* Y Combinator - vibe coders.

Are there any respectable VC tech companies out there in 2026?

For home/business users I'd agree. But in Embedded / money-handling then it's a life-saver and a really important technology.

The fact that you have to open a personal account first, in order to start a developer account seems mad to me. I have no interest at all in having a personal Facebook account.

Love the fact that your AI customer service bot takes a question and then asks for an email address for a reply.

Love your incoherently bolded statements: "The Docs app is a note taking and knowledge management software.

Love how the vast amount of emojis really clarify things and help the reader.

s/love/hate/g

You may regard them as such, but they are not in any sense frivolous. It is the law that if-x-then-y, it's not a discretionary item that one interprets. And to be clear, these are not "indirectly" making payment processors stop serving the person, it is very clearly direct and you do not, as a company, have a choice in the matter.

These guys have a 100% market share https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems at the 'extreme' end and, obviously, everyone else is trying but haven't really shown much promise.

Here's a good background article on the topic: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/...

So people don't think this is a new thing; when I worked in retail banking in the (very) early '90s it was made clear to us that any transaction in US dollars is subject to US regulation. The hypothetical scenario was that an Ethiopian arms dealer buys Russian product from a German dealer in Switzerland if they do it in USD it is the purview of the US to prosecute that crime.

My memory is hazy, but I don't think that when I was being taught it that it was a new thing.

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us", may be the apposite bon mot.

That aside, I did enjoy your article. Thank you.

Odd. Here's another BlueSky stats page, and almost every metric is in the red.

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m

Because you'd be massively adding an attack surface on to National Security elements for no benefit to National Security.

What LLMs are absolutely not useful for, in my opinion, is answering questions or writing code, or summarising things, or being factual in any sense at all.

I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.

No, that's not correct at all. The Tube Alloys project[0] was the key, codified in the Quebec Agreement[1], giving the USA access to UK nuclear weapons research.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Agreement

It is an item of some irritation to me that many people think the USA was the nation which started nuclear weapons development first. "In July 1940, Britain had offered to give the United States access to its research, and the Tizard Mission's John Cockcroft briefed American scientists on British developments. He discovered that the American project was smaller than the British, and not as advanced."

The App listens on localhost:xxyyzz when backgrounded. You open your browser and go to onesite.com and then differentsite.com the ID you are known as on those two sites is transmitted by having the JS on each site that supports Facebook functionality / ads etc for that site, and runs in your browser, make a request for an asset on your localhost with args . The app gets the args, and sends it off to HQ. That ties your signed-in account on the app to your activity on all the websites that was using this. And to be clear, FB Pixel calls are tagged with the 'event' that you're doing like "checkout" "just looking" "donate" etc. While I don't know for sure, I'd assume that the fact you're in Incognito Mode is just an aspect of the data report, I would say. Nothing would stop it.