The danger of selling to big companies, if you're a startup, is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment. But it's not. They love having meetings! It's almost all they do.

If you send me an email that seems like it was written by AI, that will make me curious whether I'm right, and instead of reading it I'll paste it into Pangram to check. Which is probably not what you want to happen.

I was curious why LLMs have gotten so good at math and still aren't that good at writing, so I asked an expert. It's not because math is easier. It's because it has clear right and wrong answers and so is easier to train on. But they are coming for me next.

Most successful startups consist of a wonderfully popular product more than compensating for many mistakes by the founders. You have to have that wonderfully popular product or there is too little margin for error. But if you do, it will buy your way out of all kinds of trouble.

Robert van Engelen wrote a complete Lisp interpreter in just 99 lines of C it includes 21 built-in primitives garbage collection and an interactive REPL to prove how small it is he ran it on a Sharp pocket computer from the 1990s the source is free and every line is explained in an accompanying article

@_chenglou I was part of that team. Basically ChatGPT one year before it came out. Called LMChat and then another codename. Google was too nervous to release it and DeepMind was blocked from shipping products that could disrupt Google. I think about this a lot.

1960 Longines automatic with a cal 291 movement. Longineses are among the best bargains in vintage watches. For $700 you can get a golden age manual-wind Longines that's still accurate to 5 seconds a day (dial up).

BASH: I want you to use your bully pulpit to tells parents who have not vaccinated their kids that they should vaccine their kids for measles. Will you do that? Look into the camera RFK Jr: I'll say it right now. Parents should get their children vaccinated for measles.

In the 60s, Fairchild, that Fairchild, personally went to India because they wanted their first offshore manufacturer to be there. They wanted to produce 10 million transistors yearly; the government explicitly told them to produce only 600k. They decided to leave for Hong Kong.

What causes stagnation in the built world is one of the key questions of our era. In this month’s @WorksInProgMag, @SCP_Hughes argues quite convincingly that some of today's housing shortage is downstream of aesthetic choices. In particular, he shows that the abruptly ugly turn of postwar architecture triggered a regulatory backlash in the form of the conservation movement, which in turn stymied construction and development in urban environments across the West: It may seem tendentious to flatly declare postwar construction ugly, but survey data is quite consistent on this point. Indeed, the sentiment is so widespread that it has spawned the Tartaria conspiracy theory. While the idea that people didn’t like the modernist construction of the postwar years is not by itself a new finding, Hughes teases out the particulars of the causality and shows how this popular rejection led to ensuing stagnation. This essay builds on Hughes’s prior work (“The beauty of concrete” and “Cheap ornament and status games”), and is I think an important contribution for anyone who cares about material progress.