Wind overturned semi trucks in Mojave, CA today.
Paul Graham’s Tweets
Thinking back to the early days of The Ocean Cleanup, our main job was to get things done with no $.
We didn’t have money to access professional scale model testing facilities, so we got permission to use a local pool for a night, in which we constructed our own wave generator.
22
108
1,458
Show this thread
Beauty is often a guide in finding optimal solutions, but not always.
Quote Tweet
The optimal known packing of 17 equal squares into a larger square - i.e. the arrangement which minimises the size of the large square.
Show this thread
26
25
333
14 yo told me he uses ChatGPT as a sort of on-demand textbook. When he's preparing for a class, he asks it questions. He was quite surprised to hear that Sam founded OpenAI.
74
57
2,073
Well, well, well. Curiously enough, this study, by being shelved, still managed to achieve its objective of telling us more about the origins of Covid.
24
60
387
An observation I frequently make here in Japan is that it also structurally ensures that participanting industries develop cohorts of angels, who combine know-how and control of capital.
Japan largely lacks this, to the enduring detriment of its tech industry.
Quote Tweet
giving equity to employees is perhaps the key element to making startups work.
it's amazing to me that some countries make this so hard (sometimes totally economically impractical) and then wonder why they don't have more successful startups.
7
15
203
Show this thread
The young and the old feel roughly equally confused. In theory the old have things figured out, but things that matter are so hard to figure out that in practice they're only slightly ahead. Plus the young, confused as they may feel, feel less confused than they should.
39
35
445
One surprise: the phone doesn't ring audibly when it can tell you're already looking at it. I thought there was something wrong with the sound, and so did the guy at the Apple store, till he asked a colleague.
25
8
184
Show this thread
When teachers are allowed to grade standardized tests for their own students, the distribution of scores around key proficiency levels looks... let's just say "suspicious"
36
139
1,091
Show this thread
Consultants know less than they claim, cost more than they seem to, and prevent companies from developing their own in-house capabilities.
When I worked at BCG, for the most part I had no idea wtf I was talking about.
102
330
1,964
Show this thread
An interesting consequence of the wave of startups building on LLMs is that for the first time I can remember, many YC startups are facing more technology risk than market risk. The main question is not if people want it, but if it's possible to build it.
43
114
924
I traded in my iPhone 8 for an iPhone 13 mini, which I was happy to find is slightly smaller.
122
41
1,063
Show this thread
Jessica tried to send a text message and found to her annoyance that her phone was autocorrecting "you" to "Herbert Hoover." We suspected 14 yo, but it turned out that 10 yo had set his iPad to autocorrect common words to names of old presidents, and the settings were shared.
48
34
1,011
I often enjoy chasing bugs in purely functional code. But not bugs in threaded code with state. Does anyone enjoy chasing those?
155
41
588
Dynamics of structures during the earthquakes, visual explanation by Francisco García Jarque
[source: buff.ly/3YtQW8y]
82
2,019
9,359
Was talking to some founders in the current YC batch, mostly in their twenties, and they were surprised to learn why my site has what seems like a narrow column of text down the left side: that's how wide monitors used to be. In 1998 this would have been a typical browser window.
100
54
1,408
Polarization. Phoenix, 2023.
18
13
140
It's a perfect storm of bogusness, with dishonesty at each stage of the pipeline, from the sources through the writers to the readers.
This doesn't mean every story about Twitter is wrong, obviously. But it means wrong will be the default.
56
56
736
Show this thread
At this point, you should be default skeptical of any news story about Twitter. Many journalists have an agenda, there are a lot of angry ex-Twitter people ready to tell them what they want to hear, and there are a lot of readers eager to consume negative stories.
538
1,368
20.5K
Show this thread
“Staking is not a security under the US Securities Act, nor under the Howey test, which the SEC uses to determine whether an investment contract is a security.”
61
212
941
Prediction: Incumbents will try to use regulations to prevent themselves from being displaced by startups using AI. So when you see a new AI regulation being proposed (or a rule for some self-regulating industry body), ask if it serves incumbents at the expense of startups.
69
154
1,185
Charm Industrial now lets you buy CO2 removal direct through an online form. You can take a flight, and after landing, pay to have the CO2 taken back out of the atmosphere.
45
49
309
After driving a lot of the moral outrage around “privacy” and online ads, the New York Times is shocked that eliminating ad targeting leads to worse ads.
This is the privacy you craved. Why see ads for things you might like when you can see random junk instead? Thanks Apple ATT.
79
234
1,578
Show this thread
Flo Crivello was just asking whether startups or incumbents will benefit most from AI. I would bet startups do. Startups win when new technology falsifies incumbents' underlying assumptions, and AI seems a big enough change to do that.
25
25
292
I'm looking at three different versions of an essay simultaneously: the current one and two previous versions. Never had to do that before. 98% of the time it's sufficient just to look at the current draft. But this one has been a monster of rewriting.
31
6
215
I was talking to a YC partner about how long it takes for valuation to reflect reality. Our consensus: 3 years. Demo Day valuations don't mean much, but if a startup has a high valuation 3 years later, it's probably on to something.
17
34
418
They just told me that the preceding graph had a mistake in it. This is the correct graph. Still down in all 4 categories, though not as much in "targeting incidents" (yellow).
14
12
95
Show this thread
"Then I returned with my family to the United States in 1999, and I found that even reading was political: Republicans endorsed phonics, so I was expected as a good liberal to roll my eyes."
22
61
273
Yet another instance of something initially dismissed as a toy turning out to be more useful than most people expected.
Quote Tweet
Kind of crazy that a computing device designed for desktop gaming has become critical to the emergence of super useful AI systems.
41
43
640
“European countries spend a third less on research and development than America or Japan, as a share of gdp, and are out-invested even by China nowadays.”
24
90
747
Show this thread
Here's Musa's article, which contains further evidence:
14
10
144
Show this thread
Musa al-Gharbi recently published an article saying that wokism had peaked. So I asked , which among other things tracks cancellation attempts at universities, and sure enough all 4 of the measures they track are down. Maybe we've turned the corner!
95
108
980
Show this thread
Amusing data point: I did office hours with 5 startups yesterday. I began by asking each "What does your startup do?" And in 5 out of 5 cases, the first two words of their reply were the same: Yeah, so...
58
38
1,023
Show this thread
Partly the goal is to test whether I understand them. But the exercise of finding the shortest possible explanation is also a useful one in itself. It usually helps to clarify the idea.
18
17
781
Show this thread
One thing I usually do when I first meet a new startup is to listen to their explanation of what they do till I understand it, and then re-explain their startup back to them in the fewest possible words.
92
154
2,442
Show this thread
Within YC this has long been a running joke.
"What do you think of the current batch?"
"Pretty good, except the companies aren't as good as in the past, and valuations are too high."
12
9
153
Show this thread
Judging from this article, UK tech journalism seems to be roughly 11 years behind US tech journalism. US tech journalists were already using the old "the companies aren't as good as in the past, and valuations are too high" line about YC in 2012.
20
9
106
Show this thread
In the UK you have to pay for a "TV license" if you watch live video in any form. The collection of this revenue is outsourced to tax farmers, who in some cases send investigators to trick suspected violators into incriminating themselves.
33
13
251
Show this thread
In Scotland, you can be sent to prison for expressing forbidden opinions in a private conversation, in your own home.
20
20
294
Show this thread
It's only fair to do the same thing for weird things about the UK. One of the weirdest is that people speak in two different accents (or more precisely 1+n different accents, since there are a huge number of regional accents) depending on their social class.
11
5
167
Show this thread