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I have been saying this for a while now?
xitter.cf/lahjar_/status/1882068…
.@satyanadella expects a slow takeoff:
"The real problem will be in the courts.
No society is going to allow for some human to say, 'AI did that'"
When you attempt to optimise for being good at just doing things, instead of painstakingly agonising over doing the right thing
THIS is the outcome you get
Says something is math
Gets said math wrong
Seemingly the recipe to being successful...
Becoming successful is not luck. It’s math.
If your probability of success is 1/100 and you try 100 times, you have a 100% chance of success.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The post encourages persistence, but the stated probability is inaccurate. For independent trials with 1/100 success chance each, the probability of at least one success in 100 tries is about 63%, not 100%. Calculation: 1 - (0.99)^100 ≈ 0.634
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_… math.stackexchange.com/questions/1885…
Rishal retweeted
There's a bias in AI discourse where we say certain things were achieved with AI, but they were also achieved with millions of dollars.
Like if we gave every traditional scientist tens of millions per year, they'd probably be coming up with plenty of fancy new solutions too.
Rishal retweeted
I'm actively hiring right now so I want to push back on something.
When a big company lets a few hundred people go, the CEO doesn't get up and say "we over-hired in 2022 and made bad bets on headcount." That's the honest version. It also gets you fired by the board.
What they say instead is: "AI makes us more efficient, so we're rightsizing." It sounds strategic. It's defensible. And it has just enough truth in it to be believable.
The problem is we've started treating those press releases as ground truth about where the industry is headed - and then drawing conclusions about the profession from them.
What I actually see on the ground in SF: most companies I know that are doing well are hiring A LOT.
Because the demand for software isn't shrinking. If anything, we still have more software to build than we have people to build it well.
Junior roles are changing shape, yes. The work is shifting. But that's a different thing than mass contraction of the field.
Pay attention to what companies are doing, not what they're saying about why.
Rishal retweeted
Since publishing "The Abstraction Fallacy," the most common pushback relies on a deeply ingrained but flawed metaphor: the assumption that the brain is a computer. Here is a brief clarification on why it is not, and why this matters for computational functionalism. 1/5
philpapers.org/rec/LERTAF
Such distinguished eloquence
Tears in my eyes!
Replying to @KTmBoyle
I cannot wait until the White House changes hands and all of you ghouls switch back from "you're a traitor unless you bootlick so hard your tongue goes numb" to "the government asking any questions about my offshore fentanyl casino is vile tyranny and I will throw myself in the San Francisco Bay in protest", like werewolves at the last ray of the setting moon.
Rishal retweeted
Very little about software engineering has changed over past last three months.
A great deal has changed about coding, not unlike when we saw the rise of high order programming languages and compilers, the difference today being that the number of developers is far larger and distribution channels are such that the velocity and breadth of change is far greater.
The entire history of software engineering is one of raising the level of abstraction.
Whoever goes to meet him next
Let Aaron Swartz know
The world owes him an apology
NVIDIA allegedly contacted Anna's Archive directly for access to ~500 terabytes of "pirated" books and papers for pre-training their LLMs
Anna's warned them the collections were illegal and copyrighted.
NVIDIA's data strategy team pushed anyway; executives gave the green light within days, per internal docs cited in the lawsuit.
If you can create a mechanism for telling a machine what to do, that is precise, concise, and can unambiguously suffice
That IS a programming language
And you can dress up the remaining pieces however you want
For vibes and hype
Cursor CEO Michael Truell on the future of writing code: “ Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming.”
“It looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English.”
“You can imagine kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level.”
“It won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much terser and easier to understand and easier to navigate.”
Source: @mntruell (CEO @cursor_ai) with @lennysan on Lenny's Podcast
youtube.com/watch?v=En5cSXgG…
This entire Soham thing seems like a Sokal-esque revelation of the system we have venerated and rewarded
Or like what @peterboghossian did recently
And exactly like those instances, the system has decided to blame the trigger rather than look inward at its huge issues
Rishal retweeted
YC asked “Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.” in their application for the longest time and you're all still surprised about the cluelies and sohams of the world
Rishal retweeted
Partnered with SPC for next hackathon in Bangalore, India.
Future builders in Bangalore, join in..
@agihouseindia
@modelsmafialabs
Replying to @spc
We’re teaming up with an incredible crew of partners who move fast & think big!
@Microsoft @awscloud @OpenAI @elevenlabs @perplexity_ai @SarvamAI @TheWTFund @productfolks @agihouseindia, @modelsmafialabs @atalovesyou @Headstart_IN
Rishal retweeted
We’re not the best at pictures — others might’ve made a big deal out of this.
But when our suppliers send us these pics, I smile. Because they’re just as passionate as we are.
Even with cities blacked out, machines were on. Work didn’t stop. Everyone was firing on all cylinders.
This part was on the 5-axis a few days ago. Now it’s ready.
Lights can go out — but not the spirit.
Rishal retweeted
VERY EXCITING NEWS!
We at Arctus Aerospace are setting up a state-of-the-art 10,000 square foot UAV manufacturing facility in Bangalore, India!!
More details soon!!!📈🚀❤️
@gradcapital @spc @abhisheksethi96 @prateekmehta42 @prateekbehera96 @ankitcc @bwertz
Getting More credits and tools added by the day
This is the place to be for all building models for regional use cases!
Resilience happens a lot through redundancy
And redundancy in most places, is just a consequence of legacy systems
1. The upside is probably more in the PE scale than the VC (but that's been a weirdness going on for a while now)
2. It isn't really ARR, given how rapidly things are shifting in this landscape. Very difficult to reasonably believe even >50% is recurring
3. Primarily a BIG problem for founders and employees, given how prefs work. Hopefully they've taken out huge secondaries 🤞
Most people who would do this
Don't care about your privacy or data or security
Marrying someone who wants to build this at scale and can raise capital/support to do so, while also doing it in a manner that maximizes the right values, not capital accrual
Is extremely hard
Rishal retweeted
Lovable/Cursor/Bolt have created a "Home Depot moment" for apps
It hasn't killed software development; it has simply opened the doors for non-professionals to participate in something previously inaccessible due to skill and capital-based barriers to entry.
"But that app is terrible, wait until they deal with the reality of maintaining an app with real customers and scaling infrastructure..."
I think this argument misses the point entirely. Very few people walk into Home Depot thinking, "I'm going to build my dream home and then immediately start a home-building company"
People go to Home Depot to buy the things required to solve their small and idiosyncratic problems—painting a room, fixing the deck, building a house for their dog.
I think the same thing is happening with apps—there's a level of joy AND utility in building an app that solves a personal and potentially, ephemeral need.
Home Depot didn't displace professional painters nor did it put them in competition with the DIY'er attempting to paint a room in their house to save some money, learn a new skill, for the enjoyment, or all of the above.
I think the tension we see today occurs when the DIY painter finishes their first room and immediately starts bragging to the world, "There's no need for professional painters anymore; Just go to Home Depot and do it yourself!"
The definition of "app" is changing.
While previously, consumers equated "app" to "highly professional and reliable", we're now seeing a wide array of "apps" flooding the market; some great, some good, and some, quite frankly—dangerous to consumers.
I really think the only outcome here is consumers increasing their skepticism while subscribing to new apps and placing a higher value on the "origin" of the app. Durable apps will continue to capture the majority of the market.
Just like the industrialization of farming led consumers to care a lot more about the sustainability and origin of their foods, I think this mass-production of applications will wake consumers up to the quality of the apps they're using; not just whether it looks good and works well. It will probably also lead to more stringent review processes in app stores :/
Nevertheless, AI code generation has opened up a creative outlet for thousands of people that will most certainly push existing apps to innovate faster. And for that reason alone, I think it's a huge win for everyone.


























