one of the things that made Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, was how in command he was of the facts - yes, even those sprinkled with reality distortion dust! - on stage.
One of the distinctive things about YC as compared to later stage investors is that you have to be prepared to give advice about practically everything.
Writing is thinking, and we are interested in your own thoughts and observations, not a sharp, one-sentence observation turned into three paragraphs of blob text by an LLM.
I do think I want to push back on the cyber on the brain hypothesis that you raised a couple of times. We didn't find like particular evidence for the cyber nature of the task making all the hacking and crimes that they did more likely versus the impossible nature of the task.
So, I do think that if it happens to be like on the very fast and chaotic end, that would be a relative benefit to this rogue swarm compared to humans. But it's not obvious that it gets caught if it takes twice as long versus half as long.
when you're working with a lot of data, the the difference can be massive if you structure it in one way versus structuring another way, right? Again, architectural decisions that have nothing to do with hotspots, they're how all the data is laid out and what the access pattern is, right?
We were talking about reward versus effort. And essentially that's a very important way I think that we make a decision. Much of that could be subconscious.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
And once you look at the brain systems, they're distinct brain systems in this instance for fear to something out there in the world versus panic of something happening inside you like having a heart attack or not getting enough air.
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
So, you might be surprised to hear that most state-of-the-art foundation models for robotics have no memory or no context. They're just operating on the current sensor observations, the current camera readings, uh, and predicting actions based off of that.
In other words, the absence of calcium is not the same as the absence of disease—it may simply mean the disease hasn’t reached the stage CAC is designed to detect.
So, it's hard to tell how much of like the loss of the past few years was AI versus the end of like zero interest rate policy and like the post-COVID crash. And I think it's more the latter, but like again, LLMs are still getting better.
But I think it is more useful for most developers to have an exposure to like what math has in the various fields versus just going all in every single field when they see them, right? You've got to know what's available to know what's most useful for you. And most math will not be useful for you.
And now I actually think with the power of agents um and AI broadly speaking, it's much closer to Goliath versus Goliath. Like I think but maybe the startup is like a Mecca Goliath that is like vastly enhanced by the power of agents and AI and you know, the the large companies are the sort of like more traditional Goliath, so to speak. But I think that startups now like if you properly embrace AI agents and um figure out the way to leverage their strengths in the most like ambitious ways, you can easily outcompete incumbents.
Why? We engaged early. We made the regulators part of the team and we worked together. We made it boom plus FAA versus the problem, not Boom versus FAA.
It does feel like we have to be more more explicit about the types of people and talent that tend to thrive at Netflix versus other companies like some of the frontier labs.
I don't think anyone found it useful enough to like maintain a system to keep the specs and the code in sync versus just using the code as the source of truth always.
The primary axis is no longer the politico-economic axis of capitalism-vs-communism, but the ethno-cultural axis of ethnomasochism-vs-ethnonationalism.
So with one, you get the effect that the person produced art print is valued much much higher than the than the AI version. And then what we do is to say there's in a set of other conditions, there's 500 of these being produced. So for the human made one, the price goes down a lot because it's no longer seen as like you're not like making a connection with this one artist versus with AI, there's no difference. AI is already viewed as like a commodity.
And what I learned from the puppet days, every presentation is an interview. I don't think a lot of people think about it that way cuz people are looking at you on stage and they get to see what you're about.
I kind of went from 80/20 of like, you know, uh to like 20/80 of writing code by myself versus just delegating to agents. And I don't even think it's 20/80 by now. I think it's a lot more than that. I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December basically.
and even if you take a generous interpretation of 128 * 8 gig transfers, you're at 128 gigabytes a second for the same shoreline versus 2 and a half terabytes a second. There's a there's an order of magnitude difference in bandwidth per edge area.
They could release claw slow mode and have an increase in tokens per dollar by a significant amount. Um they could probably like reduce the price of Opus 46 by you know 4x 5x and reduce the speed by another by maybe just like 2x like the curve on inference throughput versus speed is there already just on hm um and yet they don't um because no one actually wants to use a slow model
So when you look at inference at let's say 100 tokens a second for deepseek and kimk 2.5 hopper versus blackwell the performance difference is on the order of 20x
We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick. So we’re all different types of gamers, but if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I am, I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was or the type of gamer I want you to think I am versus the type of gamer I actually am.
I- i- like, we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me, but I wanna build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate.
And so that's the last thing which was very surprising to me which is that like we already reversibly cry preserve tissue including human tissue including whole body human tissue at that very very small like you know in a couple hundred cells stage
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
Breakneck by Dan Wang Wong does an excellent job at objectively looking at the pros and cons of the Chinese and American societies. The engineering state versus lawyerly society as a way to explain each nation is brilliant.
I would assume it will because it’s so anticipated, and anticipation is the best driver of early sales, as we saw with GTA4 versus Red Dead Redemption one.
Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.
They're obviously both. A, because we've got things like the bite marks I just described, which is pretty much definitive scavenging, and then we've got the healed bite marks with T-rex teeth buried in bones, which is pretty much definitive active predation. So we've got evidence of it doing both.
But I'm being obviously overly facetious, but if ultimately part of your scaling is how big is the animal versus how big is its brain, that's most of a T-Rex brain. It's a fraction of the size of a chimp brain, and chimps don't weigh seven tons.
There are various canids that all hunt in groups, but then you've got things like maned wolves, which are effectively solitary. The hyenas. Spotted hyenas are, yeah, these super social animals, but the brown hyena, the striped hyena, and the aardwolf are solitary. So you just can't do group versus solitary off close relatives or anything like that.
Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine is a memoir I couldn't believe I hadn't read earlier. Many of her observations about engineering culture feel as relevant today as when she was a programmer in the 1980s
Certainly more on the no than on the yes. The funny thing about P equals NP is that we have also a lot more obstructions than we do for almost any other problem.
And humans are actually very good at reading or judging between two things versus... This goes back to the core of what RLHF and preference tuning is that it's hard to generate a good answer for a lot of problems, but it's easy to see which one is better.
if you believe we're in this sort of stage of economic growth and change that we've been in for the last 20 years, the export controls are absolutely guaranteeing that China will win long-term.
Here’s one small mental hack that makes a world of difference: remember that you are trying to hire the right people to join your team/org/company.
Not the “best” people.
The right people.
The only way you can make H2FC cars look cheaper than BEVs is to underestimate or ignore the cost of hydrogen production and infrastructure, socialise it, and then load the entire cost of grid build-out onto the marginal BEV.
So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.
While we love GraphQL for many use cases, implementing a secure and performant GraphQL API can be tricky and there is a definite cost to requiring it during early prototyping of your app.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
what we have now is kind of at the at the sort of deepest level what we have is kind of this big fight between people who want to use the internet to basically reinforce top-down power uh, versus people who want to use it to disrupt top-down power.
My extensive discussions with Andrew led me to conclude that the focus on value versus growth doesn’t serve investors well in the fast-changing world in which we live.
The interests of a Venture Capitalist are different than those of the entrepreneurs building a company they've invested in. Jeff does an awesome job of helping explain how you can get misaligned in your goals versus your investors. Fortunately, he also covers how to avoid it.
If you want to learn the art and science of copywriting, then this is the book for you. An expert copywriter for decades, Caples breaks down in detail what makes a great ad versus a failing one. It's loaded with examples and the kind of insights only a veteran can provide. You do need to provide a little imagination as he focuses on mail in based advertising in magazines, which isn't common today. But really, how different is that from downloading free whitepapers today?
Everyone needs to read this book. The observations were made in a pre-internet era, and they’re 10x as relevant today. Nothing will do more to help cure your information addiction that the healthy dose of reality provided in these pages.
Solve the fundamental, underlying issues, not the symptoms. We recommend starting with field studies and observations of actual practice (an applied ethnography). Ask “why?” at each issue.
I use a Logitech G5 laser mouse, which may be the closest to the Platonic ideal pointing device as it is possible for late-stage capitalism to produce.
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