The website built like an operating system
The AI gold rush | Money bots & LLM trading | The scariest hacker | The website OS | Net worth social platform | AI browsers + loads more…
🆕 Personal Updates
I’m back from an incredible holiday with the family and ready to start consuming content like a fiend. This month, I have a huge backlog of content I’ve been saving, so brace yourself for a mega issue.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last edition’s top clicked link: Making software
🔗 Hyperlinks
Inside the $50 Trillion AI Gold Rush | Episode 1
Firstly, I can only apologise for the clickbait title here on behalf of Greg and the absolutely ridiculous figure being referenced, but rest assured, this is actually a great mini doc series.
In this five-part series, Greg travels to San Francisco to meet some of the hottest startups, VCs and some of its newest players dropping everything in pursuit of the next “gold Rush”. (i.e. gold is intelligence which everyone is mining for economic value).
It’s an interesting glimpse into the wonderful world of Silicon Valley - the epicentre of AI innovation and the scramble to adopt, distribute and scale AI into new and existing products.
🎁 Bonus content: I rarely feel the urge to subscribe to many new YouTube channels, but this is one of them. Will Phillips travels the globe, immersing himself in newly minted tech startups. Check out this episode from a recent trip to London to check out its startup scene.
Money Bots | High-Frequency Trading
As the saying goes - Time is money, and that saying couldn’t be more true when it comes to high-frequency trading.
The numbers are astonishing. High-frequency trading measures speed in the margins of tens of microseconds. They have nearly reached the speed of light with each trade. How can that grey matter between our ears quantify tenths of a microsecond? Well, it’s a single flap of a hummingbird’s wing! Yeah, that fast.
However, this documentary doesn’t just discuss how high-frequency trading firms optimise for speed; they also explain how quants have developed algorithms to trade automatically and the extent of the bot trading overtaking human traders and its global financial impact when it goes wrong. If you're interested in finance and technology, this is a fascinating watch.
Lastly, if you have any recommendations to watch with content similar to this, please send them my way.
🎁 Bonus content: If this tickles your curiosity, you should check out a fantastic movie called ‘The Hummingbird Project’ starring Jesse Eisenberg. Despite its poor reviews, I thought it was a great watch. In fact, I’m going to stick it on right now.
The Making of Prince of Persia
I’m not a gaming fanatic, so this is perhaps an odd book recommendation from me, but hear me out. First thing to note is this is not an in-depth account of game development; otherwise, it would have lost me on the first page. Instead, this book focuses on the human aspect of game development, including all of Jordan Mechner’s challenges, successes, frustrations, learnings and life lessons. However, to add a further layer of intrigue, this book is actually 7 years of Jordan’s personal diary entries, including sketches, photographs, and other materials from his archives. I’ve honestly not read a book quite like it.
Following someone's step-by-step thoughts as they create something from nothing is absolutely fascinating - especially 7 years’ worth, as you can see him mature and change through his diary entries as time passes.
It’s a great story of working within constraints as a creative, resilience when hitting blockers, and momentum slows, dealing with self-doubt and managing multiple conflicting life priorities.
Pablos Holman | One of the scariest hackers i’ve ever met
It’s been a while since Tim Ferriss had a guest that piqued my interest, and admittedly, it was the title which caught my attention this time. If I said Pablos Holman was a hacker-inventor who built mosquito-zapping lasers, worked on Blue Origin and invests in deep tech, would that sound interesting to you?
In this podcast, he shares some of his past hacks, how security exploits happen, state hackers, AI, and his deep tech investing thesis.
🎁 Bonus content: As mentioned in the podcast episode, check out this great story about artist hacker, Simon Weckert and his Google Maps traffic jam hack. Genius!
Alpha Arena | LLM trading
Someone just gave the top 6 LLMs $10k each and autonomy to run loose in the cryptocurrency markets with identical prompts and input data.
nof1, the AI lab behind Alpha Area is looking to become the first benchmark designed to measure AI models’ investing abilities. Their thesis is:
…financial markets are the best training environment for the next era of AI. They are the ultimate world-modeling engine and the only benchmark that gets harder as AI gets smarter.
nof1 is ultimately looking to run simulations in real markets using AI to train new base models that create their own training data indefinitely.
Alpha Area provides a live dashboard allowing you to follow along with each of the LMM’s trades in a slick-looking dashboard, which provides all their positions and even their personal logs, which house some of their thinking on their personal performance reviews and trade thesis.
And perhaps it’s no surprise the Deepseek model is currently winning, given it was initially developed by a quant hedge fund called High-Flyer. However, Grok is also very close behind and from what I can see from its trading logs, is very long on most of its positions and not fond of selling.
📓 Articles
Why our website looks like an operating system
I didn’t see myself writing a fluff piece for a developer-focused product analytics platform. Even writing that out is making me want to fall asleep, but wake up and click this link now and prepare to be amazed.
Ok, so I’m assuming you're back now and agree with me it’s not what you expected, right? Now this didn’t come out of nowhere. Posthog’s design has been on point for some time now. Their approach to content is witty, well-written and super informative, and now they’ve gone and turned their bloody website into an operating system!
It’s a risky and bold move to make. There is a reason why most websites look the same. Countless years of data and hundreds of millions spent in A/B testing and experimentation have established a high-converting formula of pixels neatly laid out in a conforming fashion.
I’ll be the first to admit it – an OS interface for a “website” is initially a jarring experience. I felt this as I built it. The human brain expects certain patterns within the confines of a browser viewport, and when it doesn’t get that assurance, it revolts.
In this post, Lead designer at PostHog - Cory Watilo outlines what frustrations with similar technical websites he encountered and why he thinks this radical approach might be the solution.
You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please. It has window snapping, keyboard shortcuts, and a bookmark app. I could take all day why I love exploring this website, but just check it out yourself. Take your time to explore and admire the craft.
📱 Products
twocents | Share your net worth
In a somewhat dystopian future new reality, a new social media platform has emerged with a real twist - your username is your net worth.
The pseudo-anonymous platform verifies users’ net worth by linking bank accounts, brokerage portfolios and crypto wallets.
If the thought of this sends shivers down your spine just thinking about exposing your net worth, consider the following. What if by adding this verification, you dramatically reduce false reporting and fake accounts? What if you could trust the others you are interacting with? Join other cohorts of users who have a similar net worth with similar problems and questions? They might be onto something.
However, I would argue this doesn’t cover all asset types such as property, art, collectables, cars, etc, which I assume will be a real challenge to verify with low friction to the user.
Additionally, this might only feel like fun if you have a fat net worth to swing around in these forums amongst fellow Alpha whales on the platform, establishing a financially gated social hierarchy. ooo wait, come to think of it, that’s also how it works today IRL.
It’s currently in private beta and is due to officially launch this year. Despite it not being something I would personally be interested in using, I like the controversial twist of putting net worth front and centre of a financial forum/social app.
🎁 Bonus content: This new platform reminds me of an MSCHF installation in 2022 titled the ‘ATM Leaderboard’ - which tracked and ranked the checking balances of everyone who used it, displaying a high-score list.
Strawberry | Agentic Browser
Regular readers of this newsletter will know my insatiable passion for browsers, so this will come as no surprise.
It was only a matter of time until we had an “agentic” browser after all the “standard” AI browsers out there collecting dust from the last 6 months of stalled innovation. After all, it seems like every company’s marketing team has fallen in love with the term ‘agentic’ and plastered their comms with their launch of ‘AI agents’ when, in most cases, the reality is they are chat interfaces that then feed into relatively clunky workflow automations.
Right, sinicalism aside, this is an interesting product, perhaps not initially for the core proposition of an agentic browser, because I’ve yet to test that, but rather the framing of the agents as “companions” with cute names that are spun up to complete very specific tasks, like Sales Sally, Recruiter Ryan, Competition Camilla and Extractor Ella. This fully autonomous browser will take control of your mouse and keyboard and begin working on your tasks in the background while you continue to browse or kick off another task in another tab. As it stands, I feel this will be a charm for salespeople but not an everyday browser, but I’ll check back in once it’s matured and out of beta.
🎁 Bonus content: The browser wars are really heating up! OpenAI just launched their long-roumored browser - Atlas. Spoiler alert, I’ll most likely be talking about it in my next issue after some time playing with it.
⚠️ Bonus Bonus content: There are some serious security vulnerabilities to consider with agentic agents and browsers due to indirect prompt injection attacks that occur when malicious instructions are hidden in web content like webpages. When an LLM analyzes the content, it obeys the hidden instructions because it believes they’re real commands from the user. Learn more here.
Other products
I’m going to try something a little different this month, as I’ve discovered a lot of new and interesting products but haven’t found the time to dig deeper into them. So instead of hoarding them until the next issue, I’ve listed them all out below.
Software
Poke: a messaging‑first AI assistant that works via iMessage, SMS, or WhatsApp
Meteor: your browser, on autopilot
Faces: build a unique site for every project
Lore: a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions
Wabi: vibe code mini apps based on your taste, habits, and context (incredible website)
Flask: Notion + Loom, but for video
Hardware
Moment: incredibly crafted phone lenses
Taya: a stunning AI wearable which looks like jewellery
Pocket: an AI-powered device you can strap to your smartphone
Home Display: stunning computer smart monitor
Stream: AI ring wearable
🐽 Other links to consume
🔮 Flashback
Studying history to learn the future
This month, I’m taking you back to 1999 with the launch of Rollercoaster Tycoon. The launch was an instant hit with simulation gaming nerds like me, grossing almost $20m in its first year of sales. But what if I told you this game was created by one man in just two years?
The Scottish game creator, Chris Sawyer, built the game in arguably one of the most complex and time-consuming programming languages (assembly language for the Microsoft Macro Assembler) with only help from a freelance graphic designer and a composer.
But what if we flash back a few more years to 1994, with the launch of a similar, but much earlier, game called Theme Park? This pioneering game was developed by 17-year-old Englishman Demis Hassabis for Bullfrog Productions - yup, the same Demis Hassabis who later co-founded DeepMind and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry!
If you made it this far, hit reply or jump into the comments and tell me what you thought of this edition. Was this 🔥 or 🗑. I read every response 👀
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Until the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻
Love this!! Would love your thoughts on some of my stuff, follow me back I could DM you?