Two absurd things this fortnight and I refuse to rank them. One: Amazon went on 60 Minutes and announced delivery drones. Packages in 30 minutes by air. Everyone’s arguing whether it’s real or a Cyber Monday PR stunt (it aired the night before Cyber Monday, so you do the math). Two: someone made a cryptocurrency based on the shiba inu meme. It’s called Dogecoin. It was created as a joke and it already has a community mining it. Nothing means anything and I’m having a great time. ...

Both consoles are out, PS4 on the 15th and Xbox One on the 22nd, and both sold a million units in 24 hours. My own PS4 exists only as a January preorder receipt, but the group chat’s grey-import unit cleared customs Thursday and Killzone is, per intensive hands-on research at the one couch that matters, pretty. There are day-one patches measured in gigabytes for both consoles, and I’ve realized the industry quietly moved from “cartridge must be perfect” to “ship it, patch it” in my lifetime. We took the software deployment model and gave it to the living room. ...

Twitter went public and popped 73% on day one. The bird is worth $31 billion while losing money, and every founder at every meetup this week had a new gleam in their eye. Also in “numbers that break my brain”: rumor is Snapchat turned down three billion dollars from Facebook. Snapchat! The disappearing-photos app! Either the greatest bluff or the greatest conviction of our era. (Evan Spiegel is 23. I am also 23. He turned down $3B and I turned down a second helping of team lunch because I was scared of the burrito line.) ...

Vettel clinched his fourth consecutive F1 world championship in India this week, while Man United sit in ninth place under Moyes. One year after winning the league under Ferguson. Rebuilds can be fast when the culture changes, and it turns out so can collapses. Filing that away for reasons I can’t articulate yet. Battlefield 4 launches this week and the beta was so broken that the community has preemptively named the launch “paid early access.” Between SimCity, healthcare.gov, and this, 2013 is the Year of the Botched Launch. Someone should write a series about… oh wait. ...

healthcare.gov launched and it is exactly what the nervous IT people predicted. Six users completed enrollment on day one. Six. Out of millions. Every engineer I know is rubbernecking, not to gloat, but because it’s all our worst habits with a national audience: big-bang release, integration tested in production, no rollback plan, contractors pointing at each other. They’re flying in Silicon Valley engineers to rescue it. I’m weirdly rooting for the rescue squad. ...

GTA V made a billion dollars in three days. Fastest entertainment property ever to do it, faster than any movie. I contributed $60 and roughly eleven hours I should have spent sleeping. The heists are software architecture: three crew members, coordinated execution, one guy always fails his job (it’s me, I’m the crew member who fails). Valve spent the week making announcements: SteamOS, Steam Machines, a controller with trackpads. They’re coming for the living room because Windows 8’s app store scares them. Watching a company build an escape hatch from a platform they depend on is the Google Reader lesson at corporate scale. ...

Apple announced the iPhone 5S with a fingerprint reader in the home button. Touch ID. Half of HN says biometrics are the future, half says you can’t rotate your fingerprint like a password, and one guy is explaining how he’ll lift prints with gummy bears. I love this website. There’s also a plastic 5C in colors, which exists so the 5S looks premium. Pricing psychology: noted. EPL season is a month in and my auto-picked Fantasy Premier League team (two goalkeepers, no striker) somehow won gameweek one. I have opinions about formations now. This is how they get you. ...

Steve Ballmer announced he’s retiring from Microsoft within a year and the stock jumped 7% on the news, which has to be the most brutal performance review ever delivered by a market. Everyone’s sharing the video of him screaming “developers developers developers.” I’ve watched it maybe thirty times. Sweaty commitment to my profession. Respect. YC Summer Demo Day is this week. The batch recaps are full of mobile-first everything and a few “we’ll deliver X to your door” companies. Delivery is apparently the new social. My meetup friend applied with his boat thing and got rejected and is applying again with the same idea renamed. That’s either delusion or founder energy, and nobody can tell, which I’m learning is the point. ...

Elon Musk published a 57-page white paper for the “Hyperloop,” shooting pods through low-pressure tubes at 700mph, then said he’s too busy to build it and someone else should. The audacity of publishing homework and assigning it to civilization. Engineers at lunch spent two hours debating thermal expansion joints. We ship a CRUD app. Also: Jeff Bezos personally bought the Washington Post. Not Amazon, just Jeff, with his wallet, $250M. A newspaper. Everyone has a theory and all the theories are about data or ego or both. ...

Google shipped the Chromecast, a $35 dongle that throws video at your TV, and it sold out everywhere instantly. The interesting part to me: it’s not trying to be a computer on your TV (hi, Google TV, RIP), it’s trying to be invisible. Cheap, dumb, does one thing. There’s a design lesson in there I can feel but can’t articulate yet. Work has entered crunch mode for a big feature launch. I’ve learned that “we’ll just work weekends” is said by people who will not be working the weekends. My first taste of crunch-time cynicism. It pairs well with cold pizza and hot briyanis. ...