they might write Ruby.

Maybe I'd feel different if I was a starving open source artist holed up somewhere begrudging the wheels of capitalism. But fate has been more than kind enough to me in that regard. I want for very little, because I've been blessed sufficiently. That's a special kind of wealth: Enough.

And that's also the open source spirit: To let a billion lemons go unsqueezed. To capture vanishingly less than you create. To marvel at a vast commons of software, offered with no strings attached, to any who might wish to build.

Thou shall not lust after thy open source's users and their success.

To the crazy ones

2024-10-13T18:33:13Z

In an earlier era, we'd all have been glued to the television to cheer SpaceX successfully catching Starship's returning booster rocket on the first try. I remember my father talking about seeing Apollo 11 make it to the moon. That was a lifelong memory for him. And I remember, as a six-year old boy, watching the fatal Challenger explosion on TV. That's been a lifelong memory for me. Reaching for space, in triumph or tragedy, ought to be special.

But today it's often just another post that quickly scrolls by on your feed. Maybe you pause for a minute, but the moment easily gets compressed to the same level of gravitas as someone getting punched in the face or an extra cute cat. The spectacle has been completely commoditized. The grand gesture is gone. It now takes effort to actually marvel when something truly spectacular occurs. Like shooting the Starship, 50 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, towards space, and seeing it stick the landing to perfection.

You should make that effort. Embrace that marvel. Don't be cynical. Don't let transient party politics cloud the moment. Musk was once considered to be on the blue team, now he's on the red team. Little of that will matter in the long term. But propelling progress forward definitely will.

And speaking of Mr Musk, what an insane week for him, and for everyone excited about progress. Cybertaxis, robot bartenders, art-deco people carriers, and now returning starships. This is exactly the kind of willing the future into existence that leaps of progress depend on. Who cares whether all these incredible ambitions arrive right on time or not.

Because ambition this crazy is only likely to emerge from someone equally and sufficiently nuts. And I mean that in the most admirable way possible. Musk is nuts. He's one of the crazy ones. A true original. Easy to hate, impossible to ignore.

And that's what gets me. Everyone find it easy to nod in agreement with Jobs' ode to To The Crazy Ones. Everyone wants to believe that they'd support "the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers". That they too would cheer for those who are "not fond of rules. And... have no respect for the status quo".

But they won't and they don't. Most people are either aggressively or passively conformist. They squirm when The Crazy Ones actually attempt to change the world. They don't see genius as often as they see transgressors. A failure to comply and comport. And they don't like it.

I like it. Not crazy for the sake of crazy, but crazy for the sake of progress. Demonstrable, undeniable, awe-inspiring progress. And that's what Mr Musk has brought us and continues to bring us.

To infinity and beyond, you crazy spaceman! 🫡