Byrne Hobart
@ByrneHobart
The John Henry of excessive use of the em-dash. Tweets are map, not territory. Co-author: Boom (Stripe Press):
1.7K Following 61.7K Followers
7yo asked me, apropos of nothing at all, why Japan didn’t surrender until after the atomic bombs. But apparently I didn’t provide enough detail.
Sad to see schools teaching kids skills that Jev can replicate for picopennies.
The only text spam I get these days is from arborists and people with very strong opinions about James Talarico (the Paxton campaign does not appear to consider the word “Paxton” a selling point).
I'll be on with @lefttailguy in a few, talking Palantir!
Today is a big day - we're live right now and covering some developing stories:
- Alibaba's latest ai strategy roadmap
- Analyzing updates from the UN general assembly week as top ai leaders meet with heads of government
- China continues investigating DeepSeek and Moonshot for alleged leaks to Anthropic
Following this up with a really awesome slate of interviews:
- @jon_stokes author and CTO at discussing why everyone should maybe be skeptical of AI benchmarks
- @eddylazzarin GP at a16z crypto, talking about AI safety discourse and how productive conversations around open vs closed ai development is getting pushed to the side
- @Houda_nait Research Lead at OpenAI, on why she believes in p(bloom) > p(doom), and why personal agents are so exciting right now
- @gaganbiyani co-founder of Udemy & CEO of Maven, and @eriktorenberg GP at a16z, on the launch of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy
- @ByrneHobart writer of The Diff & GP at Anomaly Fund, and @lefttailguy will be joining us to speak on their Arena Mag piece “Forward Deployed”
- @ElliotGlazer lead Mathematician at Epoch AI the on Hodge Conjecture rumors and OpenAI’s claim of resolving 100+ longstanding open math problems
- @ajratner co-founder & CEO of Snorkel AI, talking about the >$300M raise and why expert data is the scarce input for agentic enterprise AI
- Andrei Georgescu CEO & co-founder of Vivodyne, on training world models of human biology on lab-grown tissue at datacenter scale
- Nikhil Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Corridor, on the company's $25 million raise and how they're leveraging AI to change the healthcare industry
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My "The lengthy study the Fed commissioned on the collapse of SVB says that my tweets, while 'remarkably prescient,' did not spark a bank run" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
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8yo asked if she could go for a walk in the neighborhood to “sell painted rocks.”
She got back fifteen minutes later with $25.10.
We're in Arena with a look at Palantir! Very fun collaboration—we were working backwards from how Palantir has been doing AI differently to how they're thinking about it, and the world, differently.
Your weekend read, from the new issue of Arena Magazine. The best thing I have ever read on why Palantir is doing so well with AI -- and how the frontier labs are paying attention and reacting.
By @lefttailguy @ByrneHobart
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Me: "How are you?"
7yo: "I'm fine. Wait., no dad jokes. My name isn't fine."
Me: "Nice to meet you, N't Fine! I'm dad!"
In a nearby timeline, the Department of Health and Human Services is tweeting that the Narwhal emphatically does not bacon.
The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸
One time, when I was much younger and less responsible, I was arguing with someone online. I checked Wikipedia, realized I was wrong, edited the article to change “is” to “is not,” and then sent the link. (And then fixed it a few minutes later.) So, relatable.
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7yo just called me an “insensitive clod.” Thats what I get for letting him read Calvin and Hobbes.
In lots of 80s/early 90s profiles of quantitative investors, there's a list of the general strategies they used, and a surprisingly common one is "Japanese warrants." In today's Capital Gains, we look at what that meant and why it was such a common trade:
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7yo is increasingly speaking flawless History Channel/YouTube Documentary Narrator when describing his contraptions. Today he was talking about an idea for a hard-to-hit submarine and said "That would make it hard for a torpedo to hit. The timing would have to be... impeccable."
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Astra on the performance of rare-earths equities before/after Trump admin equity stakes. The admin is really good at predicting which equities’ short-term outperformance will persist.
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Today's free issue of The Diff: thoughts on pacing the frontier—particularly, the possibility that even a deliberately slower pace will be faster than people expect.
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An illustration of how different the media environment was in 2001: no social media, so no way to e.g. cross-reference LinkedIn and Instagram and figure out which Marsh & McLennan employee was such an avid rock climber that he climbed down more than a dozen floors before falling.
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One of the kids got a surprisingly bad grade on a spelling pre-test, so I gave Codex a picture of the test and told it to build a practice app. Much improved!
The 2002 NYT story collecting everything we know about what happened in the towers after the planes hit is grim, but then you get the occasional absolutely bonkers survival story.
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Today in The Diff, an idea I've been kicking around for a bit: LLMs make us better-informed but less calibrated.
