thundergolfer

This is unintentionally a pretty amusing puff piece, and indicates the book is going to be horrible.

> His novel is not so much an attempt to break away from that world — he loves investing and working with entrepreneurs, he says — as it is an opportunity to skewer it.

He started a crypto company and then took a father-sponsored investing job. He's done nothing to show he has the appropriate perspective to do more than lightly self-flagellate himself and his friends.

When asked about his responsibilities as an investor:

> “I just do the best I can to be like, I really like this opportunity. I think this could be really cool, and a positive thing, and really fun to work on,’’ he says. “But yes, if I backed a company that turned out to, like, cause horrible harm for people and tons of negative effects, I’d feel fucking terrible.”

Oh he'd _feel_ terrible. Well good, I thought for a second there wouldn't be appropriate consequences.

What an airhead.

I don't know anything about the elder Breyer, but this book promotion looks like a great promotion of massive inheritance taxes.

I'm not sure you understand Marx. The author probably has read Marx during their philosophy training.

'cost centre' does not mean a place that a capitalist is unable to perform exploitation. A cost center in Marxist terms can be understood as a department that participates in the money-commodity-money' (MCM') flow but doesn't directly complete the circuit to M'.

For example, delivering and receiving mail does not realize profit for most companies, but is an essential part of the business. If they spend $1,000,000 on the mail department in Q1, spending $2,000,000 in Q2 is likely to waste the extra $1,000,000. But spending zero in Q2 would cripple the company. That's a cost centre.

The author works at Github, so yes not so much a "resource constrained" environment. It matches my experience at a high growth company, Canva, where in places it was easy to see the connection to profit and in other places quite hard. There were people that didn't care about their connection to profit, and there were expensive employees doing "good work" done merely because it was good to do. Canva could do that because its margins are 80+% and it made almost $1B in revenue at the time.

In New York the website recently updated to do this, presumably because they were forced to. They had a whole banner announcing it.

I'm Australian and moved to New York recently-ish. It was one of those classic anti-consumer disappointments one experiences moving to the states. Glad they fixed it.

One of those projects that has me wondering what I was doing instead of building this. The end result is great, and the technical details seem like they'd be interesting. TIL about Internet Protocol TV: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv

> deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.

Wasn't aware they'd hit a WAU count this high. Impressive, but then again at this kind of valuation you sure want to be heading towards 9-figure MAU numbers.

This title really sounded like it was going to be about Suno.

This article uses an LLM to summarize itself into three key points. Those three points are milquetoast, making me much less interested in getting behind the paywall and reading the actual article.

Maybe this is a value add. Maybe the article is milquetoast and should be skipped. But either way it’s an example of how LLMs are not just competing with search they’re degrading the reading behaviors which make search more valuable (details, specifics, exact match).

It is an underrated point though that LLMs are competitive with Google search because they remove anti-user ads and SEO spam. In the long run LLMs will have that same problem though, because it’s a business dynamic not a technological dynamic.

That's his debut novel and I think it shows. Experimental, and has some puzzling sections. Having read that, Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, I think the latter is his strongest writing but the plot isn't as grand and dramatic.

Yes it's a big outage: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

It’s running gVisor which currently reports its kernel version as 4.4.0, even though it’s actually implementing a much more recent version of Linux.

I know this because at Modal.com we also use gVisor and our users occasionally ask about this.

What does this mean for the Roomba's long term serviceability? I tend to hear really good things about the product. In Australia the ACCC (Consumer protection office) has decent protections for these situations, but in the USA is it probably that Roomba's will become unrepairable with no consumer recourse?

The never really did. If you saw them referred to that you were getting flimsy analysis. These people have a much more purposeful, active, and visionary approach to politics and society than any conservative ever has. Conservatism, since 2018, can be pithily summed up by this quote:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Thiel et al's machinations are much more sophisticated than this quote (not an endorsement), but it basically does encapsulate the irritable gestures of your sundowning uncle and the cold selfishness of the old money class.

The population of a specific Google office could be two std deviations from the mean. My office area, SoHo NYC, has a dramatically lower obesity rate than the USA average. Maybe 10-20% of the population is overweight, let alone obese, and it’s mostly the service workers.

- The Rest is History has a huge back catalogue and is generally very interesting with good rapport between the hosts.

- Dwarkesh Podcast has a smart and charismatic host bringing on some truly excellent tech industry guests (e.g. Jeff Dean, Patrick Collison, 10x IC engineers)

- Oxide and Friends is Oxide Computer's 2nd podcast after the brilliant but short On The Metal. This one is more casual but around half the episodes are serious technical deep dives.

- Know Your Enemy is seriously the best political podcast you'll find, because it's targeted at people who read books and actually care about understanding politics, not just having some intelligent sounding soundbite for cocktail parties. It's recent episode on Ayn Rand's life and work is excellent and relevant to the tech industry which has its fair share of Randian hero archetypes.

- Acquired is great for entertaining history of important companies. The episode on TSMC is a classic, but I also found their episodes on Hermes and LMVH really enjoyable. You just have to watch out for the fact that they're (a) non-technical and can get over their skis covering software/hardware companies, and (b) they're VCs so adopt some often incredibly weird framing on things, for example their approach to discussing the societal impact of weapons companies during the Lockheed Martin episode.

Having worked in data in Melbourne and also met the author of the post you link, I think saying the entire industry is a scam is an overgeneralization. There's some especially bad stuff going on in parts of the industry (e.g Melbourne government or government-adjacent parts) but in others parts of the industry data engineering and analysis is hugely valuable.

“Pure garage-energy” is a great phrase.

Most interested to see their inference stack, hope that’s one of the 5. I think most people are running R1 on a single H200 node but Deepseek had much lower RAM per GPU for their inference and so had some cluster based MoE deployment.

The post already contains the caution.

"I wouldn’t do it every year, because I would probably collapse from exhaustion, but I’m grateful to have been able to contribute to such a project."

Why should the comment be pinned when it doesn't even grasp that the blog post isn't advocating, at all, that people should be in high-growth sprint mode 24/7/365?

Yeah fair enough. I think it's just the subjectivity of "durable" at play here. The value of the GPUs may halve in a single year (e.g. H100s), but they'll never* drop to zero in a month. That's at least some kind of durability, because you can get a transaction done in a month.

* never say never

There is a market but it most likely requires a thick software layer to enter the competitive space. Modal Labs, Anyscale, and Outerbounds are examples of companies competing for "data science stuff" and have thick software layers over the VMs.

I think it's referencing only the IPv4 block, but it is a bit confusing. It doesn't make sense to be ref'ing the GPUs because their value is definitely not durable.

There’s no hope for someone if they take Zakaria seriously about anything. He’s the pinnacle of vacuous talking head infotainment.

It used to be generally well known that Zakaria-types were for dimwits who mistook the appearance of insight for insight, but in an increasingly vacuous, video-soaked world, what used to be obviously pap for the plebs seems now solidly respectable, middle-brow.

Not realizing this is a problem of media literacy. Many people below the median literacy level unfortunately think media literacy means merely understanding that the newspaper might be biased.

Higher levels of media literacy involve understanding exactly these dynamics described by the author and avoiding this bad kind of non-fiction, mass market non-fiction.

Another interesting dynamic in fiction writing is that fiction book prices do not scale linearly with page count, but costs kinda do, so authors are discouraged from writing 800 pages tomes like Middlemarch and War & Peace.

> my definition of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) is the ability to come up with the tasks in the first place).

It’s remarkable how the business and strategy types keep adding new definitions of these things. “Coming up with new tasks” isn’t superintelligence, that’s just general intelligence. Ben Thompson even calls out that OpenAi annoyingly has like a dozen AGI definitions directly after. Yet he still adds to the pile and the confusion.

The G means “as intelligent as a typical human”. The S means “significantly more intelligent than a typical human”.

Any system which doesn’t realize you can’t wash your hands if you are missing both arms is not earning that G.

Not really any surprises here, if you’ve been following this stuff. I’d be much more interested in understanding what is holding up penetration of Claude and the rest into medicine, finance, and law.

This may just be my ignorance, but it seems that distributed version control is a highly valuable technology which hasn’t penetrated that well into law. If this is true—my evidence is only anecdotal, talking with lawyers—then it should provide partial insight that translates into the problem of LLM adoption.

Oh my mistake, I wasn't referring to its pre-Youtube era as I've not seen what those were like.

Ted is low brow now. It was originally middle brow. I don’t think it’s ever been high brow to get pop insight from YouTube videos.

> It used to be the case that speaking in that register was a strong signal of a social pedigree and an expensive education.

It's not the same register. There's a vast difference between the extemporaneous speech of the old school patricians and today's C-suite corp-speak.

Here's Robert F Kennedy Jr. speaking off the cuff at a public event moments after hearing that MLK had been assassinated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kWIa8wSC0&t=238s.

That's the speaking style of social pedigree and an expensive education. You'll tend to find it contains lifts of poetry, like Kennedy's evocation of Aeschylus, and little reference to 'synergy', 'collaboration', 'efficiency', etc.

Sorry, I forgot about the submission rule for dating older posts. This is from 2020. From an annotation in the post:

> This essay was written in April 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic which has all but shut down travel to the United States...

> we’ve surpassed 2 million developers ... 100,000+ developers who sign up for Render every month

There's something like 2 million software engineers in the entire USA. There's no way their penetration is significant (>25%) in the USA, so where are these developers coming in from? India, China, LATAM?