Daily Brief

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV26V1UvkJw Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp

Most public safety technology companies grow by collecting more data. Peregrine inverted the model: no sensors, no new data, a business built on connecting the data and information cities already own. Co-founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph received more than two dozen no's before San Pablo PD let them in the door in February 2018. Today, Peregrine powers law enforcement, emergency medical services, fire and rescue, and other services in more than 400 cities and communities globally. Nick and Ben explain their north star for data sovereignty, and discuss how Peregrine's philosophy and privacy-f

Between the moment an x402 server verifies a payment signature and the moment it settles on the blockchain, nothing stops the buyer spending that money somewhere else. Jan Curn's point is that a client can mint a thousand signatures against one wallet, so any seller starting real work on the strength of a verification is exposed. The workaround is to do the work only after settlement, fine for a fixed price API call and awkward for anything slower. Curn is bullish enough on x402 to have shipped it two days before this talk, adding 20,000 Apify tools to a marketplace that previously carried abo

Pranav Maheshwari ran one prompt in two terminals: find the email address of the head of crypto and blockchain at Mastercard. The terminal without a payment skill file returned the company's email format and an invitation to work the rest out. The one with it paid a fraction of a cent to a metered endpoint and came back with the address, the person's location and their handle. That gap is the whole argument. Most MCP servers are free today, and his claim is that the useful ones will not stay free, which leaves an agent only as capable as the tools it can pay for. Rodrigo Coelho sets up the lon

Gus Iwanaga opens by disowning his own session title, then shows the demo that did not work. His team asked their system for a sales report for Q1 four times over. It returned four different layouts: different KPI cards, different charts, different amounts of text, and copy that drifted from Q1 in one run to January and March in another. He would not ship it. None of that was a model failure. It was the consequence of handing a model a component catalog and asking it to compose the experience, which is precisely what his team had done. The rest is what they built instead, at a company carrying

Full episode: https://youtu.be/X50zezLFWWI Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp

Two hours before David Levine took the closing slot of the conference, the West Virginia Secretary of State wrote back to confirm organization number 62847. The paperwork had gone out by FedEx. What it registered was a DUNA, a decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association, under a law that had taken effect the day before, and Levine's claim is that an organization composed of agents now has legal standing. It can own property, enter agreements, open bank accounts, raise capital and be held responsible in court, with the catch that it cannot distribute profits to members without turning th

Wafer (S25) is building a fast AI inference cloud that runs open-source models at industry-leading speeds by using agents to optimize GPUs at every level of the stack, from custom kernels to speculative decoding. The result is the low cost of open source with the latency of a much smaller model. In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC Managing Director Jared Friedman sat down with Wafer co-founders Emilio Andere and Steven Arellano to talk about the college side project that became the company, how they got GLM 5.2 running two to three times faster than anyone else in the market, and why spe