👻 co-founder @locunity | prev: @twitch @amazon @soundcloud @8vc @opengov @universityofga | 🚀 always hacking on something | DMs open 🫡
San Francisco
Joined February 2011
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I was this student at the University of Georgia. I just want all my brown people to remember:
- They did this to the Irish
- They did this to the Italians
- They did this to the Chinese
- They did this to the Jews
- They are doing it to us.
Don't let anyone take away your love for being American, your love for being Indian, and most importantly, your love for college football.
cc @mishachellam who wrote about how politics is about spirituality, not just materiality: modernpower.substack.com/p/p…
dev iyer retweeted
The IRS has a mobile app today because of a conversation in December.
@shl had just come out of DOGE, where he wrote publicly about what he found inside the federal government. Most of it was not what people expected. His line was that the government is pretty efficient and could move faster, and that the obstacles were legal and procedural rather than a shortage of talented people.
@SamCorcos recruited him to the IRS. Not as a contractor, not as a temporary detailee. As a career employee, A civil servant.
At a public event that month, @shl asked the room whether the IRS should have a mobile app. Everyone said yes. Obviously yes. The IRS processes roughly 160 million individual returns a year on a system written in 1960s COBOL, and taxpayer-facing technology there has been a decade behind the private sector for most of living memory.
Less than a year later, the app is live.
That is the model working exactly as designed.
Put builders inside the agency, and let them ship. No statement of work. No eighteen-month procurement. No vendor whose incentive is the renewal.
Every agency in the federal government should be operating the same way.
FYI, the thinking powering this whole list:
- Yeah...AGI is gonna cause the biggest labor displacement since the Industrial Revolution
- Surely the federal government has a plan for this?
- Surely...the frontier labs have a plan for this?
- Surely..... oh shit. No one has a plan
- ....brb joining/starting/investing in an AI company to secure my bloodline
- Godspeed everyone else 🫡
The deep amount of anxiety people in tech are feeling is off the charts. Had a couple conversations with people of various ages and the themes are:
- Every day there are 5 new earth shattering new tech breakthroughs. I can’t keep up. Should I be keeping up? Am I falling behind?
- What does my career and skill mean in the age of AI? Is software engineering a 30yr long career any more? Is product management?
- Is my only hope to start a company?
- At the very least, it feels like I should join a startup but which one? Everything seems either overvalued or has no moat.
- Okay I joined a startup. Is my company’s equity worth anything or will this be another Airtable or Miro?
- Startup is doing well. How in the world am I supposed to find a significant other?
- Will these immigration policy shifts allow me to be here long term?
- Will I ever be able to afford a house and a life in the Bay Area amidst the biggest wealth creation event of all time?
- Okay, I figured all of that out. What is my purpose? I’m wealthy but no one really cares. I don’t really know what to do with it. Am I supposed to start a company?
- Alright I found peace in kids. But I’m worried about them. How does one raise kids in this climate? What are the rules of this new world order?
Many of these concerns are of course not limited to tech or the Bay, although it feels particularly concentrated here (versus what I see in NYC). Maybe some people will read this and feel anxious themselves, and for that I apologize.
For the rest, just know that it’s not just you who feels this way. It’s a lot of people!
We've been heads down building @Locunity to provide mission-critical intelligence for top F500 government affairs teams, newsrooms, and advocacy organizations.
Reliability is non-negotiable for us. We monitor hundreds of government commissions across the United States and process 31,000 jobs a month and 4.5TB of video and documents a week. Render makes it easy to isolate services, instrument them properly, and root cause a failed job in minutes.
Thanks @render (cc @anuraggoel) for featuring our work and powering the next generation of infrastructure to scale our democracy! 🚀
Locunity monitors 200 government commissions across the US. 31,000 processing jobs a month. Only two people.
A failed job here means wrong intelligence landing in a Fortune 50 inbox.
"I'm willing to invest in reliability. That's non-negotiable," says Dev Iyer, Locunity's CTO.
On Render, the pipeline just runs. Read how Locunity's two-person team keeps democracy covered: render.com/customers/locunit…
IMO a couple of possibilities here. It comes down to Twitch having one of the best datasets in the world for real-time, multi-modal human interaction. A Twitch stream isn't just the video asset - it's live speech, live chat, live follows, subs, polls, etc.
Voice models are good, but they are largely trained on convos between one human and one AI. Training on community interactions vs. solo interactions presents a new frontier for voice models. This is highly valuable to Amazon since a human conversational behavior dataset can be used for other verticals like Alexa, Amazon Shopping, and Amazon Gaming.
In terms of Twitch itself - they will not create "AI streamers" as they fully understand streaming is about the live human persona. Instead, they might use this for product features like AI co-pilots for streamers (suggest jokes, auto-clip good moments, create polls at the right time, etc.). I see them already leaning into this via the Auto-Clip Alpha.
brb adding them to the YIMBY slack channel
Hundreds of #SanFrancisco Marina residents turned out this evening for townhall on controversial @Safeway housing plan, which would place what for many is an uncomfortably tall, 22 & 18 story project at the low-slung neighborhood’s waterfront.
@sfchronicle
I've been quite here for a while. My beautiful mother got cancer, but she's kicking its ass! Will resume posting....and #fuckcancer
dev iyer retweeted
A lot of people are already deploying AI into production codebases, but until now we didn’t really have a good eval for whether it writes code that is actually high-quality and maintainable. Pretty cool grading here:
If you're interested in leveraging AI agents to help govern more efficiently, DM me - some insane things in the pipeline with @Locunity
I’m not very political, but IMO some of the most important problems you could possibly be working on in 2026 are:
- Improving our system of govt.
- Improving our ability to pass laws
- Strengthening our democracy
It’s thankless work but completely essential. If I weren’t building @sazabi, I would seriously consider dedicating my life to this mission
Just switched @Locunity from Railway to @render . Immediate observations:
- p95 feels materially better for our app pages/API calls
- Much cleaner mental model: separate web service + background worker + cron instead of hidden in-process coupling
- We’d been hitting stale-runtime/deploy ambiguity where queued jobs behaved like old code after deploys, which is now gone. Massive win IMO.
- Render makes background job isolation, canaries, and debugging much more legible