From the department of I did not see that coming: Jarred Sumner has announced that Anthropic is acquiring Bun. The expected path was cloud hosting. But then AI started getting good, Jarred got hooked on Claude Code — which is itself built on Bun now — and a few weeks ago he went on a four-hour walk with Boris from the Claude Code team to talk about joining forces. It’s a bit crazy, but it might just work.

For the last twelve years, Vancouver has been an amazing base for the main TED conference. The city is a generous host and I always enjoy my time there. But if TED has a home anywhere, it’s in California where it started in Monterey and then spent many years in Long Beach. Now, TED is going home to California, this time to San Diego. I’m really looking forward to it.

Congratulations to all my colleagues at Shopify who helped power another record setting Black Friday. Shopify processed $6.2 billion of sales, up 25% from last year, and peaked at 489 million requests per minute on the edge. That’s some serious scale, but more importantly it represents the collective economic activity of millions of merchants, many of them small businesses.

What if instead of sending prompts to an almost unimaginable matrix of floating point numbers to disappear, we sent them to a thermal printer in a countryside workshop and answered each one by hand? Pablo Declan’s charming video brings that idea to life, a unique take on the entire act of prompting.

Henry Oliver writes that the evolution of readable English wasn’t so much about writing shorter sentences as it was the emergence of logical syntax. A focus on writing in a plain style. This started in the 16th and 17th centuries with the emergence of writing that prioritized clarity over ornamentation. Modern prose feels different largely because we now write more like we speak, not because sentences are shorter.

After reinventing how creative work gets funded with Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler is back. This time, his aim is to fix the messy, ill-fitting business structures creators rely on. He proposes an “Artist Corporation” business structure designed for the realities of modern creative career. I’m intrigued.

Matthew Prince’s blog post about Cloudflare’s outage is a textbook example of how internet companies should communicate about an incident. It’s clear, candid, and isn’t afraid to dig into what went wrong. This level of transparency doesn’t just satisfy technical readers, it turns the incident into something that we can all learn from.

Leica’s new Q3 Monochrom does away with color to deliver richer light sensitivity, sharper detail, and a signature black-and-white look that conversions from color photographs can’t match. The tradeoff is in autofocus performance which doesn’t have the phase-detection abilities of the regular Q3. It’s a specialized tool for a particular kind of photographer.

Michael Lopp lists seven kinds of decisions, from vanilla to inspired to delegated. The one that hit hardest is what he calls “minimum viable” decisions — constructed not to be good, but to offend the fewest people. “This is not leadership—it's fear.” I've seen too many of these. They crumble quickly, get replaced by more of the same, and the organization forgets its actual purpose.

Derek Thompson wrote about one of biology’s biggest mysteries: why does sleep exist? A study reported in the Economist offers evidence that sleep originated because of volcanoes, oxygen, and the need to repair damage from electron imbalances in mitochondria. Derek's poetic conclusion: “Rest restores our ability to burn the planet's oxygen for energy. Why do we sleep? Because the earth once learned to breathe.”