arunbahl

As a startup that chose to locate in Canada, we’ve already had a dozen amazing candidates currently in the US reach out and apply for roles since we shared our thinking earlier this week [0].

The feeling of ambient immigration hostility in the US (even beyond any one specific policy) is palpable.

0: https://aloe.inc/blog/the-best-talent-in-the-world

From the article:

“We’ll be using reinforcement learning to effectively come up with the optimal toolpaths to see a 3D model, and based on the curvature and the geometric forms, to choose what are the right tools, or what are the right angles of attack,” Springut says. “And when we do that, that’s what’s going to bring the cost of fabricating stone down by 80% to 90%.”

Awesome stuff! We use a similar approach (without MCP) to great effect with Prolog currently and feels like we're only just starting to scratch the surface here.

A great paper from Nasim Borazjanizadeh and Steven Piantadosi at UC Berkeley for those interested: Reliable Reasoning Beyond Natural Language https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11373

For anyone digging in who wants to hack on this: arun [at] aloe.inc

I’ve been a big fan of Oxide’s approach for a while - thank you for articulating and sharing the thinking behind it.

This. This was one of the reasons we ended up abandoning Flutter (the state of text editing was the other, super_editor notwithstanding).

Aloe | San Francisco, CA + REMOTE, INTERNS | First hires in software engineering, UX design, NLP/ML

Aloe is an AI that helps you think and do. It follows your train of thought, gives you the space to focus, and understands you well enough to handle tasks on your behalf.

We don’t believe the future of AI tools is to automate humans out of the picture – it’s to free us to concentrate on the parts of work and life that fulfill us. But there's no Future of Work without fixing attention – Aloe is backed by peer-reviewed science and original user research. We're combining AI, UX, and cognitive science to help us get back to deep work, creativity, and proactive action.

Find out more at https://aloe.do/company – if you've been thinking about joining a startup as an early hire, feel free to reach out to me directly: arun at aloe dot do.

[Edit: here's why we think this is the most important problem to solve: https://aloe.do/blog/why-aloe ]

This is the first time I’ve encountered the term “single-cell protein”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-cell_protein

It's been hypothesized that glucosamine creates a similar response as calorie restriction. This effect was observed in rats in 2020 [0].

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33478352/

This — suspension of judgement long enough to engage in genuine introspection, followed by a return to the conversation with humility — is something we so rarely see, and each need to engage in more.

Kudos to you for leading by example.

“Focus on your high-order bit.”

-Kim Cameron

Everything is temporary.

This is a central tenet in a variety of approaches and philosophies, from religions (it's one of the Marks of Existence in Buddhism) to cognitive behavioral therapy — but few ideas have changed my thinking, resilience, self-control, and happiness as much as this one.

Unclear if you read the article and are voicing disagreement with it, but Scott Aaronson is in fact defending armchair epidemiology.

Misery, like happiness, is orthogonal to material possessions.

What are the implications of this on the Turing Test?

Great idea. I'm Arun, and am working on situational awareness for smart devices using sound. http://bridge.ai Reach out at arun [at] bridge.ai.

WordLens blew me away when it launched in 2010 (now part of Google Translate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens

> Ultimately, legal tools should be limited to problems they can solve. Fake news is not one of these problems.

False. Replace "fake news" with "false advertising", and there's ample precedent for how this might be achieved. We've got laws at both state and federal levels that make deceptive or misleading claims illegal, to protect consumers; protecting consumers of news media needn't be any more problematic constitutionally.

Among other items of interest was this snippet:

"...the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram."

Are there options for a foreign national to move from an E-2 visa (treaty investor) to permanent resident status? I've heard that it wasn't possible previously but now may be, making the E-2 a possible "startup visa" for many.

And thank you for doing this!

OS X's whole-disk encryption (FileVault 2) similarly creates a recovery key at encrypt-time.

This makes the assumption that the sole goal of education is a path to a job. That's simply not the case.

Education != vocational school.

Additional details here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/deep-b...

This is really fantastic. I've been working on a new UI for something like this and I'd love to compare notes once I dig in a little bit. Great stuff!

I think the inspiration point is a great one, if difficult to quantify. The American space program fostered a scientific literacy and pop-culture faith in the pursuit of engineering for surmounting important problems. And despite being a national program in a Cold War context, the success of the Apollo missions was bigger in scope than the US - it was a victory for all humans. We'd do well to cultivate these attitudes again.

If that's the case, it could be that a "substantial move" indicative of this migrant opportunity-seeking mentality doesn't require immigration or the crossing of nation-state boundaries at all. I wonder if there's another way to phrase this to include someone uprooting themselves from the American east coast and moving to California, for example.

Similarly there are parts of the world where crossing a border to live is nearly as easy (e.g. within the EU). What's the barrier you're trying to measure? Leaving familiar people/surroundings?

[Edit - added EU example and question]

Brilliant post.

Wouldn't it be something if the frantic term-sheet-chasing energy we have in StartupLand could be applied to the world's truly interesting problems?

There are people working on things like this (myself included) -- the problem is that many of the "real problems" out there, the ones that are really worth solving, don't have easy economic arguments. Dollars/euros/RMB are a rather unidimensional metric for value, and what the economy values and what humans value don't generally match up very well.

It's challenge enough getting potential investors to see the ROI in your webapp with well-known paths to monetization - try making a case for a project with social ROI, and very little economic return in any reasonable timeframe (by our short human attention span standards).

I would love to see (and be part of) a broader solution to this.

Great post. I want to call attention to Will's first comment from Josh Strike, who articulated what I'm thinking pretty well.

(Doesn't seem like I can link to it, so I'm pasting - and truncating, so I encourage you to read his full comment):

Most coders are autodidacts. The ones without a DIY ethos drop out pretty quickly. Frankly, the reason the tech side feels free to give the business side a lot of crap -- other than the fact that you guys make more than we do, in mysterious ways unimaginable to us -- is that the business heads tend to lack that DIY drive to figure it out for themselves. Basically, wasting our time with things they could google, or learn to do, if they were as diligent as we are being (and we, being paid less to do more, feel a right to gripe). But you don't sound like that; actually, you sound like you took the hacker mentality and applied it to business, which is what we'd all like to do. SO, bravo. The fact that you did that is great. Don't rest on your laurels (or your co-founder); keep improving yourself.

[...]

The most important thing to remember if you're going to delegate -- whether it's hammering nails, making pizza dough or writing code -- is that the guy with his hands in the pie has the power to demolish you if you don't understand what he's doing. And lives by the sweat of his balls. So buy him a beer...and never consider anything to be magic. If you do, you've just put yourself in the dangerous position of not being able to fix it when it breaks down.

It's definitely a UI issue, in that right now the burden of management of multiple identities falls to users, and yes, developers don't usually include facilities to help. It's a pain, and like Wolfrom I sometimes choose to not say anything at all.

But beyond that, I think it's also a problem of expectations mismatch: on an app level social media is about siloing information by person (or possibly by company), but the user expectation is often that they've siloed information by subject matter.

It's a burden most acutely felt by so-called renaissance men and women (which I'd wager are an over-represented group here in the HN community). There's discrimination towards people that talk about/do seemingly unrelated things, that I think Wolfrom is alluding to. People tend to confuse specialization with expertise, e.g. that a software developer that also does visual design and has an interest in making music, for example, isn't as much of an "expert" as someone focused exclusively on code. Unfortunately not separating your content can have an impact on your credibility.