I wfh and have flexibility so I often go out to a cafe to work from there so that I’m not just holed up at home all day. I have my regular places but have been curious to try new ones and wanted to see what other people have found.

My usuals:

- Philz downtown: Reliable internet, can usually find seating. Have to pay for parking unless you park a couple blocks away in the neighborhood.

- Blue bottle downtown: Used to go here but stopped a while back because internet was unreliable. Seats less comfortable and less conducive to long term sessions. It’s brother which is nice but actually makes it a bit harder for screen work compared to Philz.

- Foreigner: Tried it once. Nice to get lunch. They also do cafe. Nice charming atmosphere. Never been here in the morning. Always find it a bit unsure to just get coffee and setup shop at a food restaurant.

- Library: Free parking, lots of seats, internet works. A little too quiet for me. I like a little hustle and bustle.

- Blue Bottle Delaware: Small, can be difficult to find seating. Convenient if you live nearby I suppose.

- Philz hillsdale: Only been once. Seems ok and gets the mall crowd.

- Hillsdale mall food court: Got lunch and tried to work. Internet seemed unreliable.

Ive been curious about the other cafes in San Mateo downtown.

I’m generally a free-market kind of guy. I’ve worked in tech and I’ve done pretty well all things considered. I’ve invested in public tech stocks for almost all of my professional life and have also done well.

I know the trend that companies have been staying private longer and I understand that VCs take all the risk. I know there are secondary shares that are sometimes available but honestly for any company that’s really sought after they are hard to come by.

But here’s the thing. By staying private for so long, the VCs have really captured all this massive upside. The public comes in late.

Now maybe this isn’t such a big deal — the rich get richer. They take the risk. I heard an interview today about how Ron Baron loaded up on SpaceX because he had access to secondary shares.

The thing is that if your retail investor isn’t sharing in this kind of upside — if they don’t feel like they too can benefit in investing in American tech — then that really is going to sour public support.

Take a look at historical tech companies. The Apples and the Microsoft. Even Tesla. You have long time investors who’ve not just invested their money but also their belief in these companies. Your average American shares in the upside of American capitalism. That’s generally been true of tech in the 90s, 2000s and even 2010s.

I’m not a “f the billionaires” kind of guy and I respect company builders. And I’ve generally respected investors like Andreessen and Brad Gerstner. But the looming IPOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and heck even SpaceX are beginning to feel sick to me.

Am I jealous? 100%.

But I also think it’s true that this creates even more popular tension between average Americans and those on the cutting edge of tech.

The expectation is that these IPOs are minting so many new wealthy people in SF that housing prices are going to skyrocket from already high prices. This isn’t the 1% or even the 0.1%. This is the 0.001%.

Maybe I’m short sighted here. Maybe these companies can still 3 or 4x from $1T which would be absolutely insane.

A video about this that triggered me: https://x.com/matthewberman/status/2054300901708562482

Google's AI search results will now turn to Reddit for expert advice

https://www.engadget.com/2166393/google-ai-search-results-will-now-turn-to-reddit-for-expert-advice/

>Google is updating AI Overviews and AI Mode, the AI-generated portions of its search engine, to highlight sources in new ways, and interestingly, more prominently feature first-hand accounts from social media, expert blogs and forums like Reddit.

>Via a new section that can appear in AI responses, Google will display "a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media and other firsthand sources." In the sample screenshot the company provided, the section was called "Expert Advice" and included quotes from forums, WordPress blogs and Reddit. These were arranged above links to their respective sources. Google plans to add more context to these links, too, showing "a creator's name, handle or community name," so you can judge what you might want to click through and read from a glance.

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I posted a related thread last week where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman was quoted as saying that Reddit is increasingly powering intelligence for AIs. Here's a concrete implementation of that -- it'll start appearing in Google's AI search results.

The example they have on their website is fairly innocuous. It's about DSLR cameras. But given Reddit's heavy liberal bias, you can easily see how this can turn into a massive influence play on society. Again, last time I compared it to Wikipedia. When people trust Google as an authority on truth, the line between opinion and truth is going to be increasingly blurred.

Here's a more concrete example: Let's say Google's AI is trained on Reddit's product forums, as shown here. But let's say someone searches for Teslas.

One can easily imagine that a good percentage, if not a majority, of Tesla coverage post-DOGE is highly negative because of Elon. Now someone Googling Teslas performance, reliability, or brand may start getting negative perspectives which are branded as "Expert Advice."

The same goes for any other product or service that's back by a conservative. I see regular threads where I live (SF Bay Area) where once a local business is known to be owned by a conservative, people encourage each other to boycott it, leave bad reviews, and get a hoard of negative comments on Reddit.

What happens when someone from out of town is Googling that business or restaurant and "Expert Advice" returns the vitriol from people?

Again, this is concerning. AI and search engines are looking for more content to serve and as Reddit grows more, so does its influence. It's a subtle influence that most people won't understand is happening as it happens behind the scenes. It's the analogous downvote but now goes beyonds Reddit's borders to Google's AI.

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https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/explore-web-generative-ai-search/

https://preview.redd.it/ftu81bi4flzg1.png?width=1908&format=png&auto=webp&s=85dd74a6d35887a16ca9c195b12b088bcc44ef71

Pre-amble: I'm not here to take sides. I'm not Team Claude or Team GPT. I'm just looking for the best tools at the moment to get a job done. I'm just looking for honest discussion.

I go back and forth between Claude, Codex and Gemini based on where I have tokens left to use. With Claude, I have the smallest paid account so I'm generally careful about model/effort and what I do there. I have a lot more access to Codex and have been using 5.5 quite a bit. I also have paid access to Gemini and don't run into limits there.

I'm at a point in a personal project where I'm doing a ton of design work. GPT Image 2 has been pretty good at rendering mockups (I would say great except image generation sometimes doesn't happen, perhaps because I'm getting throttled or load).

While translating the work from a rendered image to code, my sense is that Claude still does a better job at this.

I've come across a couple un-obvious front-end bugs that Codex couldn't seem to fix that Claude ended up fixing, sometimes easily, sometimes taking a bit longer.

I find myself trusting Claude more at this task. Codex is still doing pretty good and I'm using it to do a ton of work. But for the hardest problems and the architectural feedback, Claude seems to have an edge.

Is it just me? Should I be doing something differently? I would prefer if GPT was better as I have more tokens there.

I've been working on a side/passion project to learn how to get better at agentic coding. I had a kernel of an idea that didn't seem like much. As I built more features, it started to feel real and like something that could be interesting.

I didn't pay much attention to the UI as I was just exploring ideas through functionality. I've added design for a previous, smaller project fairly easily. But my current project is more complicated.

I came in with some ideas on what I wanted to do in regards to visual design. I really just went down a path I had to pull back from. While I have some experience with front-end development, it's been a LONG time. I started with Google's stitch. I played with Figma. I tried Claude Design. These services gave me things but it they weren't quite right.

• Stitch just seems to over rely on some UI design patterns that it likes. Maybe I haven't prompted it well enough yet.
• Figma just runs out of tokens. I considered paying.
• Claude Design really was impressive and quite good -- at first. But, again, I just ran out of tokens before I could really explore.

I realized I was leading my LLMs in the wrong direction. After spending a little time looking at similar apps in the space, I got a sense of where apps in my space are today and reset.

I started grinding out my DESIGN.md and had some slow but sure success.

Separately, I saw a guy say that he used Image 2 to generate mockups for apps. I tried it tonight and I was quite impressed.

I made sure to give it a lot of context. I gave it a screenshot of my app. I described what my app was for. I described the information in the app.

I took some screenshots of apps in a similar category that had good design. I uploaded them as screenshots and put in the prompt that these were design influences.

I told ChatGPT to be a visual designer, to use best practices, to explain it's rationale and to give me a few variations and it's recommendation.

I created a project so I could put these files in there and use it generate mockups for other areas of the app.

So far, so good.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/30/reddits-ceo-fuel-artificial-intelligence.html

• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the platform’s vast library of human conversations makes it a critical input for AI, calling it “the fuel” behind the technology.

>“There’s no artificial intelligence without actual intelligence,” he said on “Mad Money.” “The knowledge has to come from somewhere, and Reddit is one of the primary sources for that sort of information that AI’s crave, but also that people crave.”

>The comments come after Reddit delivered a standout quarter on Thursday evening, sending shares about 9% higher in extended trading. Revenue jumped 69% year over year to $663 million, most of which comes from advertising**,** and daily active users climbed 17% to 126.8 million. Gross margins exceeded 90%, a level that stands out even among top-performing tech companies.

>“We’re a lightweight company,” he said. “We’re not building data centers … we’re building a consumer product for people.”

>At the same time, Reddit’s vast archive of user-generated conversations is becoming increasingly valuable to the biggest players in AI. Huffman pointed to partnerships with Google and OpenAI as evidence of that demand.

>“People want what Reddit has,” he said, emphasizing how AI systems rely heavily on authentic, real-world data. “What we’ve seen over the last couple of years with the rise of AI is that the whole market now is learning that Reddit is the fuel for it.”

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It's long been known and public that LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini use Reddit data pretty extensively. As someone who works in tech, and has a background at companies in the tech / media space, I find this incredibly disturbing.

To state the obvious, Reddit clearly has an ideological bent. Similar to Wikipedia, which also had a conspiracy of being run by leftist moderators, there is a coordinated effort to do the some on Reddit.

But, putting that aside, how is Reddit being seen as authoritative -- let alone "fueling intelligence."

--- Side story ---
Here's an example I literally just came across right now. I got a letter in the mail saying my data was stolen in a data breach. It offers free credit reporting services at a random looking website. I get a little suspicious because it says I'll need to provide PII like my SSN. (The letter is confusing because it also brings up the well-known credit bureaus.)

Anyway, I ask Gemini (& Google.com which calls Gemini) if this is a phishing scam. It says it's not. It makes all these claims. I click on "Sources" and all the sources are from Reddit. I click through Reddit where a poster is making claims. I click through to see if the user has links or screenshots at least to backup claims. Nothing.

In fact, the ironic thing is that another thread that's linked asks the same thing. Is this a scam? Nearly all the comments claim the letter itself is a phishing scam.

https://preview.redd.it/dtva91qgqtyg1.png?width=2860&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba9def124ec882c0e0a83806cf1696d5287fb310

--- / Side Story ---

I understand that AI LLMs need data and Reddit generates a huge amount of human language content that can't help. But I find it incredibly concerning that it's not just being used to train the models on speech -- it's being cited as fact.

For those in tech, this was not the "Fast" mode. This is the "Thinking" mode. I would expect sloppy answers and hallucinations with Fast but not with Thinking.

This is an area people should start paying attention too. Governments have always tried to control media to influence their message. But in the last decade, we've seen this battle play out online with social networks. LLMs are the next front for where the "truth" gets determined. Even today, Wikipedia is often cited as an authoritative source.