The biggest YouTuber in the world is looking beyond videos to build a multibillion-dollar empire. 

For the last several months, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has been talking with investors about raising $200 million in a funding round that would value his holding company, Beast Industries, at more than $5 billion. An investor pitch deck I’ve obtained gives an unprecedented look at the fast-growing, money-losing business of MrBeast and his future plans. (Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw first reported that MrBeast is raising money last week.)

To justify that eye-popping valuation of at least $5 billion, investors are betting that the future of MrBeast’s business will be selling physical products, not making videos. Beast Industries and its roughly 500 employees see future revenue growth coming from a series of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Revenue from the company’s chocolate brand, Feastables, matched the core video business in 2024 and is expected to exceed it this year. 

Meanwhile, Beast Industries has never been profitable and doesn’t expect to be anytime soon. The company lost roughly $200 million over the last few years alone. Investors are planning to buy tens of millio …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them – it's time for stricter measures

A new, lightweight version of Pi-Hole is here. Just how easy is it to block advertising on your home network?…

Old-school diner food, biscuit sandwiches worth going out of your way for, and more

Breakfast is more than a meal, it’s a state of mind. You can eat eggs, bacon, biscuit sandwiches, or pancakes at any time; breakfast can be the fuel you need to jump-start your day or the landing pad after a long night that’s bled into morning. (That’s why we’re so happy the old-school diner Beth’s is open late again.) You can have breakfast at a diner or even some bakeries; you can sit down and linger over coffee refills or grab a breakfast burrito for the car. It might not be the most important meal of the day, but it’s definitely the most fun, and Seattle has more than its share of spots where you can experience a great one.

In February 2025, we tweaked this map to provide more info on specific menu items and also got rid of a couple of places that aren’t really “breakfast restaurants”: Rachel’s Bagels and Burritos (great place but it’s a bagel bakery), and Temple Pastries (a cruffin isn’t breakfast, sorry!). We also added Bang Bang Cafe in Belltown, a New Mexican coffee shop and breakfast spot that serves some unique items.

Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailing seattle@eater.com.

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Harry Cheadle eats breakfast every day. His go-to diner order for about 10 years has been corned beef hash, and he thinks that the home fries are a yardstick by which you can judge an entire restaurant. (Bad home fries can ruin the whole plate.) He will always, when given the opportunity, upgrade from regular toast to a scone or some kind of biscuit. Speaking of, he’s been grateful that more good biscuit places have been opening throughout Seattle lately — when he was growing up here, if you asked for a biscuit you had no idea what you were going to get.

Vietnamese brews topped with salted cream, old-school espresso, and innovative iced drinks

A while back we were chatting with someone in the coffee world who told us how dumb and bad this map is. You can’t really make a single list of Seattle’s best or most important coffee shops because “coffee shop” can mean so many different things. Do you want someplace to chill on a laptop? Dark roast or light roast? Do you like your cafes to be well-lit gathering spaces a la Capitol Hill’s Bonito? Or do you want to get a great Americano to go at a casual counter like Fremot’s Milstead and Co.?

At some point you have to just throw up your hands. So this isn’t a definitive list. It’s more of a way to celebrate the variety of coffee experiences you can have all over the Seattle area, and this means more than just the quality of the espresso. Places like the Station in Beacon Hill have carved out neighborhood spaces for art, mutual aid, and activism. No matter what corner of Seattle you’re in, you’re usually just a short walk away from delicious coffee in a welcoming space.

New to this map as of March 2025: Burien Press and Bellevue’s Third Culture Coffee, because good coffee doesn’t end at the Seattle city limits.

Know of a spot that should be on our radar? Send us a tip by emailing seattle@eater.com.

Harry Cheadle is Eater’s Seattle-based editor and has spent a lot of time working out of cafes. His go-to order is an Americano or a drip, though for the purposes of doing this map he’ll branch out into seasonal drinks. And he has to admit there’s a lot of high-level work being done around town with house-made syrups and clever flavor combinations. That’s to say, you shouldn’t support independent coffee shops because they’re more “moral” than multinational chains, you should support them because they are serving better and more interesting drinks.

For all the latest Seattle dining intel, subscribe to Eater Seattle’s newsletter.

The push towards digital transformation and cloud-native infrastructure is massive, yet organizations also need to maintain legacy capabilities. With this pressure comes the need to manage operations with the same rigor and automation we apply to infrastructure, coding, and security. Many organizations have embraced the ideas of everything in a pipeline and all things as code. Teams are successfully deploying applications and the underlying frameworks, but the actual operation of service delivery and assurance is often an afterthought or purely reactive.

PagerDuty fills this gap with Operations as Code.

Operations as Code extends the principles of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to operational procedures. It involves defining, managing, and executing operational tasks — such as defining escalation policies, orchestrations that link runbooks, automating diagnostics and standardizing incident workflows — using PagerDuty’s Terraform provider. This approach ensures that operational practices are standardized, version-controlled, and can be executed with minimal human intervention.

Full Service Ownership

One of the tenets PagerDuty has long subscribed to is Full Service Ownership – You build it, you run it, you own it. Operations as Code removes the dependency on centralized teams. As the need for speed increases, DevOps teams cannot be beholden to centralized ITSM or even PagerDuty admins to integrate new monitoring, enrich events, or create new runbooks.

Similarly, centralized ServiceNow teams spending expensive, specialized skills on monitoring integrations, event management, enrichment, and automation that can be managed via Operations as Code makes little economic sense. These teams, especially in large organizations, are already stretched thin and the backlog of work grows daily. Leveraging PagerDuty’s Terraform provider achieves the same goals while delivering better outcomes for everyone.

Leveraging Pipelines and Terraform for Operations

Terraform, traditionally used in IaC, is the lingua franca of DevOps. By writing Terraform configurations, teams can automate the provisioning and management of not only infrastructure, but also the components and workflows that ensure Operational Excellence. PagerDuty’s Terraform can build service definitions, configure users, teams, and roles, define escalation policies and schedules, build event correlation, orchestration, and runbooks for automated diagnostics.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) play a crucial role in Operations as Code. By integrating operational tasks into CI/CD pipelines, you can ensure that changes are tested, reviewed, and deployed in a controlled and automated manner. Instead of directly changing configurations via PagerDuty’s UI or API, pipelines allow for version control, standardization, and rollback if there are errors.

Quality gates are traditionally used for code reviews, automated testing, security checks, etc. For Operations as Code, they can ensure consistency of service standards, such as minimum 3 tier escalation policy and maximum times between escalations, minimum requirements for runbooks, minimum enrichment via orchestrations, etc. 

This creates a great foundation to increase operational maturity. It’s easy to start with basic templates and rules such as “never ship an app without a runbook”. You can leverage a quality gate to check that there is always a Terraform with a link to a Confluence document or knowledge base article. 

You can then grow over time, identifying “Winners and Sinners” applications to baseline current operational maturity. Templates can be standardized and reused by teams that may not be as mature. One customer using this model found that services that met at least 5 of their 7 operational standards had about 30% better MTTR than those that didn’t. This will eventually lead them to defining minimal operating standards and breaking builds for those teams and services that don’t meet expectations.

Benefits of Operations as Code

Organizations that deploy Operations as Code will see several benefits, many with immediate return on investment (ROI). 

Toil reduction is critical. Too much time is spent in “ClickOps”, and by shifting from manual configurations, more time and resources are freed up for customer-impacting work. You will also reduce operational risk by ensuring traceability of changes to configurations, version control, and reusable templates. Similarly, you can operationalize governance and compliance by leveraging parsers, quality gates, and approved templates, while leadership can define minimum acceptable standards and expected outcomes.

Developer experience is improved by reducing ramp time of new team members, reducing toil in keeping the lights on and shift break-fix work to junior team members, so senior staff can focus on reducing tech debt (or mining tech wealth, if you’re optimistic) to deliver great customer experiences.

Operational Excellence is improved by reducing the frequency, severity, and duration of outages by ensuring repeatable outcomes and reduced errors. You can shift away from tribal knowledge by giving senior people a simplified, repeatable method to record their innate knowledge, creating context for reuse by junior staff. 

Getting Started

Talk to your PagerDuty contact on how to get started.

We’ll start with success metrics and then identify the areas where we can get a fast start with automation and templates. Where could you immediately reduce risk and what outcomes could you influence with standardizing operations? 

We’ll look at the ability to start a Center of Excellence with the right enthusiasts and experts who can help with Q&A, become keepers of the templates, and help continuously improve automation and orchestration. 

We’ll start with simple but impactful areas, and then focus on continuous improvement where we regularly review and improve your processes based on feedback and metrics.

What’s Next?

Operations as Code offers the promise of consistency, efficiency, and reliability by standardizing how you build operational tasks. By leveraging PagerDuty’s Terraform provider with your  CI/CD pipelines, you can lead your teams in adopting this transformative approach. While challenges exist, they are readily surmountable with careful planning, execution, and continuous improvement especially if you’ve engaged your PagerDuty team. 

This simplified approach to Operations as Code can be a cornerstone of Operational Excellence allowing your teams to move from a world of toil and break-fix to automation-driven full service ownership that will better serve your teams, and most importantly, your customers.

To get hands on with this, sign up for a free trial today. 

The post Operations as Code: Operational Excellence with PagerDuty appeared first on PagerDuty.

“Second” or “B-side city” refers to a destination often less well-known than its bigger counterpart in the same region or country. However, in my travels, I have enjoyed visiting quite a few that deserve all the love and attention. Here is my list of favorite, attention-worthy destinations full of character and charm and with so much to explore!

Traverse City, Michigan

A pocket-sized city with a vibrant downtown located on a Great Lake. TC enjoys easy access to hundreds of wineries, farms, cheesemakers, and a national lakeshore. I was struck by feeling like a newbie discovering a place for the first time yet welcomed like I had lived there my entire life. 

Check out our Traverse City episode for more!

Brooklyn, New York

Okay, technically Brooklyn is a borough, but if it weren’t it would be the 4^th largest city in the United States. Manhattan gets all the travel love and is nowhere near as cool as Brooklyn is. I am totally biased.    

Check out our Brooklyn, NY episode for more!

Huntsville, Alabama

This Southern hidden gem has a lot of surprises. It’s where the most creative people mix with scientists and the mash-up is travel perfection. I was in Huntsville for my very first season of Places to Love, and 84 episodes later, it remains a favorite. 

Check out our Huntsville, AL episode for more!

Xi’an, China

Xi’an was the capital of China for 13 dynasties and the terminus of the Silk Road. The Terra Cotta Warriors are unlike anything you will see in your life and at night, the historic buildings put on a light show that is totally magical. 

Check out our Xi’an, China episode for more!

Lafayette, Louisiana

Home to Cajun country as well as Zydeco music, Lafayette is a low key but celebratory place where the local saying is “I’ve never met a stranger” and everyone’s a friend!

Check out our Lafayette, LA episode for more!

Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore has shaped American colonial history from the beginning, yet it has an unconventional quirkiness that ensures you have a great time. Follow in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass and enjoy a museum known for outsider art.  Do whatever it takes to meet a real Hon. 

Check out our Baltimore, ML episode for more!

Corning, New York

Home to the Main Street of our dreams, you would be forgiven to think of Corning as “cute”.  And yet its famous 175-year-old glass manufacturer has been the center of so many life-altering innovations. Luckily, it has a state-of-the-art museum where its story can be told. Corning is also a part of the glorious Finger Lakes Region, so you’ve got natural beauty and wine. 

Check out our Southern Finger Lakes episode for more!

Belfast, Ireland

A cultural center of Europe, from the best live music venues to its street art and murals against a backdrop of preserved Victorian architecture. Drive up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway for an Irish trip you’ll never forget. 

Check out our Belfast, Northern Ireland episode for more!

Madison, Wisconsin

A city consistently voted as one of the best places to live is ALWAYS a good sign. Set on two lakes, its overall vibe is part outdoorsy, part food and beverage obsessed. We’re talking about a Supper Club to act out your Mad Men dreams, a rare organic brewery, and don’t get me started on the cheese scene.

Check out our Madison, WI episode for more!

Portsmouth New Hampshire

A seaside city founded in the 1600s has become a beacon of small shops, restaurants, and the best music venues in New England. It’s got a ton of charm and gravitas. It’s packed in the summer but equally as enjoyable in the off season. 

Check out our New Hampshire Seacoast episode for more!

Vienna, Austria

The size of this city doesn’t scream “B side”, yet it’s often overlooked over other major European capitals like Paris, London, and Rome. It’s one of the greenest cities in Europe with a lot to offer. Enjoy Grand Palace tours and world-class museums, then swim in the Danube.  

Check out our Vienna, Austria episode for more!

The post Second Cities Worthy of All The Attention appeared first on Samantha Brown's Places to Love.