During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened. China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.
It's hard to escape that economic engine, and easy to mistake its machinations for reality-a supply rising to meet demand, say, rather than a warped supply that whips up demand.
The concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity are legitimate, but we’re risking talking America, the global AI leader, into self-inflicted obsolescence and the obscurity of bureaucracy.
Astra is a remarkable piece of technology. Earlier agents often tried to dampen my ambitions—they’d push me to do “pilots” or “proofs of concept.” Then agents started meeting my ambitions. Astra is the first agent that routinely raises my ambitions. I encourage you to try it!
This helped the leader shift from wanting to change Jacob-something they couldn't control-to taking responsibility for changing the relationship-something they could.
Top-down works well if leadership is good enough to be in the weeds and be specifically correct. I think where it falls apart is where you don't actually know ground truth and then you attempt to manage people from above and that's where I think the term micromanagement comes from.
if you don't actually push yourself down to sit alongside your IC engineers and your IC designers and your IC PMs, you don't actually know that stuff. So you can't make good macro decisions without the micro.
But this is the book that I give to every junior engineer because I think like nobody ever really talks about debugging as like a discipline outside of like basic heuristics.
Software is kind of unique in having the third kind of the practitioner conference where we are just meeting to get better at what we do. We also are really the only kind to really focus heavily on like open source in making our knowledge freely available.
I came to the same conclusions independently before I encountered Krashen's work, and decades of learning across 20+ languages have only reinforced them. The research supports the intuition: input is where acquisition happens.
I believe that if you are too prescriptive as a leader with a team you end up stifling good ideas but if you're too open-ended sometimes teams just waste time um going in the wrong direction.
To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy
some people think either uh frontier AI gets commoditized and we all enjoy the benefits, but there might be some risk because like it's the market's really competitive and cutthroat, or um things are safer because there's a big gap between the leader and the laggard, but that means that the leaders get fantastically wealthy. No, like you could just have a relatively big gap, but it's a public company ownership and it's widely distributed.
it's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.
if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.
the companies that are very successful actually have both types of organizations inside their company. And that the leaders of the organization are the ones who are responsible for creating a healthy, functioning relationship between the two types of organizations.
staying close to your customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do.
And it went from this kind of thing that I didn’t believe into to actually, like, a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer, as a game director. And some of the best ideas have come from developing other peoples’ ideas
I think this book is a contemporary masterpiece? A cartoonist at the top of his game, a perfect meeting of subject and medium, and beautiful book design by Drawn and Quarterly.
This book dramatically changed me as a leader and as a person. It will help you develop self-awareness and connect deeply with your sense of purpose as a leader. If I could recommend one book to help you develop the human skills behind the
. Understanding how we grow and develop will help you become a better leader and a more empathetic colleague. More accessible than his academic work, this book also provides a framework for understanding underlying beliefs and motivations that might be holding you back.
Whether you’re a product leader coaching a team member or still early in your product maangement career, Petra Wille will help you break down the essentials of the job and develop a plan for growth.
I've worked a lot of companies right but I'm wrong all the time and I think consumer behavior can be very fickle and especially when you work at a company you become a power user naturally. So sometimes you you may forget like what the actual user experience is for a brand new user.
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs.
I personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don’t serve a clear purpose. But that’s a meeting problem, that’s not a communication problem.
I sometimes also struggle explaining to people, articulating, why I believe meeting in person for world leaders is powerful. It just seems naive to say that, but there is something there in person
But Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There was not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.
Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership means that the people running companies have been selected not based on their actual efficacy — especially as the position became defined by its lack of actual production — but on whether they resemble what a manager or executive is meant to look like based on the work that somebody else did.
Nobody wants to follow a joyless leader. If your presence signals, "Everything is fine. I've got this all figured out. Please don't show me anything messy," your team will take the hint.
Whereas something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader. Copilot's probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into, GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, Copilot, you become this trapped in permanent person and if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you'll never be able to switch.
The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.
It's a nice, short, and moving memoir by the comedian and actor Steve Martin. The book details his early working days at shops and clubs, his relationships, and eventually his rise to fame. He shared his struggles, his failures, long hours of practice, his reflections to refine his craft, and his efforts to find his own unique voice as a comedian. Any memoir that only talks about successes and never discusses struggles, rejections, or weaknesses is suspect. This one is not. What I like about his writing is that it feels candid and, at times, funny.
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
A hard to put down story about a company struggling and how the leadership team comes together under a new leader, doing small things that end up making big differences.
Josh Hardman at Psychedelic Alpha provided a detailed live account of the advisory committee meeting, which I found very helpful in developing a more granular sense of how the meeting unfolded without having to watch it myself.
So Tesla hasn’t found a different, better way to bring driverless technology to market. Waymo is just so far ahead that it’s dealing with challenges Tesla hasn’t started thinking about.
We think no fundamental research breakthroughs are required for labs to implement safety measures that meet our standard for AI control for early transformatively useful AIs; we think that meeting our standard would substantially reduce the risks posed by intentional subversion.
Quality is not luxury. Quality is not expensive. Quality is not that you love it. Quality is just one thing. It meets spec. So, if I look under an electron microscope at any part of a Lexus, which is by any measure the highest quality car there is, uh under an electron microscope, it's filled with defects. But they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec.
I would argue having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that has, itself, diverse viewpoints, and by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports.
At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"
Yes, and that's true inside companies too. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. And that really is about trying to... There are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last.
I think the main driving force is that the Palestinians feel oppressed as they should, and that this was a resistance move. They were resisting the Israeli occupation.
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence, and it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
Everyone who talks about AI talks about the button, the button to turn it off, right? Do we have a button to turn off Google? Is anybody in the world capable of shutting Google down?
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