_vaporwave_

> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Seems sort of prescient considering what's going on today.

Source code here: https://github.com/elijahrogers/bundle_alphabetically

This is basically the "Boots theory":

> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

It looks like they might not get the bailout they're hoping for - https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1986476840207122440

> The iPhone wasn't successful because of its beautiful design. It was because it packed everything we needed every day—phone calls, music, internet, photos, maps—into a single device.

Have to disagree here. There were many devices before (and after) the iPhone that offered this package but it stands above the rest because of its design and polish.

It's interesting that Anthropic maintains current prices for prior state of the art models when doing a new release. Why offer a model with worse performance for the same price? What incentives are they trying to create?

Is there a simple (visual) way to test for this?

I thought the same initially but this may just be a case of recency bias. Small caps have underperformed large cap stocks for the last ~12 years but these things tend to go in cycles: https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2025/04/24/small-cap....

It will be interesting to see how the next cycle plays out with the recent concentration of returns in large cap tech stocks (Magnificent 7).

Very cool! Do you have a contingency in place for things like power outages?

> a helpful order of magnitude estimate is that the hiring process all told costs the company approximately a year’s salary

It feels weird to gloss over this since transaction costs this high have a huge impact on how the system should be designed.

I think it's clear that this was not at all an "arm's length negotiation" with an independent Special Committee but, at the same time, it's not clear that any harm was done to Tesla shareholders.

Tesla traded up on the news that the pay package was re-approved by shareholders and the similar voting outcome (72% vs 73% originally) in light of all of this information seems to indicate that the shareholders genuinely want this to go through.

This is a really neat demo!

Just a heads up though your site layout is broken in Safari

Anyone else catch this reference in one of the examples?

> 9.11 and 9.9 -- which is bigger

https://community.openai.com/t/why-9-11-is-larger-than-9-9-i...

It's really interesting that there's a huge performance discrepancy between these SOTA models. In the Olympic logo example, GPT-4o is below the baseline accuracy of 20% (worse than randomly guessing) while Sonnet-3.5 was correct ~76% of the time.

Does anyone have any technical insight or intuition as to why this large variation exists?

Considering how many founders he's come into contact with, I'm curious why PG chose the Collison Brothers as the exemplary persistent entrepreneurs. Perhaps it's their inclination to tackle complex and unwieldy regulatory challenges that most tech founders shy away from?

That plot summary is... dark. Does anyone know how long the story is? Most of the copies I found online are collections of short stories.

Much of the article is rehashing common takes on social media and the attention economy, but this is the money quote imo:

“Eventually, the addiction to useless info leads to what I call “intellectual obesity.” Just as gorging on junk food bloats your body, so gorging on junk info bloats your mind, filling it with a cacophony of half-remembered gibberish that sidetracks your attention and confuses your senses. Unable to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, you become concerned by trivialities and outraged by falsehoods. These concerns and outrages push you to consume even more, and all the time that you're consuming, you're prevented from doing anything else: learning, focusing, even thinking”

I think a lot of people (myself included) have fallen for this pernicious trap at some point.

This reminded me of the recent request for startups proposal by Surbhi Sarna “A way to end cancer”. The proposal states that we already have a way (MRI) to diagnose cancer at very early stages where treatment is feasible but cost and scaling need to be tackled to make it widely accessible.

Something like this low power MRI could be a key part of enabling a transformation of cancer treatment.

“The Man Who Solved The Market” is fascinating because it spans almost the entire history quantitative finance (through the lens of RenTech) dating back to the 1970s.

Simmons was one of the first to realize the advantage of collecting and analyzing vast sums of data to identify patterns in financial markets. They were digitizing magnetic tapes and collecting more data than they could even process given technical limitations of the time.

I had no idea AI audio generation had made so much progress lately. Was there some recent model/architecture innovation that enabled this or just refinement with existing tools?