NPR listeners have long known what modern podcast listeners only realized more recently - that storytelling often hits way harder when it's delivered by the human voice.
This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.
Every lab will sell you an agent. Open claw is the alternative. Open source runs everywhere, works with any model. And if you run local models, your data never has to leave your device.
It will probably be economically shrewd to lose money on early robot models in anticipation that the data they gather will be worth more later in improving newer versions.
In the era of base LLM scaling (2022-2024), I believed the LLM line of research would reach a capability plateau (as later seen with base LLMs).
In late 2024, after the o3 test-time compute demo, I changed my views: the new models were showing genuine fluid intelligence, and with this new line of work, the LLM line of research could achieve unbounded capability scaling. "There will be no wall."
Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities-forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI's wealthy user base-resembles a classic story about dark money in politics.
But now, people know that, well, the risk of the status quo is actually extremely high. And so, even if there's risk in doing all the new things, well, this path also looks pretty dangerous. And so, I really think there's never been a better time for startups to to sell um and to have their products get adopted at, you know, pretty meaningful scale right out of the gate.
you just you can't base your business decisions based on what everyone else is saying around you. Like, if you go too much with the herd, you will get immensely confused and you will end up nowhere. And so you have to develop your own compass of what you think the future is going to look like because everyone else will just confuse you.
Yes, our supersize culture is a health disaster, but the cure isn’t lawsuits against companies that sell us what we want for a price we’re all too happy to pay.
And so his power base was fragile vis-a-vis untruth. And for him because of the specific shape of his power and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him.
This is the "show": everyone is trying to build parasocial multimedia franchises that gather audiences, and then sell ads, or subscriptions, or spon con on them.
and it turns out people kind of over glorify entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people believe there is tremendous upside, right? the type of entrepreneurship we talk about with software companies, the the upside is crazy. But when you're doing like selling parts or service business, unless you plan to open lots of stores and you know grow a larger employee base, it's not the same growth trajectory as software companies.
And the reason they came, I think, is absolutely because of the the better tooling. And I think we were totally right there that like adding a an erasable type system and then using that to enable great tooling is really where the pro where the programmer productivity boost is realized.
And so, we kind of realized at that point, too, that maybe it's not a great strategy to to place your your development platform bet on on technology that's licensed from a competitor.
did you know that according to the legal documents you yourself signed, your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing, you've already put in motion, a rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.
Now why are they willing to make the investments for me and not someone else and the reason for that is because they know that I have the capacity to buy it buy their supply and sell it through my downstream.
I know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since. And some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It's really difficult to do that twice.
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And I have no shame in saying that Base Camp was the best idea objectively in terms of a business that we've ever had.
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
I look at um the talent base and I think it is best for us to create opportunity for people to keep on growing with fresh new challenges within the company because if we don't do that they would leave the company
we're trying to crack the next frontier which is how we get that level of productivity increase and output building new features on top of a code base that are older,
They come to a computing platform because the install base is large. Because a developer, like anybody else, wants to develop software that reaches a lot of people. So, the install base is, in fact, the single most important part of an architecture.
OpenAI and Anthropic have both realized that code is the most important thing to optimize the models for, cuz that's where the money is. Like coders will spend $200 a month on a plan if it's good enough, it turns out.
one of the magic tricks about these things is that they they're incredibly consistent. If you've got a code base with a bunch of patterns in, they will follow those patterns almost to a T.
As we move from, you know, hey, [clears throat] these companies are selling tokens where they provide the entire uh reasoning chain and all that to uh selling automated, you know, white collar work, right? Automated software engineer, send them the request, they give you the result back and there's a bunch of thinking on the back end that they don't show you. The ability to distill out of American models into Chinese models will be harder.
There were booms and busts, and cumulative price inflation was zero, and the United States went from a new-world emerging backwater in the late 1700s to being the world's largest economy by the late 1800s.
The counterarguments against it are I'll politely call them fishy. Um, uh and yet it doesn't happen and we sell the chips because there's there's so much money. There's so much money riding on it.
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.
The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.
I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.
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
the marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern how sticky is your product and it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit.
Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.
Because there's no such thing as an unbiased source of information. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, I instantly realized Telegram is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides.
My sort of base case is to say this is kind of another platform shift and all the new stuff will be built around this for the next 10 or 15 years and then there'll be something else and so the impact on employment will be kind of like the impact on employment from the other platform shifts
You don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.
For me personally, I kept introducing bugs, and I couldn't figure out why. And what I realized is that I developed... I wasn't copiloting well, I was autopiloting much better.
Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
But Google has never had that DNA of like, "This is a product we should sell." The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There's a lot of bureaucracy here.
But really the software engineering agents I think can be done faster sooner than any other agent because it is a verifiable domain. You can always unit test or compile, and there's many different regions of it can inspect the whole code base at once, which no engineer really can.
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
So, trying to establish a base on Mars it's going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it's not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that.
I think that when people wanted to build a big building without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top, and that turns into a pyramid.
Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.
I started with a rather non-consensus hypothesis: companies want to pay for their critical open source dependencies, but most projects are not selling them a legible way to do so.
Does the user care if Perplexity has the most dominant model in order to come and use the product? No. Does the user care about a good answer? Yes. So whatever model is providing us the best answer, whether we fine-tuned it from somebody else’s base model or a model we host ourselves, it’s okay.
Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.
There’s this assumption that computation is at the base of reality, and I see it at the top of reality, not at the base, because I think computation was built by our biosphere. It’s something that happened after many billion years of evolution. It doesn’t happen in every physical object.
I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it’s very poorly formed, and that people use extremely different definitions for what AGI is. So I think it makes more sense to talk about when we’ll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z, rather than when we fuzzily cross this one mile marker.
So as long as you don't borrow against securities, you own really high quality businesses and it's not money that you need in the short term, then you can actually be thoughtful about it.
But one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. Again, you're truth seeking. You're trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it's easy for the author and hard for the audience.
I mean, the first thing that I would do is build tests. The first thing I would do is get a CI to where people can trust to make changes. Before I touched any code, I would actually say, “No one touches any code. The first thing we do is we test this code base.”
So, my technical recommendation to Elon, and I said this on the Twitter spaces afterward, I said this many times during my brief internship, was that you need re-factors before features.
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping.
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Therefore, I realized that it’s very important to be as awake as possible and that my model of sleepiness where you can be “awake”, “sleepy” and “asleep” is dumb.
This is precisely the role the central bank can play. By announcing that it stands ready to buy the bonds that investors want to sell at the price associated with the low interest rate, and credibly indicating that it has deep enough pockets to buy whatever is needed, it can eliminate the bad equilibrium.
I own an inReach Mini, used it for several years, and have no intention of upgrading to the Mini 2 because I don't see $400 of value in these improvements (or even $250, if I was able to sell my used Mini for $150).
Sales isn't easy to learn, especially when you have beginners luck and then hit a wall. This book, from the Sandler Sales Method, gives a good overview of the approach, and why it can be easier to sell when you first start, than once you get into it.
I use the 2018 MacBook Pro tricked out as much as they would sell it to me. It's the main tool for my job, so I've always made sure I had the best equipment I can.
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