Powerfully nice day in Boston.

“Boston is going to win the way we have for 400 years; to come together to work on problems that matter… We need to make sure this is the city to scale in, not just live.”

Mayor Wu on Boston’s Innovation Economy

The Future of AI Should Serve People, Not Platforms

Today, we’re excited to introduce Attie, currently as an invite-only closed beta. Attie is the first agentic social app on atproto. It’s something completely new — an experiment in making building on the protocol more accessible.

Startup Punditry’s 25 Years of Failure Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.

I have heard through the grapevine that my latest essay is pissing off the powers-that-be in silicon valley so, to stay in their good graces, don't read it colossus.com/article/we-h...

Cambridge, after the snow

Moderna Reversal

This is no way to run a regulatory agency:

Winning is good.

Losing is bad. Losing while telling people “actually you would be better off with this politician you don’t like” is also bad.

Working musicians pp in the US peaked in 1910. Talkies and recorded music caused ~50k musicians to lose their jobs.

I was a jazz musician in high school and studied / gigged w some old heads who grew up in the 30s and would tell stories about the change.

Like Joe Maneri RIP

Someone misusing LLMs doesn’t prove other people aren’t getting value.

There are lawyers who are getting a lot more done with them. Not for writing briefs, but for research, data collection, writing communications, client relations, …

At the high end, it’s already starting to happen. There are many coders who make >$1m and some >$10m.

Organizations will pay for the best talent in specialized areas like GPU kernels.

No one is saying we won’t have any human coders. Coding is fun so we’ll always have at least hobbyists. And we’ll also have amazing, high-end coders who work at the frontier.

Take sales. Across growth stage startups, median one is ~2x more efficient on creating new revenue than 10 years ago.

If you talk to teams, you learn about all of the tools they use to automate different parts of their jobs and what’s working (and what’s not).

oooffff. Sales, legal, medicine, scientific research, … all have huge successes from LLMs.

That’s kind of the point of the article. If you’re seeing people use these to create huge efficiency gains, you’re missing an important societal force.

Not a contradiction. Just means we’ll end up with a very small number of amazing human coders and a lot of hobbyists.

Similar to what happened to music when recorded music was invented. Megastars and wedding singers with nothing in the middle.

New paper from Google on accelerating science using Gemini (as opposed to its specialized research AIs). Lots of case studies and interesting advice on ways to work with these system.

"We view the AI as a tireless, knowledgeable, and creative bright junior collaborator."
arxiv.org/pdf/2602.03837

Massachusetts is losing the battle to keep its residents, and officials need to act fast Six Massachusetts families explain how they escaped $1 million home prices and found better lives in North Carolina, Maine and New Mexico.

MA ranks 46th in population growth. @skirsner.bsky.social interviews people who’ve left and cost of living (housing) is the major theme.

But the stories also show how it’s multifaceted. Economic opportunities in SFBA and also places like FL and NC play into it.

www.masslive.com/news/2026/02...

Mass. AG: Why I filed a lawsuit to enforce housing law — and why it’s personal for me - The Boston Globe Enforcing the law is a necessary step to ensure every transit-served town does its part to allow more housing.

The housing crisis is personal.

I grew up in public housing. When my father unexpectedly passed away, I was able to stay in our apartment because I knew my rights. Finally buying a home meant breaking cycles of poverty for my family.

I want every MA resident to have that opportunity.

it's (mostly) fake. Humans are prompting agents to do this. Most of them are made by people who run agent marketing companies.

Enjoyed hearing and getting to meet @governor.pa.gov on his stop in Boston.

'Is Boston’s tech and innovation scene withering?' - I spoke w/ Kara Miller in the @bostonglobe.com on the state of our ecosystem and what we need to do to level up.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/27/b...

Tech demands ICE out of our cities

proud to sign this w/ other tech leaders from OpenAI, Stripe, Google, Intel, Amazon, Fika Ventures, ... demanding ICE get out of our cities:

iceout.tech

An Un-MAGA Proposal to Bring Back American Manufacturing Follow the path of Italy, France and Japan.

I'm excited to announce I'm doing a new Bloomberg column about the business of fashion. The first column is about how we can re-shore US garment manufacturing. Instead of mass deportations and raising tariffs, I argue the government should move the industry upstream:

tinyurl.com/reshoringapparel

Exclusive | Geothermal Wildcatter Zanskar, Which Uses AI to Find Heat, Raises $115 Million The company says it can unlock hidden troves of concentrated energy and squeeze out more from known fields through the use of AI.

www.wsj.com/business/ene...

Zanskar gets another $115m to build more clean, 24-7 geothermal power. Amazing team on a mission.

What an excellent idea for a Starter Pack, in these days of #AISlop spilling everywhere - here is a bunch of outlets you can trust.
Hats-off to @alexip718.com.

go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

Read, Write, Gamble Jesse Pollak just announced Base is pivoting away from social. Dan Romero said the same about Farcaster last month. I pulled the data on what went wrong.

Bluesky is now 70x bigger than Farcaster, which has given up on social and pivoted to focus on tokens.

Props to @jay.bsky.team and the Bluesky team.

nickysap.substack.com/p/read-write...

A card that reads "Social media is critical infrastructure. It needs to work for people, not exploit and mislead them. Modal Foundation supports decentralized social tech that helps people create, circulate and discover trustworthy information."

Hi Bluesky! We're Modal Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to making open social tech viable at scale. We grew out of the @freeourfeeds.com campaign and support @eurosky.social. Our work will connect experts, strategists, builders and communities to create a human-centered internet.

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left “We can no longer lend our credibility to an organization that has lost its integrity,” write four scientists and administrators who recently resigned from the NIH.

Powerful piece in STAT this morning from some NIH staff members who have resigned

www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n...

1/3

You’re supposed only do it in very dry, powdery snow. That looks way too wet.

"It is a pretty exciting time for pears."

(I love heirloom pears and apples)