We’ve entered Seattle’s Third Act geekwire.com/2026/weve-enter…

Hadrian is announcing our $1.37B Series D - watch below for a comprehensive update on our plans to reinvest billions to meet generational demand for Factories-as-a-service & Opus, our physical AI platform for factory autonomy — as well as full stack munitions production, advanced foundries, international expansion, drone dominance, the Organic Industrial Base, and most importantly, increase Equity stakes for our workforce in LA, Alabama and Arizona. Thank you to our team and investors for enabling us to accelerate our mission to reshore, rescale and upgrade the Defense Industrial Base. The Factory is the Product.

Stanford research on why AI agents struggle in operationally complex industries like construction... identifies difficulty factors (i.e. if coordination overhead is large then time of actual work is low). The paper suggests that the first AI deployments in these industries should begin with workflow observability / mining (which also implies.... the real value in these industries is AI-driven orchestration of people rather than replacing workers)

Recently @tobi shared the philosophy behind River, our Slack-native AI agent, and how it has become a teaching workshop for all of @Shopify. Below River lies the Aquifer. Principal Engineers @burkelibbey & Javier Moreno share the engineering story of how River came to be, and the substrate it runs on:

Extended interview: Former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse has metastatic pancreatic cancer. He spoke with 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley about where America has been and where it could still go.

Excellent turnout at the first Alpha School Toronto meetup * heard from three graduates of Alpha High School Austin (been at Alpha since Gr2 or 3) * the three women were exceptional — from publishing a paper in Nature, to writing a broadway musical to working with scientists on epigenetics and cancer * all three were extremely well spoken and took some hard questions from the audience * the premise is that you can crush your academics in 2hrs and then spend the remaining 4hrs on passion projects of your choosing "My friend's ambitions in traditional school lowered every year they were there. At Alpha we were taught that we could do anything and then we achieved our passion projects with our guides!" "When you have no homework, you have so much time to work on what you actually want to work on" "Alpha has both high standards and high support. We teach you how to achieve big things, learn how to learn, and guide you to guide yourself" Links * community.alpha.school/ * austinscholar.substack.com/ * fs.blog/knowledge-project-po…

We built Guardian Bikes into a vertically integrated factory doing $100M+ in revenue - tube lasers, robotic welding, CNC, powder coating, assembly - all under one roof in Indiana with 500,000+ sq ft of production space. Here’s what I’ve realized: we’re sitting on one of the rarest assets in robotics and physical AI, a real, high-volume American factory with full operational control and the willingness to let you break things. Most robotics companies are building incredible technology but struggling to find real deployment environments. Demo cells and lab setups only get you so far. You need messy, high-mix, real-world production to actually train and validate. We have that. And we’re building an AI-native MES from the ground up with full sensor instrumentation and computer vision baked in. So here’s an open invitation: if you’re building robotics or physical AI for manufacturing - humanoids, manipulation, autonomous mobile robots, vision systems, whatever - and you need a real factory to develop and prove your technology, let’s talk. We’ll give you the environment. You bring the technology. We’ll build the future of American manufacturing together. DMs open.

It's easy to be pessimistic about the future, but Christian Keil (@pronounced_kyle), a partner at @a16z, talks to @asymmetricinfo about the importance of getting people excited about the changing technologies to come. 🔗 Watch the full conversation: wapo.st/4cTykcg

A home filled with reading is richer than any app. Teach letters, sound out words, and explore stories together. But above all, keep reading tied to joy, not judgment.

AI has transformed knowledge work, but manufacturing, particularly generative AI for B-Rep foundational models, lags far behind. Behind this gap lies an invisible kernel war that deserves far more attention than it gets. Geometry kernels, the mathematical foundation of CAD software, are dominated by four companies with 40 years of validation creating unbreakable moats. Open-source alternatives face a self-reinforcing trap: without battle-tested validation, industrial customers won't adopt; without adoption, they can't achieve validation. While US startups build on top of proprietary kernels constrained by licensing fees, China is rebuilding the entire stack from scratch. ZWSOFT acquired US kernel developer VX Corporation in 2010, recently acquired UK-based computational fluid dynamics company CHAM in 2023, and now powers 1.4M users including 149 Fortune 500 companies. Huawei partnered with Russian geometric modeling experts at the Nikolay Center (400+ researchers), absorbing talent from Open Cascade's dismissed Russian office amid the Ukraine war, and open-sourced 486 kernel enhancements to OGG. Control over this infrastructure layer determines who can build and implement end-to-end AI systems integrating design, simulation, and production for the next 50 years. Full essay below:

Pint with @collision turned into a tour through agentic commerce, building better internal tools, stablecoins, and motorsports.

In collaboration with @reindsummit and @newindustrials, we are releasing a request for startups motivated by a simple belief: America needs better physical technology, and startups are the best way to build and scale it. We are looking for founders interested in applying modern software capabilities to the entire stack of industrial production - energy production, materials, CAD, manufacturing, and biotech. Reindustrialization is a matter of national survival. This is your invitation to build the future.

We spend a lot of time on how to build a better company and better company systems. One thing that has always been in the way of building world class products is the traditional setup of the "corporate ladder" - it means that the best people end up managing instead of directly working on product. I've seen the traditional ladder described as "peter principling at scale" and friends joke that the best place to hire great engineers is other companies' management layers. This is all silly and we can do better. We are solving this at Shopify with the ~Mastery system, which we are rolling out internally today. We will share our learnings as time goes on.

Today we are excited to share our new Vite plugin available in Remix v2.2.0! Vite’s lightning fast DX ⚡️ means 10x faster HMR 5x faster HDR We are also happy to announce that Remix is officially sponsoring Vite! Read more about our announcement here remix.run/blog/remix-heart-v…

This is what my team and I have been building! Happy to finally have it out 🕺

The most important story of every business is the one about _why_ it exists. Pulling this story out of a business is hard to do well. I challenged our team to try anyway and I love what they came back with. *This* is why Shopify exists.

Early Bird Tickets are ON SALE for #SeattleJSConf 2023! 🎉 Our friends at @CascadiaJS are taking the year off, so we are stepping up to provide an amazing 1-day conference experience for web devs in Seattle and the greater PacNW. So, what's in store? 🧵 seattlejs.com/conf