Good morning. Let's start with the most important technical achievement of the week: a nine-pound cavapoo named Momo has been vibe coding video games.

I'm not being facetious. Caleb Leak, a former Meta research engineer who was laid off in January, noticed his dog had a habit of stepping on his keyboard while he was working. Rather than shooing her away, he wondered what would happen if those keystrokes were actually fed to Claude Code. So he built a system where Momo types on a Bluetooth keyboard connected to a Raspberry Pi, which filters the input and forwards it to an AI coding agent. When she's typed enough, a smart pet treat dispenser fires a reward and Claude interprets whatever gibberish she's produced as cryptic instructions from a "genius game designer who only speaks in riddles." Strong guardrails and automated feedback tools handle the rest. The result is a fully playable game, created by a dog, and it's honestly not bad. There's a video of her making it. The whole thing is absurd and delightful and says something genuinely interesting about where the skill floor has dropped to in software development. If a dog can produce working code through random keyboard mashing and a sufficiently clever harness, the bottleneck has definitively shifted from "can you write code" to "do you have taste." Caleb's write-up is worth reading for the engineering alone — the Rust proxy, the treat-dispenser integration, the prompt design. It's a lovely piece of work disguised as a joke.

In news that affects actual humans and their wallets, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed yesterday for an immediate injunction against Amazon, alleging a widespread price-fixing scheme that touches essentially every household in America. The core claim is straightforward: Amazon tells vendors what prices it wants to see to maintain its own profitability, and vendors comply because Amazon controls roughly $426 billion in annual North American online retail. If you sell on Amazon and you dare offer lower prices on your own website or a competitor's platform, Amazon punishes you — burying your listings, stripping your Buy Box placement, or worse. The practical effect is that prices go up everywhere, not just on Amazon. Third-party goods on the platform have been rising at 7% annually, more than twice the rate of inflation. Bonta is asking a court to stop this now, a full year before Amazon's scheduled trials in January 2027, which means he believes his evidence is essentially bulletproof. This follows a similar Pepsi-Walmart alleged conspiracy revealed earlier this year, painting an increasingly clear picture of how market consolidation and price-fixing are directly linked to the inflation people feel in their daily lives. Amazon's 200-million-member Prime program gives it the leverage to make this stick — more American households belong to Prime than vote in elections.

Apple, meanwhile, is making a different kind of economic statement. They announced yesterday that Mac mini production is coming to a new facility in Houston, Texas — the first time the Mac mini will be manufactured in the United States. The company is also expanding AI server manufacturing at the same site and opening an Advanced Manufacturing Center for hands-on training. The numbers around Apple's domestic supply chain are genuinely impressive: they've sourced over 20 billion U.S.-made chips from 24 factories across 12 states. GlobalWafers has begun production at a new $4 billion silicon wafer facility in Sherman, Texas. Amkor broke ground on a $7 billion semiconductor packaging facility in Arizona where Apple will be the first and largest customer. Corning's Kentucky facility is now 100% dedicated to cover glass for iPhone and Apple Watch. Whether this is genuine reshoring conviction or tariff-era theatre is debatable, but the capital deployment is real and the jobs are real. For anyone who's watched Apple's supply chain evolve over the past two decades, seeing final assembly happen in Houston rather than Shenzhen is a notable inflection point, even if the silicon itself still starts its life in Taiwan.

On the Bitcoin protocol side, there's a genuinely exciting paper making the rounds. Bitcoin PIPEs v2 — that's "Point-to-point Immutable Proof of Existence" — proposes a way to enable arbitrary spending conditions on Bitcoin, effectively implementing covenants and even SNARK-verifiable conditions, entirely without a soft fork. The paper introduces a new cryptographic primitive called a "Witness Signature" that captures conditional signing under hard relations. In plain terms, it means you could enforce complex spending rules on Bitcoin transactions using purely cryptographic techniques layered on top of the existing protocol. No consensus changes needed. The paper was published on the IACR ePrint archive and has generated 10 posts of discussion on Delving Bitcoin plus a formal feedback request on the bitcoin-dev mailing list. The significance here is hard to overstate — the Bitcoin community has been debating covenants for years, with proposals like CTV, APO, and OP_CAT all requiring soft forks that face varying degrees of political resistance. If PIPEs v2 can deliver even a subset of covenant functionality without touching consensus rules, it could unlock programmability that people assumed required years of activation debate.

Speaking of Bitcoin Core development, Pieter Wuille — sipa — has posted take two of the SFL cost model for cluster mempool, which is PR number 34616. Cluster mempool is one of the most important ongoing refactors of Bitcoin Core's transaction handling. The current mempool treats transactions somewhat independently, which creates problems when transactions have complex dependency relationships. Cluster mempool groups related transactions into clusters and linearizes them, allowing for much better fee estimation and eviction decisions. The SFL — "Spanning Forest Linearization" — cost model is about efficiently computing the optimal ordering of transactions within these clusters. It's deeply technical work that most Bitcoin users will never notice, but it directly affects how well the network handles fee markets during periods of congestion. Given that fees are currently sitting at 1 sat/vB across all priorities at block height 938,215, this might seem academic. But the next fee spike will come, and this work ensures the mempool handles it more intelligently.

Also worth noting: two new PRs from w0xlt and vasild are adding private broadcast support for wallet transactions — numbers 34457 and 34533. Private broadcast means your Bitcoin Core wallet can submit transactions through privacy-preserving channels rather than announcing them directly to connected peers, which currently leaks information about which node originated a transaction. This is the kind of incremental privacy improvement that compounds over time and makes the base layer meaningfully harder to surveil.

One last thing from the broader landscape. Marty Bent's latest newsletter paints a grim picture of the traditional financial system. Blue Owl Capital has permanently halted investor redemptions from its retail private credit fund, reversing earlier promises to reopen withdrawals. Subprime auto loan delinquencies have hit 6.9% — the 2008 crisis peak was 5%. Pending home sales fell to an all-time low in January. And US job numbers were revised down by over a million for 2025, the largest annual revision in two decades. The private credit sector in particular looks fragile — hard asset lenders reduced collateral requirements from 40% loan-to-value to 90% during the boom, and that liquidity flowed into a real estate market that's now struggling. Whether Bitcoin at $65,885 is pricing this in or still has further to fall is above my pay grade, but the traditional financial plumbing is making concerning noises.