Latest Posts (20 found)
DHH 2 days ago

Dell is on a roll with the XPS

We've been buying servers from Dell since the 2000s at 37signals, but I was never too impressed with their personal computers. They either felt cheap or enterprisey to me. Like they were made exclusively for people who are handed standard-issue laptops by corporate, and not something discerning techies would buy with their own money. But the new XPS line has completely changed my perception. I've now spent several months with the 2026 XPS 14 and 16, and last week I added the MacBook Neo-fighting XPS 13, and all I can say is that these machines are fantastic! Great chips, great screens, great build quality. Superb packages. Which is very satisfying to see because there are few American business leaders I respect more than Michael Dell. He's been running his company for over forty years now, and he's still calling the shots! So to see the company pull a turnaround like this, so many years into its run, is very inspiring. I've written about the XPS 14 before, and as I noted back in April, a good portion of the credit for these new Dell machines being really good belongs to Intel. The 18A process is paying big dividends for both companies (and the rest of the PC makers). But Dell could still have stuck these chips into forgettable machines, and I wouldn't have had any interest. In fact, they did! Just last year, for the 2025 model year, they shipped new XPS machines with awful capacitive-touch function and esc keys. Two years after Apple had finally thrown in the towel on the ill-fated Touch Bar on their MacBooks! Dell also killed the XPS branding last year, and went with the truly uninspired Plus/Premium/Pro copycat branding. Like some cheap Chinese knockoff. It was embarrassing, to be honest. But unlike Apple, which introduced that cursed Touch Bar back in 2016, and then crammed it down everyone's throat for seven long years, Dell rebooted this nonsense almost immediately. Gave us back real function and esc keys, and revived the XPS branding. You could argue that they should have learned from Apple's mistakes to avoid their own, but the next best thing is surely a quick reversal. And what a reversal it's been. As I said, I've spent months using an XPS 14 as my main machine. It's been so good I even gave up on using a dedicated desktop machine. Now I just run everything off the XPS 14, connected to an Apple XDR 6K 32" (nobody has yet managed to beat this, and I've owned it for years). It's a great, simple setup. The XPS 14 is an expensive machine, though. Not more so than its direct competitors, but still, at $2,799 for the 358H/32GB/1TB/OLED unit, it's a lot. I'd spend that in a heartbeat, but not everyone is going to drop that kind of cash on a laptop. Especially if they already have a powerful desktop. That's where the new XPS 13 comes in. It's part of the PC industry's answer to Apple's new MacBook Neo, which analysts all thought would catch the other side flat-footed. Well, surprise, it didn't! Apple charges $699 for an 8GB RAM/256GB SSD Neo, whereas Dell wants $699 for 8GB RAM/512GB SSD, and even offers a 16GB RAM/512GB SSD version for $899 (there's no RAM upgrade possible for the Neo). But matching Apple on specs and price wasn't the surprise; it was besting them with a nicer screen and keyboard, and meeting them on build quality. The XPS 13 has a great 120Hz screen (something you don't even get on a MacBook Air at twice the money!), a superb keyboard w/ backlighting (also missing on the Neo!), and weighs 20% less at just 1 kg with every bit as nice an aluminum chassis. Now I'd forgive anyone their skepticism about 8GB RAM and Windows. Microsoft isn't exactly known for creating a responsive operating system on modest specs these days, but who cares, we have Linux! Of course, I've been running Omarchy on this thing for the past week, and it's frankly fantastic. As long as you understand the limitations! The Intel Wildcat CPU uses the same performance cores as the full Panther Lake chip, so single-threaded snappiness is all there, but it only has two of those, and then another four low-powered cores. So six total, but not a mix that's conducive to running big multi-core workloads, like local CI. This is where the XPS 13 meets the moment. As the agent craze has been taking over software development, you might have seen any of the many memes about half-cracked laptops, just so the agents won't halt with a closed lid. The obvious answer is of course to run these agents off a home server in the closet, connect them to something as slim and light as an XPS 13 over Tailscale, and then control it all over SSH. Used like this, you get a machine that runs a browser as fast as anything on the PC (thanks to those full-speed performance cores) while costing a fraction of a new top-spec machine, and having better close-the-lid ergonomics. Win-win-hurray. When I posted my enthusiasm on X about this new XPS 13, I got at least three replies with "Is this an ad???". No. This is not an ad. I bought the XPS 13 with my own money, and frankly, you couldn't pay me any sum to use a laptop I didn't like. I did try Dell's laptops a few years back, didn't like what I saw, and ended up spending a few years using Framework computers instead (they're still great too). I'm simply excited that the PC isn't giving up without a fight. That Linux has been on a run among early adopters. That companies like Intel and Dell are here to keep Apple honest. Competition is great. It was Apple's M chips that rejuvenated the laptop market, and they held a supreme lead for years. So it's lovely to see Intel, Dell, and others actually being ready to meet the challenge from the low-cost Neo right out of the gate. So I tip my hat, once again, to Michael Dell. Forty-plus years at the helm, not too proud to pivot quickly, and now the maker of my favorite Linux laptops. Well done, sir.

business Business Electronics hardware Hardware
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DHH 4 days ago

The will to power will return

In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity. Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power? A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times (Les Trente Glorieuses), good times create weak men (The End of History), weak men create hard times (now). The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis. It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment. But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response. And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition. The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline. We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.

business Business culture Culture
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DHH 4 days ago

But Y

It's no mystery to me why the Tesla Model Y is the world's best-selling car. As a total package, I could make a fair argument  that it's simply because it is the world's best car.  I'm no stranger to Teslas at this point. We've owned a Model S Plaid, the Model X we traded in on the Y, and we still have the Cyberbeast too. But as impressive as all those cars are, the Y towers above them in several key respects, but first and foremost, value. The premium all-wheel-drive white-on-white seven-seater we just got was right around $55,000. That's not exactly cheap, but it's less than half of what we spent on any of the other Teslas. It's a quarter of what we spent on the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. It's a sixth of what a new Aston Martin DBX would set you back. And, if I could just have one car, I'd pick the Y over all of them. The first thing you notice coming from earlier Tesla models is just how well-built the new Model Y is. The gigapress process that produces these new cars results in a package that feels reassuringly solid: no squeaks, no rattles, no flex. This couldn't be said about any of the earlier S and X models we had. But compared to other makes, it's not exactly revolutionary that a brand-new car feels well put together. Many other makes have managed to perfect that process over the decades. Tesla has now merely leapfrogged itself to the front of the class. But what very much is revolutionary is just how effortless owning the Y feels. It starts with entry and exit. Once you've paired your phone, you never think about keys or starting or stopping the car again. It just happens. There's no on/off button, no starter, no unlock. Again, other makes have made attempts at this, but none that I've tried is even close to the effortlessness that Tesla's superior software stack is able to deliver. Speaking of software: It just works. Every time. Going anywhere. You don't miss Apple CarPlay or Android Auto for a second. The navigation, the Spotify integration, the setup. Everything feels like it was written by a leading American software company. Not subcontractors out of India or firmware developers forced to deal with user interfaces. But where everything comes together is FSD. The self-driving technology that Tesla pushed against all odds for over a decade is finally here in an utterly magical incarnation. The car not just drives itself anywhere, it drives better than almost any human I've ever been driven by has been able to do. Its ability to anticipate traffic patterns, hit the perfect deceleration curve towards a light, slow down for even minor speed bumps, and gracefully curve around pedestrians or cyclists is nearly unbelievable.  As in, you'd be forgiven the suspicion that there must be a human driver hidden somewhere controlling the car over the internet. But it's just AI, and it's gotten fiendishly better over just the past year or so. All in service of that effortless experience. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it a luxurious experience. Like you're being escorted by the Queen's own driver to your desired destination. The Queen wouldn't bother with keys or rattles or driving. She'd just get in, be driven, and arrive fresh for a waive. This is the best approximation you can buy for mortal money today. But then, unlike the old X, it's actually also surprisingly delightful to grab the wheel yourself, hustle it down a hill, lean it into some fun corners, and surge out on that wave of endless torque that electric motors always deliver so well.  No, it's not a Porsche 911, but I'd say it's 90% as fun as a Taycan, at a fraction of the price, in a package that's endlessly more practical, and — did I mention this already? — can drive itself once you're done with the spirited part of the journey. The Tesla Model Y is a triumph of capitalism. Making the best self-driving technology available to the masses at a price that's accessible to the middle class in a car that even billionaires would appreciate.  Andy Warhol captured this egalitarian celebration well with this sentiment: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” The Tesla Model Y is an incredible car for nearly everyone.

programming Programming Electronics business Business
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DHH 3 weeks ago

European Delusions & Danish Drones

Europe is finally waking up from many decades of naive pacifism. While the continent is loath to give America credit, this is largely where it's due, as Trump has pulled back on blanket security guarantees. Well, that and a major war on its doorstep going on four years now. That's the thing about delusions. Their upkeep seems free until reality intrudes. And that reality has finally gate-crashed the European continent with all the tact and timing of a drunken sailor. So now what? "Buy, buy, buy" was what the Danish prime minister declared last year, as she committed another 50 billion kroner to buy weaponry in that year and this. But buy what and from whom? Sadly, there aren't many top European weapon and equipment makers ready, as the continent's defense industry has been starved of investment for thirty years.  As late as 2018, nearly two-thirds of European investors excluded companies involved in conventional weapons production due to ESG considerations, per Eurosif. And this has been going on since the early 1990s. As always, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now. And this also applies to the tech industry because the next war will depend on it more than ever. Like drones. They've become the main vector in the war in Ukraine. Fiber-optic cables have covered the battlefield like a spiderweb, and many of the recent advances on the Ukrainian side have been attributed to their superior drone operations. We need drones in Europe. Lots of them. In all shapes and sizes. Made by European companies, built on open-source platforms, and with local supply chains. And that's exactly what the Danish startup Upteko has been working on for nearly a decade, and is now ready to scale up. So I invested in Upteko. It's outside my normal, boring invest-in-what-you-know strategy of putting money in Danish SaaS startups, but also not that far away. The future of drones is as much in software as in propulsion. And I know something about that. But really, it wasn't so much about knowledge as it was motivation. And nobody has brought more of a motivating example to the tech-meets-defense question than Palmer Luckey. His Anduril company is infusing modern weapon-making with the zest and innovation of a Valley startup. It's sorely needed, and deeply inspiring. Europe needs its own Andurils. Not because it can't also continue to buy systems from the Americans, but because a good ally is self-sufficient, equally inventive, and armed to the teeth with a diverse fleet of awesome, native weapons.

business Business
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DHH 4 weeks ago

The Rape of Britain

Rupert Lowe, member of the British Parliament and leader of the Restore Britain party, released The Rape Gang Inquiry yesterday. It details the industrial-scale sexual atrocities committed by predominantly Pakistani Muslims against mostly White British girls in the United Kingdom over decades. It's the stuff of nightmares.  In fact, it's so grim, so vile, and so dark that I can't in good conscience recommend reading the graphic details directly (even just a summary of the accounts is traumatizing). But at the same time, you can't look away either. The report estimates that 250,000 British girls have been victims of these rape gangs over the decades. It's an unimaginable scale of horrors. The closest comparison to these accounts is the atrocities committed during times of war, but somehow this seems worse: The terror did not come as a result of losing an armed conflict, but aided and abetted by the national institutions sworn to serve and protect. From the report: Police forces ignored repeated reports, criminalised victims instead of perpetrators, destroyed evidence, and allowed known rapists to walk free on bail.  Social care services undermined protective parents, placed children in trafficking hubs inside children’s homes, closed cases despite clear indicators of exploitation, and retaliated against whistleblowers.  The NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple sexually transmitted infections in children as young as 13, pregnancies caused by rape, and suicide attempts, yet discharged victims back to their abusers without safeguarding referrals or trauma care.  Schools observed older men collecting girls at the gates, heard disclosures of rape on school premises, and responded by excluding victims rather than protecting them.  Taxi licensing authorities renewed permits for drivers who formed the logistical backbone of the networks and collapsed in the face of organised protests when basic safety measures were proposed. But that's the collective, general assignment of complicity. The specific examples are so much worse. I promise I won't haunt you with more, but here's just one example from the report: When Fiona's mother called the police to report her daughter missing and mentioned a history of abuse by Asian men, the call handler told her: “You can’t describe them as Asian men because that’s racist. You should just be glad your child is being taught a different culture.” On one occasion, a police officer returned Fiona to the house where the abuse was occurring and told the men to “have fun with her.” On another occasion, police instructed the abusers that if they could persuade Fiona to sign herself out of care, the police would stop bothering them. Now let me touch on two related topics. First, the BBC reported yesterday that trust in traditional media is plummeting in many places, but the fall in Britain has been particularly steep:  The research published on Tuesday suggests that public trust worldwide is at 37%, three points down on this time last year. In the UK, it has fallen by five points to 30% - 20 points lower than 10 years ago. So in 2016, half of Brits had trust in traditional media, like the BBC. Now that's down to 30%. Grim. So imagine my surprise when I couldn't find a single mention of The Rape Gang Inquiry on the BBC's news site from neither yesterday nor today. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce a connection between narrative-driven coverage (and absence of it!) and lower trust.  Second is how the UK wants to track everyone's social media use under the guise of restricting access to those under 16. Which requires every adult to verify they're of age by providing a digital ID, passport, or credit card. Thus ending any hope of anonymity online. All wrapped in Protect The Children dressing. So a state that not only failed to prevent these sexual atrocities, but in many cases abetted the horrors, now wants to end anonymity online to "protect children", so it can prosecute even more regime critics? The same country that leads the world with 12,000 yearly arrests for online speech already? It's painfully on the nose. It's tragic what the Brits have had and continue to endure. They deserve so much better. Especially these abused children detailed in Lowe's report. And making them wait much longer is a dangerous cocktail.

media Media culture Culture journalism Journalism
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DHH 1 months ago

A pond of interesting problems

The great joy of having built a successful business that employs a broad team of talented people is that I get to fish for exactly the kind of problems that most interest me, most of the time. Usually, this coincides well with the needs of the business. When we moved out of the cloud, I spent months getting Kamal off the ground, so we didn't have to get mired in the complexity of Kubernetes. Fun problem to solve! And of course, the origin story of Ruby on Rails is that Basecamp gave birth to it all back in 2003. Because I simply wanted Ruby to work well for the web, and we needed a platform to build the business. But sometimes it's also a bit further afield. We had our big clash with Apple over the App Store's monopoly abuses back in 2020, but it wasn't until 2024 that I severed our exclusivity with the Mac on the engineering side by moving to Linux, and ultimately building Omarchy. I don't always get to choose, of course. There are occasionally urgent problems that just need our, and therefore my, full attention as a company, or humdrum issues that I just happen to be best qualified to tackle. But this is increasingly rare because of all those great people we've managed to assemble at 37signals. And that's how it should be! Building a successful business should yield dividends beyond just the financial ones. It should afford you more opportunity to press your comparative advantage, so you spend most of your time on the projects that stimulate a little Call of the Wild. Never to the point of being too good for anything, mind you. Taking out the trash is still everyone's job some of the time. But mostly, I want to be sitting by the pond of interesting problems, fishing for the ones that catch my eye and hook my motivation.  Who could wish to retire from that?

business Business ruby Ruby
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DHH 1 months ago

Let the agents democratize open source

The open source movement spent decades fighting for everyone's right to change software, through free access to code and permissive licenses to release improvements. But at the dawn of the AI revolution, as this mission is finally being broadly fulfilled, it's clear that "everyone" never actually meant everyone to some. See, all programmers are equal, but some programmers are more equal than others. If you're a programmer being assisted by AI, you're not a real programmer. Therefore you aren't entitled to the same supposedly universal open source rights. Or so the self-serving thinking goes in the growing number of anti-agent camps springing up as part of a modern Luddite movement. Projects big and small have been erecting new participation barriers on contributions aided by AI to preserve the privileges of the old programmer guilds.  This is a protectionist tale as old as time.    And the justifications are just as tired: It's about quality! It's about attribution! It's about workers! Spare me. It's about you, your insecurities, and your privileges. Humans have been writing shitty software, with dodgy attribution and plenty of bugs, since five minutes after the profession materialized. Agents aren't perfect, slop is a problem, but giving more people the power to enjoy malleable computers is undoubtedly a huge win for the founding vision of open source.  But as with so many social movements that purport to fight for freedom or equality, this AI backlash reeks of status games, envy, and what Nietzsche called ressentiment: How dare you make or change software without suffering through all that I had to endure learning this trade! This precious power is my reward for enduring the social humiliation of being a nerd! What should be celebrated as the spread of computing freedoms is instead condemned because it diminishes the exclusivity of those who possessed it first. Don't succumb to this insular, fearful, protectionist thinking. Programming is evolving. We don't know exactly what the final shape will look like, but giving more people access to the fruits of computing freedoms is worth resisting the temptation to close the gates of participation.

career Career open-source Open Source ai AI
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DHH 1 months ago

Basecamp Five

I've been working on Basecamp for half my life, and nearly my entire professional career in software. The first code was written in the summer of 2003 when I was just 23. Now I'm 46, and we've just released the fifth major version.  It's an incredible update to a service that continues to help about a million users a day avoid dropping the ball when working with others. It's AI accessible, but not agent hysteric. It's still famously easy to use, still executes the basics beautifully, and still focuses on the small to medium-sized teams we've been serving in the Fortune 5,000,000 for decades. Here are just three of my favorite new features in Basecamp 5: Lexxy editor: Our new text editor finally brings tables, markdown, and live syntax highlighting for code to Basecamp. Oh, and voice notes. It's built on Meta's Lexical editor toolkit, and it's going to ship as the default for Action Text in the next major version of Rails. Keyboard accessible: After moving to Linux, building Omarchy, and acquiring a taste for mechanical keyboards, I've come to love navigating the computer primarily through hotkeys. So with a lot of effort, Basecamp is now a delight to drive through the keys, and you don't have to be a brainiac to remember them all: just hold down SHIFT, and they're revealed in the interface. SHIFT + S opens the sidebar, ESC moves focus between it and the main page, SHIFT + C starts composing a comment/chat line/answer. The permanent sidebar: If you live in Basecamp, like I do, it's to stay on top of all the new things that are constantly happening in a busy account, and that's just gotten so much faster with the new permanent sidebar. Before, we had a Hey! menu in the top bar. You'd get a little dot when something was new, then you'd open it, click, and the menu would close. If you had five things that were new, it'd be open-click-close, open-click-close, five times. Being able to zoom through these now with just the return key, tap, tap, tap, and I've read three new things. So good. And there's so much more. Jason put together a great summary on the new marketing site, which in itself is brand new too. A back-to-basics design in many ways. As our entire industry is getting swept up in agent hysteria (and I love AI as much as anyone!), we thought it better to focus on the human communication that's the cornerstone of Basecamp. The new site just speaks plainly to that mission and shows you the software right at the top. Another thing that's back is color, specifically in the logo. Basecamp's clever but flat paperclip logo has been replaced with a modern take of our original rolling mountains. In full three dimensions, with depth and a gradient. Love it.  Overall, I'm really proud of what we've built with Basecamp Five. We're inching in on a quarter of a century in service! We still have customers who signed up back in early 2004! This is the kind of legacy that makes me beam, and the new version is just ace.  If you've tried Basecamp in the past, it's time to take another look. If you haven't tried it yet, you're in for a treat.

business Business ruby Ruby programming Programming web-development Web Development
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DHH 2 months ago

Celebrating computers at Omacon

Do you see the same truth? That's how C.S. Lewis defined the essence of friendship. And that's what we gathered 130 people in New York to honor for Omacon two weeks ago. Seeing the same truth: A love of computers. Bespoke computers. Malleable computers. Our computers. It's the kind of magic you can only really summon in person. We do our best online, but you instantly realize what an impoverished medium it is for creating real connections once you're all together in the same room. So that's what we did. We connected. We shared our work, our passion, and our opinions about all these new Linux vibes. It happened in an absolutely gorgeous venue, generously offered for the occasion by Tobi and his event team at Shopify. The space had an almost comedy-club intimacy, with chairs just a few inches from the podium. Thanks to the single-track format, we made the most of that warm atmosphere. I gave the keynote. I also got to meet Prime, TJ, Bjarne, Spencer, and Vaxry for the first time in person. Which is always a bit odd when you've been working together for a while over the internet. It feels so familiar, but like an unfinished agreement. And then, boom, it's signed with a handshake and a smile. Same with getting to meet and talk to a ton of other Omarchy users from all walks of life. Many were programmers, but plenty were not. Some came from other Linux distributions, but most from either Windows or Mac. Everyone shared a passion for computers, though. Not just as instruments of action, but as delightful environments for play, learning, and connection. It all added up to a massive recharge. I built Omarchy for myself, but sharing it makes it mean so much more. Seeing others enthusiastically embrace it as a starting point for their own Linux adventure is a real boost to the motivation needed to keep making it better. Because there's always more to do: more systems to cover with perfect compatibility, more corners to polish. So that's what we're going to do, together. Make this distro reach more kindred spirits. Entice those who would love a bespoke, kintsugi system, but don't know where to start. It's never going to be for everyone, but that's also why it works as a beacon for those who choose to share the quest.

culture Culture open-source Open Source
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DHH 3 months ago

The malleable computer

Open source promised that users would be free to change whatever code they were running. The reality, however, is that hardly any of them ever did — it was simply too hard. Now, with AI, it suddenly isn't. This is very exciting. Being able to add features to any local open-source application and then use that bespoke fork for your own benefit is an incredible step toward the original open source promise. This isn't just about regular users, either. Even if you are a programmer, you might not be familiar with the language the application is written in. And even if you are, taking the time to get familiar with any substantial codebase is a tall order. AI is compressing that complexity and making it malleable at a ferocious rate. What excites me even more, though, is when this power is applied to the operating system, and thus the entire computer. When you're able to change not just individual applications, but your system's menu bars, your window manager, your notification system, your everything.  But you can only do this on Linux. With Windows and macOS, the core elements of the operating system are owned by the companies that make them. While it's often possible to hack certain aspects, it's far from truly having the malleable computer that Linux allows. I've already seen this a lot in the Omarchy world: users who aren't super technical making the system their own with the help of AI and being utterly delighted by the outcome. And while this is still a pretty nerdy thing to do, I don't think it will remain contained to that niche for long. As models get even more powerful, the idea that your system is tied down as a fixed black box is likely to become an archaic notion pretty quickly. As always, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

ai AI open-source Open Source linux Linux
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DHH 3 months ago

Panther Lake is the real deal

Intel really delivered with Panther Lake. A 2026 Dell XPS 14 using this chipset with an IPS screen can hit just 1.4 watts of idle power draw on Omarchy. That's good enough for over 47 hours!! And in real-world mixed use on another 74-Wh machine, I've seen around 16 hours of battery life. That's a huge jump over the ~6 hours I was getting over the past two years from AMD-powered Framework laptops. Technically, Intel already had something close to Panther Lake on efficiency with the Lunar Lake chips from last year, but those were quite slow on any multi-core workloads (like a developer would need). With Panther Lake (358H), I'm getting 17,500 on Geekbench 6, which is about 10% faster than the already excellent AMD HX370, and a match for Apple's M5.  Apple remains ahead on single-core performance, but even there, Panther Lake is on par with an M3. And I don't remember anyone complaining that those were too slow. What everyone has been pining for was better battery life, and now we got it. On a machine with excellent integrated graphics that are good enough to play a ton of triple-A games no less! But we're getting more than that. The PC makers are getting their act together on all fronts. Haptic touchpads on level with Apple's is now standard on both high-end Dell and Asus laptops. Many of the new machines also have tandem OLED screens that blow even the nice micro-LED options from Apple out of the water. And PCs are now somehow both sleeker and slimmer than the MacBooks. Jonathan Ive knew this, he was just a bit ahead of the components, and he was willing to sacrifice reliability to get to what wasn't possible back then. But now it is, and the PC makers are taking full advantage. Now I know that any comparison between Macs and PCs are moot for most people. There's not a lot of cross-shopping going on these days. If you're locked into the Apple walled garden, it's hard to untangle yourself, so most just continue to buy whatever their team offers. But for the few who are either fed up with Apple in general, macOS Tahoe in particular, or just want to try a whole new way of computing with Omarchy, it's fantastic that battery life is no longer a blocker. It's been the #1 reason cited by folks who've been interested in trying Omarchy, but felt like they couldn't let go of Apple's efficiency advantage. Now that's largely gone. I also just love a good turnaround story. Intel had been on the ropes for years. Now they have a fantastic integrated GPU that's compatible with all the tens of thousands of PC games on the market, a super-efficient CPU that's a match for an M5 on multi-core and an M3 on single-core performance, and a range of PC makers finally taking the fight directly to Apple on touchpads, build quality, and weight. These new Panther Lake CPUs are made in Arizona too, btw. With the world as it is, I think any American should breathe a sigh of relief that if things get spicy with Taiwan, there's more to frontier computing than a TSMC plant within a short reach of China. There's still more work to be done on that front (as Intel CPU cores still come from TSMC!), but it's a huge step in the right direction. Personally, I'm just thrilled that competition is lifting all boats. Apple gave the entire laptop industry a huge wake-up call in 2020 with the introduction of the M chips. Intel's former CEO, Pat Gelsinger, saw the threat clearly, kicked off the 18A plan, but sadly didn't last long enough in the top seat to see his bet pay off with Panther Lake. The rest of us now benefit from his boldness. I'm also thrilled to see both Dell and Intel leaning into Linux. Omarchy 3.5 ships with every possible tweak to make these Panther Lake chips perform at their best, and that was only possible because Michael Dell assigned a team to work on it. So much love to Mr Dell for letting us borrow the brains and commits from senior engineers within both his company and Intel to ship this big new release. If you've been waiting on the sidelines for a laptop that can run Omarchy and still get amazing battery life, now is your magic moment. Give the new Dell XPS series, or any of the other laptops shipping with Panther Lake, a try. I think you'll be as impressed as I've been.

hardware Hardware performance Performance
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DHH 3 months ago

Basecamp becomes agent accessible

In the past 18 months, we've experimented with a ton of AI-infused features at 37signals. Fizzy had all sorts of attempts. As did Basecamp. But as Microsoft and many others have realized, it's not that easy to make something that's actually good and would welcomed by users. So we didn't ship. In the meantime, agents have emerged has the killer app for AI. Not only are LLMs much smarter when they can check their thinking using tools, but the file system also gives them the memory implant they needed to learn between prompts. And now they can actually do stuff! So while we keep cooking on actually-useful native AI features in Basecamp, we're launching a fully agent-accessible version today. We've revamped our API, created a brand-new CLI, and wrapped it all in a skill to teach agents how best to use it all. It works remarkably well, and it's really fast too. Not only can you have your agent look through everything in Basecamp, summarize whatever you need, but it can also set up to-do lists, post message updates, chat with humans and clankers alike, upload reference files, and arrange a project schedule. Anything you can do in Basecamp, agents can now do too. This becomes extra powerful when you combine Basecamp with all the other tools you might be using that are also agent accessible. For software development, you can use the MCP from Sentry to trawl through major sources of bugs, then have the agent summarize that in a message for Basecamp. Or you have it download, analyze, and highlight key customer complaints by giving it access to your help desk system. All this was possible in the past with APIs, hand-written integrations, and human data scientists. But it was cumbersome, slow, and expensive, so most people just didn't. A vanishingly small portion of Basecamp customers have ever directly interacted with our API. But agents? I think adoption is going to be swift. Not because everyone is going to run OpenCode, Claude Code, or Gemini CLI. But because agents are going to be incorporated into ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and all the other mainstream interfaces who were collectively embarrassed by OpenClaw's meteoric ascent  and popularity very quickly. There's a huge demand out there for a personal agent that can act as your private executive assistant. This is where the puck is going, and we're skating to meet it with agent accessibility across the board. Basecamp is first, Fizzy is next, and we'll hit HEY before long too. Revamped APIs, comprehensive CLIs, and the skills to use them whatever your harness or claws look like.

ai AI swift Swift business Business api API
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DHH 3 months ago

Denmark desperately needs more inequality

The Danish election is tomorrow. One of the central themes in the incumbent campaign has been a proposed wealth tax. The fig leaf for this proposal was "smaller classrooms in the early grades", but that quickly fell off, and the debate centered on "inequality". And it's true that inequality is a problem in Denmark: There's not nearly enough! I know that sounds sacrilegious. Even most of the business-friendly press and parties in Denmark dance around this topic. Which makes political sense because the word "inequality" leads most people to think of poverty and destitution. But that's not the reality in the little kingdom that could. Denmark has an enormous state apparatus (half of GDP and a third of all workers!) that offers equal access to everything from health care to education and a million programs in between. It could surely be slimmed and trimmed, but on the whole, it works remarkably well. The average Dane is incredibly well cared for by any international standard (high-trust society, hurray!). By those same standards, it's the 8th most equal country in the world on income, as measured by the Gini coefficient (0.28). But this is where the numbers start spellbinding the debate. Because the Danish Gini coefficient perversely "degrades" if new businesses succeed, as any time successful founders and high-paid employees earning incomes above the median "worsen" inequality.  This is obviously nonsense. When the pie gets bigger, it gets better for all, as long as nobody is robbed of their existing slice.  Denmark should clearly want new successful businesses! It should love to see founders reap big rewards when the risks pay off. It should celebrate early employees making fortunes on stock grants. But all too often, it just doesn't. Just to put it on a pin: Danes hate flashy cars with a passion that stretches back much further than the current green excuses. But buying a $300,000 Ferrari in Denmark is one of the most patriotic things you can possibly do! You'll end up paying almost three times the price for the privilege, and sending 2/3s of that to the treasury in taxes. Truly a contribution to the common cause worthy of admiration, not scorn!  But because the debate around inequality is anchored in a fixed-pie paradigm, scorn is all you're likely to get. Anyone who does well in Denmark is immediately suspected of having succeeded at the expense of others. Probably through some form of nefarious exploitation, even if we can't prove what?! There is a core national politics of grievance and envy. But, however human that may be, the future progress and prosperity of the country depends on rejecting this zero-sum delusional dogma. The Danish economy is currently doing well compared to the rest of the EU, but it's dangerously dependent on a handful of vintage corporations pulling the bulk of the load. This simply has to change if the Danes wish to retain their high standards of living going forward. No corporation lasts forever. Novo Nordisk was Europe's most valuable company at the start of last year, now it's worth half that, and is out of the top ten. And who knows what the closing of the Hormuz Strait will do to Maersk. These two companies alone represent roughly a quarter of all Denmark's exports! Meanwhile, new business formation just hit an all-time low. And only a tiny portion of the big employers in Denmark were created in the last thirty years. And thus, almost all the wealth that funds the highly-prized welfare state is coming from really old companies. Many of them over a hundred years old. This is wonderful in many ways. The Danes should be rightfully proud to host Maersk (1904), Novo (1923), Vestas (1945), Lego (1932), and other international heavy-weights. But it can't rely on this aging corporate vintage to forever bear fruit for tomorrow. Tomorrow needs to be tended to by planting new seeds. New companies. New growth. New capital. And that's just not going to happen if the Danish state declares itself at war with capital formation or accumulation. It should be so lucky to have more rich people, with more capital, and the talent to deploy it toward a better, shared future (or spend it on heavily-taxed Ferraris!). The ballot boxes open tomorrow morning. It's predicted to be a close one. Fingers crossed for a prosperous choice.

business Business Finance
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DHH 4 months ago

ONCE (Again)

The original concept for ONCE sought to sell self-hostable web apps for a one-time fee. That didn't work. Sure, we recouped the investment on Campfire, our chat app, but that was it. You gotta listen when the market tells you what it wants! And it didn't seem to want to pay for self-hosted web apps in a one-off way. So we set Campfire, Writebook, and now Fizzy free by releasing them all as open source with a permissive license. That worked! Tons of people have been running these apps on their own servers, contributing code back, and learning how we build real production applications at 37signals. Now we're doubling down on the gift and adding an integrated way to run all these apps, and your own vibe-coded adventures too, on a brand-new application server we're also calling ONCE. If you twist my arm, I can make that spell "Open Network Container Executor", but we don't even have to go there. Once is just a cool word, we already own the domain, and it's running all the original applications released under that banner as free and open-source installations. That's good enough! The pitch here is that installing a whole suite of applications on your own server should be dead easy. The original ONCE model wanted a dedicated box or VM per app, which was just cumbersome and costly to maintain. Now you can use a single machine — even your laptop! — to run everything all at once. ONCE gives you a beautiful terminal interface to track application metrics, like RAM + CPU usage, as well as basic visitor + request/second counts. It also gives you zero-downtime upgrades and scheduled backups. It's meant to be able to run all the infrastructure apps you'd need, like our full suite and all the ones your AI agents will soon be building for you. Give it a spin. It's just a single command to install. I can show you how with this YouTube video tour. Enjoy!

devops DevOps open-source Open Source
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DHH 4 months ago

Omacon comes to New York

The vibes around Linux are changing fast. Companies of all shapes and sizes are paying fresh attention. The hardware game on x86 is rapidly improving. And thanks to OpenCode and Claude Code, terminal user interfaces (TUIs) are suddenly everywhere. It's all this and Omarchy that we'll be celebrating in New York City on April 10 at the Shopify SoHo Space for the first OMACON! We've got an incredible lineup of speakers coming. The creator of Hyprland, Vaxry, will be there. Along with ThePrimeagen and TJ DeVries. You'll see OpenCode creator Dax Raad. Omarchy power contributors Ryan Hughes and Bjarne Øverli. As well as Chris Powers (Typecraft) and myself as Linux superfans. All packed into a single day of short sessions, plenty of mingle time, and some good food. Tickets go on sale tomorrow (February 19) at 10am EST. We only have room for 130 attendees total, so I imagine the offered-at-cost $299 tickets will go quickly. But if you can't manage to snatch a ticket in time, we'll also be recording everything, so you won't be left out entirely. But there is just something special about being together in person about a shared passion. I've felt the intensity of that three years in a row now with Rails World. There's an endless amount of information and instruction available online, but a sense of community and connection is far more scarce. We nerds need this. We also need people to JUST DO THINGS. Like kick off a fresh Linux distribution together with over three hundred contributors so far all leaning boldly into aesthetics, ergonomics, and that omakase spirit.  Omarchy only came about last summer, now we're seeing 50,000 ISO downloads a week, 30,000 people on the Discord, and now our very first exclusive gathering in New York City. This is open source at its best. People from all over, coming together, making cool shit. (Oh, and thanks to Shopify and Tobi for hosting. You gotta love when a hundred-plus billion dollar company like this is run by an uber nerd who can just sign off on doing something fun and cool for the community without any direct plausible payback.)

programming Programming ruby Ruby
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DHH 5 months ago

Clankers with claws

With OpenClaw you're giving AI its own machine, long-term memory, reminders, and persistent execution. The model is no longer confined to a prompt-response cycle, but able to check its own email, Basecamp notifications, and whatever else you give it access to on a running basis. It's a sneak peek at a future where everyone has a personal agent assistant, and it's fascinating. I set up mine on a Proxmox virtual machine to be fully isolated from my personal data and logins. (But there are people out there running wild and giving OpenClaw access to everything on their own machine, despite the repeated warnings that this is more than a little risky!). Then I tried to see just how little help it would need navigating our human-centric digital world. I didn't install any skills, any MCPs, or give it access to any APIs. Zero machine accommodations. I just started off with a simple prompt: "Sign up for Fizzy, so we have a place to collaborate. Here's the invite link." Kef, as I named my new agent, dutifully went to Fizzy to sign up, but was immediately stumped by needing an email address. It asked me what to do, and I replied: "Just go to hey.com and sign up for a new account." So it did. In a single try. No errors, no steering, no accommodations. After it had procured its own email address, it continued on with the task of signing up for Fizzy. And again, it completed the mission without any complications. Now we had a shared space to collaborate. So, as a test, I asked it to create a new board for business ideas, and add five cards with short suggestions, including providing a background image sourced from the web to describe the idea. And it did. Again, zero corrections. Perfect execution. I then invited it to Basecamp by just adding it as I would any other user. That sent off an email to Kef's new HEY account, which it quickly received, then followed the instructions, got signed up, and greeted everyone in the chat room of the AI Labs project it was invited to. I'm thoroughly impressed. All the agent accommodations, like MCPs/CLIs/APIs, probably still have a place for a bit longer, as doing all this work cold is both a bit slow and token-intensive. But I bet this is just a temporary crutch. And while I ran this initial experiment on Claude's Opus 4.5, I later reran most of it on the Chinese open-weight model Kimi K2.5, and it too was able to get it all right (though it was a fair bit slower when provisioned through OpenRouter). Everything is changing so fast in the world of AI right now, but if I was going to skate to where the puck is going to be, it'd be a world where agents, like self-driving cars, don't need special equipment, like LIDAR or MCPs, to interact with the environment. The human affordances will be more than adequate. What a time to be alive.

ai AI
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DHH 5 months ago

Cloud gaming is kinda amazing

I fully understand the nostalgia for real ownership of physical-media games. I grew up on cassette tapes (C64 + Amstrad 464!), floppy disks (C64 5-1/4" then Amiga 3-1/2"), cartridges, and CDs. I occasionally envy the retro gamers on YouTube with an entire wall full of such physical media. But do you know what I like more than collecting? Playing! Anywhere. Anything. Anytime. We went through the same coping phases with movies and music. Yes, vinyl had a resurgence, but it's still a tiny sliver of hours listened. Same too with 4K Blue-rays. Almost everyone just listens to Spotify or watches on Netflix these days. It's simply cheaper, faster, and, thus, better. Not "better" in some abstract philosophical way (ownership vs rent) or even in a concrete technical way (bit rates), but in a practical way. Paying $20/month for unlimited music and the same again for a broad selection of shows and movies is clearly a deal most consumers are happy to make. So why not video games? Well, because it just wasn't good enough! Netflix tried for casual gaming, but I didn't hear much of that after the announcement. Google Stadia appears to have been just a few years ahead of reality (eerie how often that happens for big G, like with both AI and AR!) as they shut down their service already. NVIDIA, though, kept working, and its GeForce NOW service is actually, finally kinda amazing! I had tried it back in the late 2010s, and just didn't see anything worth using back then. Maybe my internet was too slow, maybe the service just wasn't good enough yet. But then I tried it again a few days ago, just after NVIDIA shipped the native GFN client for Linux, and holy smokes!! You can legitimately play Fortnite in 2880x1800 at 120 fps through a remote 4080, and it looks incredible. Yes, there's a little input lag, but it's shockingly, surprisingly playable on a good internet connection. And that's with the hardest possible genre: competitive shooters! If you play racing games like Forza Horizon or story-mode games like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, you can barely tell! This is obviously a great option for anyone with a modest computer that can't run the latest triple-A titles, but also for Linux gamers who don't have access to run the cheat-protection software required for Fortnite and a few other games.  And, like Spotify and Netflix, it's pretty competitively priced. It's $20/month for access to that 4080-tier. You'd quickly spend $2,000+ on a gaming rig with a 4080, so this isn't a half bad deal: it's a payback of 100 months, and by then you'd probably want a 6080 anyway. Funny how NVIDIA is better at offering the promise of cheap cloud costs than the likes of AWS! Anyway, I've been very impressed with NVIDIA GeForce NOW. We're going to bake the Linux installer straight into the next version of Omarchy, so you can just go to Install > Gaming > NVIDIA GeForce NOW to get going (just like we have such options for Steam and Minecraft). But of course seeing Fortnite running in full graphics on that remote 4080 made me hungry for even more. I've been playing Fortnite every week for the last five years or so with the kids, but the majority of my gameplay has actually been on tablet. A high-end tablet, like an iPad M5, can play the game with good-for-mobile graphics at 120 Hz. It's smooth, it's easy, and the kids and I can lounge on the couch and play together. Good Family Fun! Not peak visual fidelity, though. So after the NVIDIA GeForce NOW experience, I found a way to use the same amazing game streaming technology at home through a local-server solution called Apollo and a client called Moonlight. This allowed me to turn my racing-sim PC that's stuck downstairs into a cloud-like remote gaming service that I can access anywhere on the local network, so I can borrow its 4090 to play 120-fps, ultra-settings Fortnite with zero perceivable input lag on any computer in the house. The NVIDIA cloud streaming is very impressive, but the local-server version of the same is mind-blowing. I'm mostly using the Asus G14 laptop as a client, so Fortnite looks incredible with those ultra, high-resolution settings on its OLED, but unlike when you use that laptop's built-in graphics card, the machine stays perfectly cool and silent pulling a meager 18 watts. And the graphics are of course a lot nicer. The Moonlight client is available for virtually every platform: Mac, iOS, Android, and of course Linux. That means no need to dual boot to enjoy the best games at the highest fidelity. No need for a honking big PC on my primary desk. I did not know this was an option!! Whether you give NVIDIA's cloud gaming setup a try or repurpose a local gaming PC for the same, you're in for a real treat of what's possible with streaming Fortnite on ultra settings at 120 fps on Linux (or even Mac!). GG, NVIDIA!

gaming Gaming cloud Cloud
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DHH 6 months ago

Promoting AI agents

At the end of last year, AI agents really came alive for me. Partly because the models got better, but more so because we gave them the tools to take their capacity beyond pure reasoning. Now coding agents are controlling the terminal, running tests to validate their work, searching the web for documentation, and using web services with skills we taught them in plain English. Reality is fast catching the hype! This is all very evident if you've tried to employ any of the new models — especially Claude Opus 4.5, Codex 5, Gemini 3, and even the Chinese open-weight models like MiniMax M2.1 and GLM-4.7 — in one of the modern terminal harnesses that give them access to all these autonomous powers. The code being produced by this new breed of AI is leagues ahead of where their predecessors were at the beginning of 2025. I've thoroughly enjoyed putting them all to work in OpenCode, which is a terminal interface for coding agents that allows you to seamlessly switch between all of the models, capture your sessions for sharing, and simply looks astounding when theme-matched with the rest of Omarchy (where we're making it a default in the next version!). See, I never really cared much for the in-editor experience of having AI autocomplete your code as you were writing it. That was the original format pioneered by GitHub's Copilot and Cursor, but it left me cold. When I code, I want to finish my own thoughts and sentences. That was the sentiment I expressed on the Lex Fridman podcast last summer. But with these autonomous agents, the experience is very different. It's more like working on a team and less like working with an overly-zealous pair programmer who can't stop stealing the keyboard to complete the code you were in the middle of writing. With a team of agents, they're doing their work autonomously, and I just review the final outcome, offer guidance when asked, and marvel at how this is possible at all. Yes, I'm ready to give the current crop of AI agents a promotion. They're no longer just here to help me learn, answer my questions, or check my work. They're fully capable of producing production-grade contributions to real-life code bases.  Yet pure vibe coding remains an aspirational dream for professional work for me, for now. Supervised collaboration, though, is here today. I've worked alongside agents to fix small bugs, finish substantial features, and get several drafts on major new initiatives. The paradigm shift finally feels real. Now, it all depends on what you're working on, and what your expectations are. The hype train keeps accelerating, and if you bought the pitch that we're five minutes away from putting all professional programmers out of a job, you'll be disappointed. I'm nowhere close to the claims of having agents write 90%+ of the code, as I see some boast about online. I don't know what code they're writing to hit those rates, but that's way off what I'm able to achieve, if I hold the line on quality and cohesion. But I'll forgive folks for getting excited! Because you don't have to connect many future dots on the current trend line to get dizzy by the prospects. The leaps of improvement that AI agents took in 2025 is simply incredible. This is the most exciting thing we've made computers do since we connected them to the internet back in the '90s. So what might things look like in 2026 or 2027? I get the exuberance. I also get that some programmers are eager to tune it all out. The hype drones on relentlessly, the most fantastical claims are still far off from being substantiated, and there's real uncertainty about where all this will leave the profession in the future. But that's still not reason enough to miss out on this incredible moment in human and computing history!  You gotta get in there. See where we're at now for yourself. Download OpenCode, throw some real work at Opus or the others, and relish the privilege of being alive during the days we taught the machines how to think.

ai AI programming Programming
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DHH 7 months ago

The O'Saasy License

One of my favorite parts of the early web was how easy it was to see how the front-end was built. Before View Source was ruined by minification, transpiling, and bundling, you really could just right-click on any web page and learn how it was all done. It was glorious. But even back then, this only ever applied to the front-end. At least with commercial applications, the back-end was always kept proprietary. So learning how to write great web applications still meant piecing together lessons from books, tutorials, and hello-world-style code examples, not from production-grade commercial software. The O'Saasy License seeks to remedy that. It's basically the do-whatever-you-want MIT license, but with the commercial rights to run the software as a service (SaaS) reserved for the copyright holder, thus encouraging more code to be open source while allowing the original creators to see a return on their investment. We need more production-grade code to teach juniors and LLMs alike. A view source that extends to the back-end along with the open source invitation to fix bugs, propose features, and run the system yourself for free (if your data requirements or interests maks that a sensible choice over SaaS). This is what we're doing with Fizzy, but now we've also given the O'Saasy License a home to call its own at osaasy.dev. The license is yours to download and apply to any project where it makes sense. I hope to read a lot more production-grade SaaS code as a result!

open-source Open Source backend Backend business Business
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DHH 7 months ago

Europe is weak and delusional (but not doomed)

The gap between Europe's self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that's threatening to swallow the continent's future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack up to strangle Europe's sovereignty. But its current political class continues to double down on everything that hasn't worked for the past forty years. Let's start with free speech, and the €120 million fine just levied against X. The fig leaf for this was painted as "deceptive design" and "transparency for researchers", but the EU already bared its real intentions when they announced this authoritarian quest back in 2023 with charges of "dissemination of illegal content" and "information manipulation" (aka censorship). Besides, even the fig leaf itself is rotten. Meta offers the very same paid verification scheme as X but, according to Musk, has chosen to play ball with the EU censorship apparatus, so no investigation for them. And the citizens of Europe clearly don't seem bothered much by any "deceptive design", as X continues to be a top-ranked download across every country on the continent. But you can see why many politicians in Europe are eager to punish X for giving Europeans a social media that doesn't cooperate with its crackdown on wrongthink. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is personally responsible for 5,000(!!) cases pursuing his subjects for insults online, which has led to house raids for utterances as banal as calling him a "filthy drunk". Germany is not an outlier either. The UK has been arresting over 10,000 people per year since 2020 for illicit tweets, Facebook posts, and silent prayers. France has thousands of yearly cases for speech-related offenses too. No wonder people on X aren't eager to volunteer their name and address when their elected officials crash out over their tweets. It's against this backdrop — thousands of yearly arrests for banal insults or crass opposition to government policies — that some Europeans still try to convince themselves they're the true champions of free speech and freedom of the press. Delulu indeed.  But this isn't just about the lack of free speech in Europe. The X fine also highlights just how weak and puny the European tech sector has become. Get this: The EU's tech-fine operation produced more income for European coffers than all the income taxes paid by its public internet tech companies in 2024!! That's primarily because Europe basically stopped creating new, large companies more than half a century ago. So as the likes of Nokia died off, there was nobody new to replace them. In the last fifty years, the number and size of new European companies worth $10 billion or more is alarmingly small: But even the old industrial titans of Europe are now struggling. Germany hasn't grown its real GDP in five years. The net-zero nonsense has seriously hurt its competitiveness, and its energy costs are now 2-3x that of America and China. This is after Germany spent a staggering ~€700 billion on green energy projects — despite Europe as a whole being just 6% of world emissions. All the while, the EU as a whole sent over twenty billion euros to Russia to pay for energy in 2024.  So cue the talk about security. European leaders are incensed by getting excluded from the discussion about ending the war in Ukraine, which is currently just happening between America and Russia directly. But they only have themselves to thank for a seat on the sidelines. Here's a breakdown of the NATO spending by country: This used to be a joke to Europeans. That America would spend so much on its military might. Since the invasion of Ukraine, there's been a lot less laughing, and now the new official NATO target for member states is to spend 5% of GDP on defense. But even this target fails to acknowledge the fact that even if European countries should meet their new obligations (and currently only Poland among the larger EU countries is even close), they'd still lag far behind America, simply because the EU is comparatively a much smaller and shrinking economic zone.  In 2025, the combined GDP for the European Union was $20 trillion. America was fifty percent larger with a GDP of $30 trillion. And the gap continues to widen, as EU growth is pegged at around 1% in 2024 compared to almost 3% for the US. Now this is usually when the euro cope begins to screech the loudest. Trying every which way to explain that actually Europe is a better place to live than America, despite having a GDP per capita that's almost half.  And on a subjective level, that might well be true! There are plenty of reasons to prefer living in Europe, but that doesn't offset the fact that America is simply a vastly richer country, and that matters when it comes to everything from commercial dominance to military power. But it's the trajectory that's most damning. In 2008, Europe was on near-parity in GDP with America! But if the 1% vs 3% growth-rate disparity continues for another decade, America will grow its economy by another third to $40 trillion, while Europe will grow just 10% to $22 trillion. Making the American economy nearly twice as large as the European one. Yikes. These should all be sobering numbers to any European. Whether it's the 10,000 yearly arrests in the UK for social media posts or the risk of an economy that's half the size of the American one in a decade.  But Europe isn't doomed to fulfill this tragic destiny. It's full of some of the most creative, capable, and ambitious people in the world (like the fifth of US startup unicorns with European founders!). But they need much better reasons to stay than what the EU (and now a separate UK) is currently giving them. Like drastically lower energy costs to for a competitive industrial base and to power the AI revolution, so best we quickly revive European nuclear ambitions. Like an immigration policy designed to rival America's cherry-picking of the world's best, rather than mass immigration from low-average-IQ regions of net-negative contributors to the economy (and society). Like dropping the censorship ambitions and bureaucratic boondoggles like the DSA. Like actually offering a European internal market for remote labor and a unified stock exchange for listings. There are plenty of paths to take that do not end in a low-growth, censorious regime that continues to export many of its best brains to America and elsewhere. So: make haste, the shadows lengthen.

business Business media Media
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