Ghost Racing App

Humans are competitive by nature, but most runs happen alone. All the runner has is a phone or watch they keep checking for their pace, and a number on a screen never pushes them the way someone running alongside would.

October 30, 2026

Welcome back. Happy Halloween, in today’s edition:

💡 An idea to help runners race against their own best lap times
😩 Non-English AI’s token tax, data centre heists + more
📈 Is the coding interview dead?
🧠 A $52m raise for trades software, a homepage chainsaw + more

Let’s get into it.

💡 Ghost Racing App

Squad Ghouls

[Click to view the demo]

Source: Linus Ekenstam tweeted a mockup of a runner racing a hologram, Mario Kart style, and asked whether the tech exists to pull it off. Good news! It’s closer than you’d think…

❌ Problem:

Humans are competitive by nature, but most runs happen alone. All the runner has is a phone or watch they keep checking for their pace, and a number on a screen never pushes them the way someone running alongside would.
What if that competitive streak didn’t even need a real opponent. In one study, people on exercise bikes beat their own best time when researchers disguised them as other riders. Here’s the idea.

✅ Solution:

A running app for Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses that saves every run as a ghost the runner can race next time.
Before heading out, the runner picks a past run to race, like last Sunday’s 5K or the 10K they still can’t beat. The glasses then project it onto the road ahead as a hologram moving at that exact pace.
Meta’s adding an Explore app later this year to show off the best web apps for the glasses. Get in early and you could be the first running app people find.

Someone tried this in 2020 and the hardware sank it. Leave the glasses to Meta, nail the solo ghost, then let friends race each other’s runs. I’m super pumped about this one. Someone go build it.

Full idea write up

🥇: Founders building AI in non-English languages require up to five times more tokens per prompt, so every answer costs them more. Someone fix this.

🥈: Data centre builders are watching cargo thieves drive off with their copper and servers before the kit reaches site.

🥉: Landlords who manage their own rentals say Zillow applicants send forged paystubs, fake bank statements and synthetic credit

📈: Nearly half of Brits aged 16 to 21 would rather grow up without the internet, and e-ink phones and app blockers are lining up to help.

📈: Open-source social scheduler Postiz now pulls in $330k a month in verified revenue. Cloning pricey SaaS is a real business now.

📈: GitHub just logged 7.4 billion commits in a single month, and AI agents are doing most of the typing. Code is cheap now.

💻 Saas: Two twenty-something founders and an ex-plumber COO built AI agents that book jobs for tradespeople, and they've now raised $52M. Boring pays.

📱 App: This spooky assisted face painting idea from our archive

🛍️ E-com: Google's Universal Cart now lets US shoppers fill one cart from several retailers in Search and Gemini, tracking price drops as they go.

😂 Lol: One free script lets visitors take a chainsaw to your homepage, then sweep the rubble back up. 404 pages will never be the same.