Perhaps the US State Dept. used it's strong relationship with Stripe to encourage this purchase as a geopolitical move. They've done so before with companies like eBay and Microsoft to neuter the P2P telephone access network that was "Skype".
Both are in the business of putting a single API key in front of a fragmented ecosystem and charging a convenience fee. This middleman business is naturally coalescing.
The nature of the ecosystem also means that pricing is closely tied to "procurement" which could be routing, limits, whatever at a company level.
If stripe wants to be _the_ one that charges that fee, they either have to continuously try to ensure that all the different middlenen use stripe (most of them do!) but even better is to acquire the largest middleman.
You don't want someone else who happens to do all the routing+limits+policies, end up not using stripe. They already have this hold in existing stripe financial products where they apply all the policies, and everything goes through them.
It is also an easy deal from an investor point of view.
Stripe seems to appear to be attempting to compete with the US Federal Reserve as the core dollar payment processor while also dipping into the same for tokens. Core value exchange platform, dollars, tokens, whatever. A bit of a less exciting version of Dune. “The transaction volume must flow.”
> According to Dangel, it costs $2,600 to run Anthropic’s LLM Opus 4.6 through RULER 128, a test developed by Nvidia to assess a model’s ability to retrieve information from large data sets. And SubQ? “It cost us eight dollars,” he says.
> SubQ does seem to be able to handle a lot of text at once. The model has a context window (roughly akin to a working memory) up to 12 million tokens long. Most top models today have context windows one million tokens long. In a demo that Whedon ran for me, he asked SubQ to perform a task that required it to reason about information contained in 400 documents. It responded in seconds. When he gave Perplexity—a popular LLM-powered search engine—the same task, it failed to load all 400 documents.
I’m increasingly thankful Zulip exists as an open source alternative to other collaborative platforms. In the age of agents, it feels like a huge advantage that folks can take a robust platform as a base and customize it to their needs (and hopefully contribute back)!
Also, thanks for sharing about your experiences with agent-based contributions, both internally and externally. Super fascinating.
Interesting baseline of how much AI can help with the profitability of a business:
> By the end of last year, Medvi had reached $401 million in annual sales and amassed 250,000 customers. It produced 16.2 percent in net profit, or $65 million, with spending going to the fees for telehealth platforms, marketing and then software. Hims, by contrast, had a net profit of 5.5 percent last year.
I’d argue this is more of an extreme outlier than a baseline. While it shows the 'ceiling' of what a hyper-lean AI-enabled team can do in a white-hot market (GLP-1s), it’s hard to call $200M+ revenue per employee a 'baseline' for any industry. It’s a remarkable anomaly. A dream of every vibe coder like myself, but not a realistic target for most.
What is this platonic ideal of a vibe code business that doesn't rely on some outside vendor to create value? If all you're offering is something for a niche (CRM just for car repair business), that's getting cloned yesterday. Unless your value is locked behind some moat, like hiring licensed doctors, you won't survive, and even then.
Just pointing out a business that is fundamentally about doctors prescribing and delivering compounded GLP-1 is not something "agents" will whip up for you, nor is it a one-man business.
My one-man business uses AWS and a bank and some vendors. AWS and the bank and my vendors have many people working there. Is it still a one man business?
Come on, you know what I'm talking about - those aren't your main products and customers aren't dealing with them instead of you. If you were paying 1000 people to wrap gifts and deal with customers it's a stretch to call your biz a one man operation. That's just outsourcing.
Yeah, man, I'm sayin' that that is what a vibe code business looks like. It's gotta do something in the real world. No one's making a million dollars off of leftpad as a service so it's a fine example of a successful vibe code business.
> Manufacturing job share has been dwindling in nearly all middle- and high-income countries. By one analysis, China lost more than 30 million of those jobs from 2011 to 2020, more than twice as many as the number of jobs that exist in the entire U.S. manufacturing sector. Yet total employment continued to grow, meaning the relative share of jobs in manufacturing fell even more sharply than the numbers alone would indicate.
> Manufacturing output, meanwhile, has risen, because workers now produce far more per hour using better and more sophisticated equipment. Today a given number of autoworkers can make, according to my calculations, three times as many cars in a year as they could 50 years ago.
> The problem is that consumers do not want three times as many cars. Even as people get richer, they increase their spending on manufactured goods only modestly, preferring instead to spend more on services like travel, health care and dining out. There are only so many cars a family can own, but that’s not the case for expensive vacations or fancy meals. As a result we have fewer people working in auto factories and more people working in luxury resorts and the like.
Congrats Steve! I haven't touched video since I was at JW Player a million years ago, but I always inspired by the simplicity of video.js (especially the theming).
Hope this new iteration is exceptionally successful.
Oh hi Zach! Blast from the past. Hope you’re doing well and thanks for the well wishes. Always enjoyed chatting you and the JW team at FOMS and conferences. The water’s warm back here in video tech if you ever want to jump back in!
So fun seeing all these familiar names pop up in a single thread, haven't been active in video after leaving Kaltura but have fond memories of FOMS/FOSDEM and meeting all of you!
The advice is correct: don’t use AI to file your taxes!
But what the article misses is that the uplift we’ve seen across models is incredible. Don’t be surprised if next year the headline reads “A.I. newest trick: Filing your taxes”.
Customers who book through Chase Travel will no longer receive 1.5 times as many points for Reserve accounts and 1.25 times as many points for Preferred accounts.
I did this last year with my kids various activities using ChatGPT and the results were just OK. I'm looking forward to trying this out with Claude this year!
I just migrated our app from Vercel to AWS Amplify.
We’re updating everything to use SSO so we can do BeyondCorp-style auth on SaaS platforms. Vercel wanted to charge >$10k / year to get on their enterprise plan for SAML access, vs bill prior to that was ~$2.5k / year. The migration took ~30 mins and we expect our bill to drop to $500 / year. the toughest part was making sure we didn’t miss any build variables / secrets.
Is this as cheap as running base metal? No. But 30 mins to save $10k / year was worth it. And maybe the bigger point: what value are they really adding if it’s this easy to migrate off?
Not sure I understand how this is strategically aligned for Stripe but certainly an interesting comparison.