DesaiAshu

brb while I build my entire cloud stack on Cloudflare

"On August 21, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order, America by Design—a national mandate to direct American ingenuity on the citizen experience.

He established the National Design Studio, and turned to entrepreneur and designer Joe Gebbia to lead it."

Great show of leadership to take credit 5 paragraphs before mentioning anyone else on your team, and to avoid mentioning them by name so they can't be given too much credit ;)

In my recent experience, it seems like LLMs may even increase need/demand for actual lawyers (more ideas + more words = more lawyer time). I expect lawyers will generally adopt the technologies that will benefit them, rather than the technologies that would increase standardization and trust

The same has happened with modern finance. Despite more technology that has power to drive more transparent/efficient markets, we have less perfect information sharing and a larger group of middlemen capturing a growing share of profits of the economy

Assembly expertise crashed from LLVM reliance

"Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened"

Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?

Seems like every country has factions who do this - right?

Given how much the US economy has centralized profits to the financial sector - market inefficiency that is quantitative and automate-able with ML - it’s unfortunate to see Stripe pivot industries to expand TAM rather than doubling down on fixing the market inefficiencies within finance (insurance, etc)

Maybe a signal of how rigid the moats/lobbies are on insurance and private equity

If the leaked data is to be believed, OpenAI is spending 40% of revenue on sales and marketing, which is not the OPEX profile of a product-led technology company

Broadly speaking, companies that spend 40%+ of revenue on sales and marketing end up being a bit of a drag on society. Eg. Salesforce’ product quality is far lower than winners in other sectors that sit closer to 10-15% of revenue on sales and marketing

Maybe - just as how the city of Sao Paolo implemented a ban on billboards - we can implement a law where a 3 year rolling average of sales and marketing spend cannot exceed 20% of revenue in that period

Or a music making platform

The government response to the ‘08 crisis seems to have worked out better for most big banks (low taxing of negative externalities, growing larger and more profitable), than for regional banks (consolidated) and the bulk of Americans (low median wealth, rising costs of housing/living)

Given the data on this[1], this is a confusing choice of hire to ensure AI gains are distributed equitably

[1] https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...

Strict borders have only existed for ~100 years, and many were drawn without much regard for the people living there, often constructed with intention of religious segregation, and to maintain europe's global superiority

They run counter to the notion of sovereignty and local agency which we value greatly in the US

The irrationality of strict country borders and heavy migration controls will emerge as a heavy global challenge due to economic and climate migration and aging populations

I don't think we have a good answer for what replaces them, but I don't believe there's enough evidence to state that hasty decisions made after WWI and WWII should forever govern global human freedoms - and we need a better approach than war to renegotiate some of this

Unless you’re in the top 5-10% of American society, it’s unclear that your kids will be more comfortable than you. Data here:

https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...

At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well

A few reasons: 1. Header files make C++ verbose. Header files are well within LLM's ability 2. LLMs can handle setting up cmake for you 3. C++ is very well documented relative to (most) newer languages 4. LLMs can port modern features like websockets and build API wrappers easily, reducing the disadvantage against web (since most documentation is for JS/python/go)

Coding languages have been developing for speed of (manual) writing - akin to how human languages did with modern alphabets. Now that writing is a lot easier, languages will likely evolve towards a focus on execution (or in the case of human languages, speed of reading and precision of understanding)

We should talk - I'm building a new DAW with this in mind :)

You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards

Looks like a font rendering or retina issue

A lot of us are coming to terms with "tier-1" venture firms like a16z tolerating corruption and ethics violations to support financial deregulation (crypto, prediction markets) and AI deregulation

Polymarket is even running ragebait ads[1] about Trump's corruption, while his son (profiting from the corruption) sits on the board

The word you are looking for is "greed", and it is ripping apart the moral fabric of this country

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DYmu4RJnFrF/?img_index=11

Inefficient variants with $100m+ worth of compute will still probably outperform the best team of researchers

I think the most correct would be "OpenRouter costs 800% less than Apple Silicon" ;)

This one is regulated as a commodities derivative rather than gambling

Call a spade a spade, rather than calling it a club because the president’s son is on the board

Corruption is corruption.

Fear not, a few of us are building in the direction you're hoping. Leveraging AI to make it easier to stay in a creative headspace with music rather than getting caught in a spreadsheet with endless settings

Sharing is definitely a core part of "why do it", but that can be sharing with friends/family or a living room performance

Some preliminary ideas here: https://songbird.studiocollective.xyz

"Western ideals have been something genuinely new in history. The Enlightenment’s bet on reason, individual dignity, free speech, limited government, and the belief that human beings can organize their collective life through arguments rather than force produced the most prosperous, free, and peaceful societies in human history."

Most of these ideas were present in older civilizations.

Yes also passing data within each layer

I think raising public awareness is a great escalation channel for severe (and complicated) cases that require bureaucratic help from senior people. We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)

We crossed a threshold in the past couple months where I'm not sure I'd agree that "libraries other devs depend on" is the right cutoff for LLMs. In many cases, LLMs will write more concise, faster, and more accurate code. Not by one-shooting, but through a deeper search of possibility space - not dissimilar to how stockfish and other pre-llm search algorithms worked

Modern harnesses are systems built with LLMs as one of many building blocks (incl. regex, test suites, linters). If it can be measured and verified, there's a good chance LLMs will optimize it

This is not a new concept. Humans stopped writing "artful" assembly many years ago, because Lattner and others made it much more efficient to rely on LLVM than hand-optimizing assembly

It's also been demonstrated in other domains within Google (4x4 matmul, silicon photonics, protein folding)

Interface heavy apps are not purely about objective function, they are about feel, comfort, usability - those apps will benefit heavily from humans. But subcomponents of these apps (eg. an algorithm to route packets efficiently) can often be better solved (somewhat objectively) by LLM-based solvers or other forms of RL.

However, writing assembly for the sake of art sounds rather interesting in an 2026. Many of my favorite musicians and DJs are driving a resurgence in vinyl to help balance the computed future - and I think that's a great thing

data bandwidth limits distributed training under current architectures. really interesting implications if we can make progress on that

Either that or implement it at the exchange level. Eg. if accredited investors sell a stock in <3 months, you pay X% as a tax at the moment of sale - or maybe different fees for <1 hour, <1 month, <1 year

Could also price in negative externalities of short term trading with higher taxes for that behavior, nudging the markets to focus on value driving investments rather than speculation

You could report every month and audit every 6 months

Technology is at the mercy of our social and financial systems, it rarely leads social advancement. As with other tools, it can be used in many ways

In surveying my friends in Silicon Valley, it seems that most VCs/techies know that: 1. This administration is likely leading us into long term wars and social instability 2. American Dynamism and Defense Tech (or more politely bundled into "DeepTech") are war profiteering, benefiting from greater instability

Speaking / acting out against the American military complex and Big Tech/VC's role in this carries 3 big risks: 1. Not being invited to parties ("too much negative energy, we want to be surrounded by positivity" or "don't talk politics") 2. Censorship and reduced following across most major social media platforms 3. Being economically left out as the world bifurcates into a K-shape economy

As a result, most of my community (generally peace-loving, music-loving humans) seem to be either taking a position of "the world has always been at war and will always be at war, I'm just a realist" or "I'm just going to focus on my locust of control and my personal wellbeing" or "if it's gonna happen anyways, I might as well make money off of it". There is a strong contingent of the resistance as well (still fighting for climate, social justice, peace) but much higher rates of depression and social isolation in this group

So it does not seem to be a problem that can be solved by more information and more technology (though k-12 and higher education assuredly is worth investing in), but perhaps by less nihilism and a stronger social/moral fabric

A big reason I am considering starting a company again is that we need more flags of institutions that carry large weight/reputation and stand for a set of values that is different than the current (and historical) status quo. I expect most of my community would be thrilled to align with those flags if those flags where held up tall and broke through the noise

Which is to say, if you're considering setting up one of those flags, please please do. The world doesn't have to be this way.

The Department of Defense was named as such after the detonations of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back

Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position

None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns

Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?