A federal judge ordered Meta to explain under oath how four visa holders ended up on its May layoff list. Meta's HR director responded with a 13-page sworn declaration that reveals how the company actually makes termination decisions. Some of what came out: Meta has 7 performance tiers. "Met Most Expectations" is officially below expectations. One employee with "Consistently Met Expectations," the lowest passing rating, was cut anyway. Org chart depth was a criterion. Employees six levels below Zuckerberg could be flagged for elimination. Managers with fewer than 7 direct reports were targets when the average team ran 10. One plaintiff was terminated less than two weeks after returning from maternity leave. Meta's defense: "nearly 40% of Doe 26's team was selected for termination, demonstrating that Doe 26 was not singled out." Meta explicitly denied AI was used in the selection process and says its activity monitoring tool launched April 22, after selections were "already well underway." Termination notices went out May 20. The four visa holders face a 60-day window to find a new sponsor or leave the country. The 13-page declaration never mentions that clock or what happens when it runs out. The word Meta chose, under penalty of perjury, for the plaintiffs' leave histories: "coincidental."

"The combined sum of it can be better than the top five most valuable company in the world. A trillion dollar organization with 40 years of history... and still the crack kid from Poland can beat them." - DHH

"I'm not in the market for a better product. I'm in the market for the product I already bought. I want the shitty thing I already have because I know all the ways it is broken." - DHH

"If you have unlimited time, unlimited money, and unlimited people, you're going to build a blob." DHH on why constraints make great software and unlimited resources produce blobs.

Sen. Lummis: “90% of the spot market is overseas. 80% of the digital asset futures market is overseas.” “I don’t know if they understand how significant this would be if the CLARITY act failed and we allowed this industry… to grow overseas.”

Roughly 600 Claude AI conversations were just indexed by Google, exposed to anyone with a search engine, after users shared links publicly and Anthropic's crawl protections fell short. What was exposed? Crypto wallet keys, API credentials, legal strategy discussions, internal company documents with staff names and emails, and deeply personal conversations. All discoverable with a simple Google search. Anthropic says conversations are private by default and that indexing only happened because share links were posted publicly by users. They say they blocked crawlers and never submitted those directories to search engines. But technical analysis suggests interactions between their robots.txt rules and noindex signals reduced the effectiveness of those protections. Bottom line, there's a big difference between "sharing a link with someone" and having it show up in Google results. Results have largely been scrubbed as of today, suggesting Anthropic moved quickly. But removal from search doesn't mean the links are dead. Anyone who saved or bookmarked those URLs may still be able to access the conversations. This isn't unique to Claude. Similar issues have hit ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. The lesson is, treat every AI conversation as potentially public. Never paste private keys, passwords, or sensitive information into any AI chat, and if you use a share feature, assume anyone could eventually find it.

Goldman: equity volatility spikes ahead of every midterm election. The S&P 500 is a political instrument whether you want to admit it or not.

Strategy is sitting on 843,775 bitcoin at a $75,653 average cost. Down about 15%.

"You can't have a truly capitalist system if the most important tool used to coordinate economic activity is centrally controlled." @MartyBent & @Matthew Mezinskis on why the income inequality blame is pointed at the wrong system, and why Bitcoin fixes it.

"Bitcoin and the stock market are on a collision course. In 10-15 years, they'll cross, and everyone will have to choose between chasing fiat or going back to the castle." @Matthew Mezinskis breaks down Bitcoin's power trend vs exponential growth.

The CLARITY Act quietly included federal protection for self-custody, your bitcoin can't be deemed "abandoned" just because it's sitting on-chain.

The Fed has quietly added ~$290 billion in Treasury bills to its balance sheet since December. That's the fastest T-bill accumulation since the COVID panic buying of 2020.

Frieberg's Netscape/Apache analogy, if the internet had been locked behind proprietary gates, it never would have taken off. Open-source AI means value diffuses to a million businesses instead of two or three companies.

Anthropic pirated 7 million books from LibGen to train Claude and maintains the right to train on all the world's output under fair use. But when Chinese companies look at their model's outputs, suddenly it's IP theft. Sacks: "They themselves never claimed it was IP theft because they know it would poison all of their fair use lawsuits."

"If you really care about distillation, you implement KYC." Chamath on Anthropic pushing the government to restrict open-source competitors.

India ordered GitHub to remove BitChat repositories within three hours. The government's argument: the app's offline, decentralized Bluetooth messaging lets protesters communicate during internet shutdowns, making "lawful interception" difficult. BitChat downloads in India jumped 32x on July 19 after authorities began restricting internet access around the student-led protests in New Delhi. India now accounts for 85% of global downloads, with over 91,000 installs in five days and 330,000 daily active users. The Indian government isn't targeting specific illegal content. They're targeting the architecture itself, the fact that BitChat works without central servers and can't be shut off by flipping a switch. As the Internet Freedom Foundation pointed out, "deleting a repository does not delete the application from any phone that carries it, and the mesh keeps functioning without servers. What the takedown actually prevents is scrutiny of the underlying code." This is the Samourai Wallet playbook applied to communication. Prosecute the tool because you can't control the protocol. Open source, peer-to-peer, no servers. That's why they're scared of it.

Fidelity, with $7.1T in assets, urges the Senate to pass the Clarity Act for clear digital asset rules.

"We don't live in a truly capitalist society when the most important tool in a capitalist society, money, is centralized." @MartyBent on why Gen Z's anger is aimed at the wrong target. We don't have late-stage capitalism. We have socialism light.

Elon Musk announces that next month every line of code for the X platform will be open-sourced and third-party audited. “Only total transparency deserves trust.”

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5, stating the model approaches Fable 5 performance at half the price.