Performance critical contributions by humans will stay what they are: an edge case. In 99% of software it does not matter that you could’ve written a faster algorithm or picked a better data structure.
The coolest thing about the recent wave of AI is that everyone is excited about building. All short-term drama aside, this is an immeasurably good development for the world.
the jev release is giving react major version drop vibes. just a massive crashing wave, everyone rethinking fundamental stuff and thinking through the implications of a novel new primitive.
No software tells me quite as much about your org as the choice of video conferencing software. Meet vs Zoom vs Microsoft Teams vs Citrix vs Jitsi are all picked for very different reasons.
And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.
common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.
Um, but actually the median business, uh, is doing better this year than a year ago. Um, and so and then if we kind of, um, stratify and look at the probability that any given business will reach some revenue threshold, a million dollars, five million dollars, 10 million dollars, whatever, um, those all seem to be getting better.
the best AI products haven't even been developed yet. You know, that if you look at the AI ecosystem and everything that's happened, like every wave is 10 times bigger than the past wave.
it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.
mini thesis, every time there's a new information technology, there's a subsequent wave of censorship to try to censor the new technology and a bajillion books get banned all at once.
if if I got to pick one if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat.
In fact, multiple analyses we do suggest that the genome is vibrating with natural selection, and uh there's all sorts of weaker effects that are there that would be picked up in larger studies even than we've done. Uh and that uh in fact, almost every position in the DNA is uh correlated to a position that in being dragged in one way or the other uh by natural selection. Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere.
but the thing about AI is that, you know, all of many of these things we were talking about how important they were and how valuable were and trying to persuade people of the importance of them. Yes, even the internet. That may sound surprising, but there were people who would weren't thinking that was important. Um but AI, there's kind of no argument about how important it is. People can't can I mean, you cannot put blinkers on to deny the importance of this thing.
There may be a lot of AI things that's going on right now, right? Uh eventually some of these things will consolidate, some will go under, some will become really awesome solutions and all that stuff. And so, but the the market will sort it out.
There’s this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave. Most games fall off the back of the wave. They don’t catch the wave. No one plays it or plays it for two weeks.
Like, if you think more globally, we are, we copied Google for agents. You have, like, a prompt, and, and then you have a chat interface. That, to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV.
And I realized it was the first one on the list and I thought, huh, I wonder if people are just picking the first one. So then then we randomized the list so everyone saw a different order of the list and now all the items were picked equally
I last picked up Stendhal’s The Red and the Black a decade ago. I wasn’t certain that the novel, which I keep calling my favorite, would hold up on re-reading.
And it's like the growth experimentation is more the the the slow and steady or fast and steady, I should say, uh approach where you're just continually iterating. You're making the product experience better, but then every so often, right, there's a big wave that comes in. you can quadruple your, you know, registrations overnights and yeah, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of that.
So when you make something like chat GPT, you can go from to zero to 100 million users faster than any technology in history because of the other technologies though. like you couldn't have gotten there if not for the build out of the internet, if not for the smartphone.
And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939.
The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
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.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
I picked this book up, and I liked it. On the surface, it's about wizards and magic, but there's more to it. Every now and then, Ursula Le Guin sprinkles in some wisdom.
Most of the coverage of The Coming Wave has focused on what it has to say about artificial intelligence—which makes sense, given that it's one of the most important books on AI ever written.
I mean, if that’s right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together, when they thought about, “We need a count of time for us,” they didn’t look up into the heavens, they looked into their bodies. “What’s the first cycle that we actually go through as humans?” and they picked this nine-month thing. It really is our cycle, and no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.
One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon.
Challengers (US) 2.6 Drove 30 minutes to the theater. Sat through 15 minutes of commercials and 15 more of loud in-your-face trailers. Then within 60 seconds I knew I had picked the wrong film. Unpleasant characters, phony “Hollywood” dialogue and a really annoying musical soundtrack.
This is the 2001 monolith hypothesis. I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization.
Sometimes people think that complexity or life or whatever is fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, fighting against the increase of entropy. That is precisely the wrong way to think about it. We are surfers riding the wave of increasing entropy. We rely on increasing entropy to survive.
I could believe that the Middle East doesn’t exist because I’m not there now. That would be kind of ridiculous, I think we would all agree on that. I think there’s only so much that we can attribute to our own powers of seeing. The whole system doesn’t come into being because I’m measuring it.
Decoded is a semi-autobiographical book that tells Jay-Z's story growing up and finding success in hip hop. It also helps you deeply understand the inner-city ghetto struggles (Jay was actually a drug dealer until age 27). In organized sections of hand picked songs with RapGenius-style lyric explanations (note: Decoded came first), you see through his eyes the difficult choices he and so many others faced while listening to some of his best tracks.
The skills US workers learned in the process of becoming an industrial giant helped set the US up for technological leadership over the rest of the century.
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