And https://app.precip.ai

I reference this often! Thanks for writing it.

This is exactly what Precip does. Other apps just show the past forecast which can often be wrong. The Precip app uses radar to measure what actually happened so you'll know if that trail is muddy or not. https://precip.ai

We took a lot of inspiration from darksky and this post when designing the forecast tab in the Precip (YC W24) app. The app started out just as historical weather, but we recently added forecasts if you want to check it out. https://precip.ai

Yes.

Great move by Plaid. Alain, Chris, John and the team at Cognito saw the new internet economy needing easy to implement ID verification and KYC compliance way before others and quietly built the best solution on the market. While others touted their fundraising, Cognito just kept building and growing revenue like crazy. Happy to see their hard work paying off and excited for Plaid to extend its capabilities in this area.

Any reason the acquisition was only for $250M?

There are many others in the space that have been able to have higher valuations, more press, and bigger contracts in a shorter amount of time

I do wonder if this was even a top 10 choice for Plaid.

Me too! Could you say more about what kinds of experiments you've been doing and how you are measuring the results? I've been using the Haney Soil Test along with Phospholipid Fatty Acid Analysis (PLFA) to understand how my management practices have been impacting overall soil health and microbe communities. I've been thinking about how I wish I could collaborate more with others on research to help build a dataset that can be used to quantify the effects of regenerative farming.

I haven't done anything quite that sophisticated! I have only "anecdata" to contribute.

We are basically on sand dunes here and our "soil" is what I call "dirty sand". I had a bunch of wood chips with some chicken manure and feathers in it and I spread that about six inches deep over a bare patch of sand. I added potatoes and kept it moist. Now, a year and a half later, there's a layer of rich living soil between the sand and the wood chips. There are lots of worms and other critters living in there, and I have plants growing well. It's January and I've got broccoli, blooming nasturtiums, fava beans, and potatoes of course, plus a lot of other things. Mushrooms appear regularly too. I don't add any fertilizer or anything.

Measuring humus is a great start to measuring soil quality. Simply looking at the 'black' left on ones hands after feeling the soil is a great start. It is an established science (soil management), just not applied in commercial farming very often.

https://talk.newagtalk.com is where farmers hang out on the web.

I'm curious how they even got this update to their app through the review process. Apple never would have allowed it per the app store rules. I suppose they are using some dynamic tech to push updates out to a build that already cleared the review process?

Almost certainly, yeah. That's also a big violation that should see their account being disabled.

If Apple was treating all developers the same, that is.

Many banks were waiting to process the loans until the guidance settled down. Even the application form changed after the program officially launched. Guidance from the Treasury Department on how to apply and underwrite was a moving target for several days into the program launching.

Our bank said they were still doing diligence on all applications upfront before submitting the loans to the SBA even though the bank isn't actually liable for anything. This was causing about a 2 day lag time from starting to process the loan application to submitting it to the SBA. In our case that meant not getting the loan submitted before the funding ran out.