people are always saying that YC has jumped the shark. You know, and like I remember when people started saying this, which is in about like 2008, right? YC is always this thing that was great, but now it's not what it was, right? Cuz they can't say it was always terrible. They have to admit it was once great.
rather than thinking about individual forecasts like what me and Phil are going to do, rather looking at kind of like basically generating prediction markets, where you get aggregate forecasts, where you get like kind of wisdom of the crowd effects. And kind of the reason that I think this is because we have been famously terrible at forecasting.
And so what ends up happening is the emails that the AI write are pretty good. Okay? If you're getting terrible emails, it's a poorly trained product from a bad vendor.
It isn't easy dealing with peer pressure and a room of warm and friendly staff begging you say something, anything nice about their terrible product for fear of losing their jobs -- and realizing you must be brutal to their faces otherwise you're not helping the vendor or your own company.
reinforcement learning is a lot worse than I think the average person thinks reinforcement learning is terrible. It just so happens that uh everything that we had before is much worse
Um so I almost feel like because the internet is so terrible, we actually have to sort of like build really big models to compress all that. Uh most of that compression is memory work instead of like cognitive work. But what we really want is the cognitive part actually delete the memory
UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.
Earlier this year I started writing a piece on why “hire great people and get out of their way” is such terrible, dangerous, counterproductive advice to give anyone in a leadership role.
That’s one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people in my field like to use in astrobiology is life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with, and I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it’s terrible, and I think it’s terrible that people use it. I think every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.
The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night.
I expect that the delta between 5 and 4 will be the same as between 4 and 3 and I think it is our job to live a few years in the future and remember that the tools we have now are going to kind of suck looking backwards at them and that’s how we make sure the future is better.
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