Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.

Best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight – it will have no chance of accessing the Internet!

Remarkable shift in German industry thinking on China. From new BDI paper: “Even if de-risking entails costs, including in the form of counter-reactions, passivity would in the long term be economically considerably more costly & irresponsible from a security-policy perspective”

How the highest performers sustain a massive workload:

We are excited to announce that World Labs is joining @AMD. The research and technical breakthroughs we have achieved since our founding in 2024 have given us a clear vision for AI’s potential to solve problems in the spatial and physical world. Accelerating the future of spatial and physical intelligence requires scaling our efforts, scaling our reach, and getting closer to the hardware.

This one might be my favorite to date. Speechless. Starship as she began clearing the tower today before her orbital debut. 📷: Sony A7RV Lens: Sony 200-600mm G

Full story: politico.com/news/2026/09/27…

I set a camera really close to the launch pad to get this shot. It was a sound activated trigger since it wasn’t safe for me to stand here. That’s all 33 Raptor engines performing nominally as Starship heads to orbit for the first time.

It is poetic that Starship reached orbit 18 years, to the date, after the Falcon 1 rocket. 'Orbit Day' should be a perpetual holiday at the company.

First orbital flight of Starship successful!

Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship!

SpaceX's Starship rocket has successfully reached orbit and deployed its V3 Starlink satellites into orbit for the first time, officially making this Starship's first revenue-generating flight, a major milestone for the company! Congrats @SpaceX team! Incredible achievement 🚀

There are two ways to win in life - Bend the rules - Just be really really really good at what you do

Starship performs its orbital insertion burn and enters orbit of Earth for the first time

Yup

🇩🇪 I will keep making the case that there isn’t anything intrinsically anti-entrepreneurial in German culture, or in European culture for that matter: • Germany is a surplus country specialized in manufacturing. It wants to export more goods than it imports. • To do this means repressing wages and consumption to maintain competitiveness. The relatively weak euro, shared with indebted Southern European countries, helps to some extent, but much of the wage repression is the direct result of the 2004 Hartz reforms. • This means there isn’t a compelling case for investing more in Germany. Because of wage repression, the domestic market is stagnant, with the situation made even worse by weak demographics, which means there is little need for additional investment to serve that market. • This is compounded by two things. First, wage repression means that most savings end up trapped in corporate balance sheets and are therefore paid to shareholders, most of them US asset managers, rather than reinvested at home. • Second, the government itself doesn’t invest because of its religious (and constitutional) commitment to balanced budgets. This helps explain the deplorable state of German infrastructure, which in turn makes the country even less investable. Why would you put money into a country where the trains are never on time? • If you can’t invest domestic savings at home, those savings are invested abroad, notably in the US. • And if the direction of capital flows is generally outward rather than inward, it means two things. First, whatever domestic capital is invested at home goes primarily into the safest assets, not VC or startups. • Second, because Germany sends most of its own capital abroad, there isn’t a pull effect whereby foreign investors would be compelled to invest more in Germany. There is simply no relatively attractive yield, whether in VC or in any other asset class, and domestic capital is more than enough to cover what investment there is anyway. As a result, viewed from abroad, Germany is not even on the map as an investment destination, let alone as a place to allocate VC. • Which is why a German version of Zuckerberg or Musk can’t scale their company at home: there simply isn’t enough capital, whether domestic or foreign, willing to fund the whole journey. • The corollary is that those who really want to scale emigrate to the US and succeed because the US, being a deficit country, is the opposite of Germany: it is a magnet for capital! They then look back at Germany and say, in a condescending manner, “Oh, but it’s German culture and a lack of ambition.” Germans want to build companies as much as any other people. The problem is that Germany has built an economy that sends the capital needed to build them elsewhere, betting the whole house on manufacturing and exports rather than startups. And then China enters the room… Cc @HMangesius @michaelxpettis @humanandtheloop @patrickc @SineadOS1 @lugaricano @robin_j_brooks @daveg @christianmiele @kofinas

>be senior devops engineer in Germany >master's degree, 10 years experience, five interview rounds >72,000€ before tax >C2 German required >All team members based in Asia speaking English >mandatory office attendance to sit on Teams with people at another mandatory office >"we have a startup mindset" >company founded in 1894, CEO is the founder's great-grandson >"we have flat hierarchies" >eight people can veto your decision, none can approve it >hired to "drive digital transformation" >need department head's signature to install Docker >service account request rejected because "accounts must belong to a person" >CI/CD pipeline ends with a ticket for Jürgen >Jürgen on holiday until the 23rd >AI tools forbidden because Datenschutz >database password in an encrypted Excel file called Passwörter_final_NEU.xlsx >root password in Confluence >on-call every weekend >company phone listed under benefits >ask for a raise >unfortunately the salary band is exhausted >no budget for a second monitor >external consultant gets 1,400€ a day to ask you how the code works >take banana from company fruit basket >office manager says those are for the upcoming customer visit >Fachkräftemangel