wait a minute, elon musk: - basically rebuilt america’s space ambitions after the shuttle program got retired. i mean the only way america could send astronauts to space was through the fucking russians! could you imagine if that dependency was still there with the conflict that exists today? - turned electric cars that no one even remotely touched into a desirable mass market product… this also resulted in vast amounts of competition & other infra development (like the super charger network). he also effectively inspired the chinese electric car industry after they basically stole all of tesla’s secrets. - acquired twitter & reopened parts of public debate that a ton of gatekeepers preferred closed & off limits. ppl got banned for simply asking questions during humanity’s most critical event (covid). - & is now saving the sheer incompetence of the american govt by building out an american semiconductor complex. you can dislike his politics, personality, or methods. but any honest macro accounting has to admit that few individuals ever have done more to rebuild strategic american capacity across space, transportation, communication, & now semiconductors. the american media judges him tweet by tweet while barely acknowledging the rockets, factories, & infrastructure being built that should’ve actually been the responsibility of the collective. this is shameful af.

i can probably take this thread point by point & counter it hardcore but the quote tweets have done that so it’s not that interesting. but beyond that.. you as an openai head of policy simply cannot publicly post content where you blatantly introduce mechanics for fud regulations that clearly favor your institution no matter how truthfully you believe in it. openai was supposed to be the *open* one, remember? how quickly do even the employees forget.

okay, enough openai criticism for a second (still gonna give product feedback when it’s deserved). it’s been a little too easy. i’ve been using gpt live a lot, like a lot lot, & it’s genuinely fucking amazing. the feature to let the model speak like a human “hmm”, “let me check”, brief pauses, & natural turn taking while calling a bigger model or searching or using tools in the background is a fantastic execution. almost all of my conversations have been nothing but pleasant, i can’t describe the feeling but it’s i think a little too good at this point. nothing else is particularly close in this category right now at all. anthropic’s voice experience still feels very very underbaked (after thought really), & gemini’s personality & intelligence seem lacking. & since it’s already reaching an enormous user base, every great gpt live interaction makes people more confident in ai as a product category instead of walking away thinking ai is a gimmick. really great work.

i remember when the joke inside fb was that twitter had fewer monthly active users than meta’s support docs. which makes it pretty funny that zuck now posts here cuz he owns 3b+ users & still has to walk into his competitor’s building to announce a model launch. whether it’s actually him or some pr person it doesn’t really matter. this platform is significant because the most interesting people, the most important people, & the people shaping the next thing still congregate here like it’s a 24/7 sermon.

it’s remarkable seeing online dating as a product complete its lifecycle. i have rarely ever witnessed products that just mechanically stop working for most of the customers ever before like this, does anyone have a good comparison? these products worked when the userbase was positively selected (early adopters, normal-ish people, 2012–2018 tinder boom) & the algo was quite dumb & they were not monetized to hell. but now selection runs the other way where staying on the apps is itself a negative signal, which is a death spiral no product fix can ever escape. this is pure adverse selection eats the market, aka lemons but for romance. pretty fun to see.

love is less a feeling than a practice of attention. the feeling is unreliable as hell, highly mimetic, & mostly noise. but beneath it there’s a chosen orientation toward another person’s reality. in this realm a model can theoretically love something or someone as much as a human can.

happy birthday america. the greatest place ever invented. i’ll spare the cliche immigrant story or whatever but one thing i think about a lot is when i moved to london ppl would basically always tell me to tone it down (cuz i used words like awesome all the time) or ppl told me i was too optimistic or that would always be enthusiastic about something working. i had hard time doing this cuz i never learned any of this behavior, it was sorta just built into me. i found that to be strange & it took me a long time to realize they they were correcting all of my priors instead of simply correcting my vocab. that’s kinda the thing that is hard to explain until you leave. what makes this place so damn unique is ppl here are unusually willing to have an absurd dream & then attempt to make it real. it’s the greatest concentration of individuals on the planet who actually try to make stuff *real*. that instinct feels almost pre programmed into americans. “why not me?” is prolly the macro that separates this country from anywhere else. ppl love comparing here to other places using metrics like healthcare, trains, safety, etc. those things matter. but they are the outputs not inputs. the inputs matter way more. kinda like sports leagues trying to create the next generation of stars by investing in little league. the macro inputs of america are the belief that the future is not something that happens to you, but something you are allowed to build or change. & here, far more than anywhere else on earth requires almost zero permission to attempt it all.. without asking for any sort of cultural consent. that’s why all of the shit you see around the world is basically invented in america. what an astonishingly ridiculous beautiful country.

monetizing internet influence is more art than science. e.g. anyone can charge for posts or launch a subscription. but power law outcomes don’t come from selling access to attention (this is also cringy to boot). they come from weaving influence into taste, trust, distribution, deal flow, talent, capital, products, equity, & culture. the commercial layer has to feel like a natural consequence of the worldview instead of a dumb ad unit. most ppl think of influence as simply inventory cuz it is natural for the human mind to operate this way but you should view influence as a compounding cultural asset.

wow i didn’t realize there is a chip in the ball that detects even the faintest of touches. can someone explain what this technology is? how reliable or accurate is it when the ball is being kicked around for 90 minutes? the amount of tech used in soccer outpaces american sports. for american sports replay review in baseball & even strike zone challenges are recent introductions. even football challenges aren’t that old (although you get limited).

in many ways, the modern internet turns a lot of ppl into deeply unpleasant versions of themselves. attention makes the self into a product. then inevitably the product starts managing the person. this is esp obvious with ppl who get a lot of attention online, god damn particularly on insta & similar platforms. everything becomes self referential.. it’s their life, their face, their taste, their trauma, their wins, or their growth. & when you add credentials (harvard law, ex google ex meta ex openai) like this, it’s gets even worse. a credentialed influencer seems to be the final boss of narcissism. where did all the humble chill ppl go?!

posting about culture is often more important than posting about technology because culture is where people decide what technology means. tech posts often explain what’s possible but culture posts decide what’s desirable, threatening, cringe, inevitable, or worth funding. when you marry the two well, it’s steroids for influence.. combined with this platform it’s the most potent worldview distribution machine ever built.

the fundamental problem with ppl who get plastic surgery or other type of physically enhancing work is that they simply do not know when to stop. if you had gracefully stopped while you were ahead, but for some reason ppl just keep going & eventually turn into michael jackson (see clavicular).