A few days back, Elon posted an AI-generated audio clip of Kamala Harris on X in which she shared a litany of crazy things, from an admission she knocked Biden out of the race for president to a celebration of the nation’s border crisis. It was, obviously, parody. Nonetheless, it triggered an avalanche of pearl-clutching press reports, and a promise from Gavin Newsom to ban deepfakes — a fascinating First Amendment discussion for another day. Will “lies” of this kind impact our next election? Unclear. But is Trump a Manchurian candidate literally working for Russia? No. Does JD Vance think women incapable of having children are bad people, a major story at the moment entirely derived from 1) a child tax credit he supported, and 2) a joke about MSNBC cat moms? No again. The deepfakes are annoying, but what is the government planning to do about Joy-Ann Reid?

The NYT just published a hagiographic interview with Melinda Gates, who says she’s “ready to take sides” after leaving the Gates Foundation with a $12.5 billion divorce payout in hand. Asked to evaluate the charitable contributions of billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey, who have largely eschewed traditional giving, she didn’t mince words. They’re “nonphilanthropists,” she said, and we shouldn’t categorize them with, say, MacKenzie Bezos or herself. Now, Melinda’s caught flack from commenters pointing out that each of those men have, in fact, invested millions of dollars in fellowships focused on solving pressing social problems. But honestly, I think she’s right. In modern parlance, a “philanthropist” is just a wealthy person who dumps money into orgs that either 1) do nothing or 2) fund the most annoying people in society. Who does that better than MacKenzie and Melinda? Let them have the title.

Over the weekend, thousands of Google users noticed the search engine’s “autocomplete” feature was failing to populate results related to the attempted assassination of President Trump — even when prompted with an incredibly leading phrase like “attempted assassination of tr.” In response, Google claimed its autocomplete has built in “protections” that prevent the display of results “associated with political violence.” Of course, the shooting wasn’t “associated with” political violence, it was actual political violence, which Americans actually need to know about? But sure, “rules.” At the end of the day, the shooting was just another thing that happened this election, crazy for sure, but isn’t all of it? Or at least, that’s how it’s being treated. And, when you think about it, that nonchalance is even crazier than the degree to which Google has allowed its core product to degrade while GPT, its first real competitor ever, rapidly takes over market share.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Few B2B SaaS companies take this as seriously as Warp, the payroll and compliance platform we use here at Pirate Wires. The Warp team has said no to all the superfluous features that their competitors are focused on, and instead opted for a dead-simple interface that allows us to get in, do the thing, and get out. Most importantly, Warp puts our payroll compliance on autopilot, allowing us to spend more time in Google Docs and less time on the phone with the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. If design truly is “how it works,” then Warp is designed exceptionally.

Get started with Warp here.

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pirate wires #124 // open war in silicon valley — a question of ethics, politics, or status? — trump’s new dance with venture capital, zenefits, and the other side of “going direct”

this week, john coogan joins the pod to talk about the battle of the billionaires that played out on 𝕏. plus, we discuss biden officially dropping out of the presidential race, democrats replacing him with his vp, kamala getting an image makeover, the crowdstrike global tech outage, and more

for years, the eu has weaponized regulations to extract billions from u.s. tech companies. with their most recent batch of laws, they’ve positioned themselves to destroy tech’s profit margins

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