kippinitreal

Wrote up some thoughts on what their financials may look like. Quick take is that they probably need cash fast! https://kippinitreal.substack.com/p/manus-acquisition-though...

Dug into the available information about Manus's business. I imagine this is pretty reflective of the new class of $100m ARR AI companies. High CAC, high costs, high competition and no real clue where things will land long term.

Their new SF campus charges $75k/yr!

Routes you to a random LLM - just a fun way to force yourself to try new things not just rely on muscle memory. Currently only has 5-10 and roughly weights the routing by popularity (ChatGPT -> Gemini -> Claude .... Copilot). Have been using it personally but thought I'd share in case folks had other ones to add. Main learning so far is that many are really good. Often small UX decisions can lead to better experiences than just AI horsepower.

Amazing name for this tool.

I believe it's not strictly more decks, but also how often they shuffle. If they add 7 decks but don't shuffle until near the bottom, it's actually advantageous as the count can get very skewed (e.g. 50 cards left and 30 facecards remaining). However, with 7 decks and reshuffling halfway through the count doesn't reach as much relevance to the next card.

I wonder if in an application you could branch on something more abstract than tokens. While there might by 50k token branches and 1k of reasonable likelihood, those actually probably cluster into a few themes you could branch off of. For example “he ordered a …” [burger, hot dog, sandwich: food] or [coke, coffee, water: drinks] or [tennis racket, bowling ball, etc: goods].

My amateur understanding is that the benefits are: A) H2 is exceptionally difficult to store at scale. Salt caverns are an option, but that is limited B) methanol can be used off the shelf by existing generators so the prices are much more economical and they can use both fuels during a transitory period

I mean, it's totally fine for a non-profit to "wallow in irrelevance"? I think the fundamental issue here is that a tax-exempt non-profit organization like these board members are leading _shouldn't_ necessarily be chasing fame/fortune. By definition they've put mission above profits (with tax writeoffs as a benefit). The naivety seems to be that the company is trying to be altruistically mission driven while also acting like a typical ambitious/profit seeking startup. Startups are great! Just weird to wrap one in a non-profit which brings different incentives

True - but Richard Rhodes (author of Hedys Folley) was an advisor to Nolan for the film and I imagine his books on atomic history were very helpful.

Totally agree that this is under appreciated.

Between open source modeling tools being incredible, transfer learning allowing dirt cheap fine-tuning and now mega-models being able to instantly give you a "mostly right" data set, the cost of creating ML features has dropped to almost nothing.

Products that took quarters/years and required big budgets for labeling, ML specialist, GPUs etc just a few years ago can now be done in an hour or so for free (if you are scrappy). I imagine this is going to lead to a ton of great ML features that weren't worth funding in the past but are very valuable in aggregate. Similar to the mid-2000s when the cost/ease of web development came down enough that there was a lot more experimentation and fun to be had.

Clever idea. I think you would have to recompute the context (ie embed the prior tokens) every time you swapped models because the weight distributions would be different for each model. Going from big->small might make this overhead worth it, but going back from small->big would assuredly be very costly.

Cool stuff! But it’s criminal to not call attention to JQ’s elder sibling CSVKit. It’s invaluable for playing with csvs. Much easier to parse out columns, allows you to generate new csvs and even merge them. More importantly, it allows SQL on csvs (via SQLite iirc) which empowers all sorts of csv shenanigans. The bash scripting this enables us incredible (good and bad).

https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

That video did the same for me. I also like the reducible video for Fast Fourier Transforms as well as the Veratasium piece that shares some fun history.

Reducible - FFTs the most ingenious algorithm ever https://youtu.be/h7apO7q16V0 Veritasium - The Most Important Algorithm of All Time https://youtu.be/nmgFG7PUHfo

I too have always been blown away by Shazam and pondered how it could possible index so much content for fast lookups. A few years ago this article was super helpful in helping me understand and learn a lot. Fun read which required a lot of side googling for me http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/

Could you share any links that break down the cost structure you described for solar farms? I’d love to understand that more

I’ll second “Making of the Atomic Bomb” as an excellent history of modern physics tied to a great narrative.

For Biology I really enjoyed “A Brief History of Creation”, high level overview of all of the advances to understand what we are made of.

“Eight Day of Creation” is supposed to be incredible but it’s the size of the text book so I keep reaching past it on my desk

The sequel “Dark Sun” is also quite good. Continues the story into the making of the hyrogen bomb, the Teller-Ulam design, and the USSR’s efforts. Much shorter too :)

Yes, with SharesPost, equityzen and Forge. Company had a pretty standard policy so approval was straightforward but took a few months and required some legal opinions (costing $,$$$). In my case the deal was for the shares directly. Biggest lesson was really just that the fees really added up (near 10% if under $100k) and it’s a shame more companies don’t do more to broker these deals on employees behalf to get the best price and cut out the middlemen (another employer did this and it was great).

DM if I can help with more info, experience with each company was essentially the same and you should just reach out to all of them to see who has inbound buy requests at the highest price. Worth noting that there is more room for negotiation on price than you might expect.

This is what I’m here for! Awesome work, super cool to see and read how you did it.

The Goal is one of my favorite “business” book (it’s written as a novel). it addresses all of the wasted energy when you target efficiency at the expense of hitting your true goals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)

Great interview with Larry King focused on his interview style: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/larry-king/id124844662...

Some great stories in there including one about how in his early days he would play a game with his producer where he’d go in blind and try and figure out who his guest is. I guess this helped him develop his “average guy” style. While series is worth a listen if interview styles is of interest.

The difference is that Bell scientists were always focused on core business problems and not just chasing fantasies. OK sure, Shannon was doing whatever with mice and unicycles...but he earned it! All of Bells big accomplishments were tightly coupled to business needs: Information theory => everything, transistors => bad vacuums, fiber optics => latency.

Similarly Google has had huge contributions on "research" focused on their core problems: MapReduce, BigTable, Borg, BERT, etc.

Can't speak to this specific case, but often this is done to help founders exercise shares/pay taxes on gains. Still a kind favor, but it's usually not a Nuemann-esque private jet purchase.

Great book! Super interesting analogy to Nantucket being the Silicon Valley of the era, pulling in top young talent from the whole east coast.

Avoid the movie at all costs.

First deep dive into the business model I’d heard - really fascinating

IMO the best reason for this isn’t even to raise funds, but rather because the rich/connected are going to do this anyways (and get away with it) so we might as well decrimalize it and make a dollar off of them in the process. I’d rather encourage them to give more money to the government than to see how low they go to validate their “essentialness”.

It’s not even clear to me that this is such a terrible way to allocate this scarce resources - if the NBA wants to spend a billion dollars on some of the first doses so they can go to work (and subsidize 50m other doses in the process) that doesn’t seem so wrong? For every 100 doses auction off 1 to pay for the other 99 (maybe even more!).

“When Genius Failed” is really good. Lot of parallels to tech where folks are visionaries right up until the day that they’re not and how things that we don’t truly understand can go haywire

Seems like a smart decision by those businesses to team up (collude?) here both for business and public health reasons. If they all agree to wait post election there will be a higher rate of vaccinations which will benefit everyone (sales and progress towards herd immunity). I'm not sure if this would put them into any odd legal situations for playing politics.

> In the age of COVID, they [local retail] are also emerging as the most convenient option with delivery and pickup turnarounds in under an hour.

What?!? Local retail is being absolutely decimated right now. If anything, big box stores have had a resurgence as being “essential” with a wide product catalog gave them a temporary advantage. Most mom & pop retail are being crushed (obviously there are some exceptions).