tikkun

I polled my friends and there were two major themes:

1) Claude/ChatGPT (copy and pasting back and forth)

2) Cursor

When I Say No I Feel Guilty.

Never Split The Difference.

The Gift of Fear.

Those 3.

FAQs I found:

Is it available for use now? Nope

When will it be available for use? On FB, IG and WhatsApp in 2025

Will it be open sourced? Maybe

What are they doing before releasing it? Working with filmmakers, improving video quality, reducing inference time

Related, thanks to Ethan for mentioning this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644315

Also related TrueBill, Rocket Money (thanks to Ron for mentioning these 2), and DoNotPay, but they don't quite solve this. Maybe one of them will in the future.

Makes me think of: some of Taleb's ideas about just-in-time manufacturing (no slack eg covid supply shocks)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack

Also, can't recall it but a long time ago I read a piece about how scheduling a system to 60% of its max capacity is generally about right, to allow for expected but unexpected variations (also makes me think of the concept of stochastic process control and how we can figure out the level of expected unexpected variations, which could give us an even better sense of what %-of-capacity to run a system at)

See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195527

> We need to act wisely but with conviction.

Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE)

* "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote)

* "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity."

* "the ability to sort of like, stay calm and centered during hard and stressful moments, and to make decisions that are where you're not too reactive"

> If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.

This seems to be the key of the piece to me. It's his manifesto for raising money for the infra side of things. And, it resonates: I don't want ASI to only be affordable to the ultra rich.

The future will be abundant, because deep learning works. To achieve that, we need to be calm, but cautious. And, we need to fund infra (chips and power) so that AGI isn't limited to the ultra-wealthy.

My take:

* Foom/doom isn't helpful. But, calm cautiousness is. If you're acting from a place of fear and emotional dysregulation, you'll make ineffective choices. If you get calm and regulated first, and then take actions, they'll be more effective. (This is my issue with AGI-risk people, they often seem triggered/fear/alarm-driven rather than calm but cautious)

* Piece is kind of a manifesto for raising money for AI infra

* Sam's done a podcast before about meditation where he talked about similar themes of "prudence without fear" and the dangers of "deep fear and panic and anxiety" and instead the importance of staying "calm and centered during hard and stressful moments" - responding, not reacting (strong +1)

* It's no accident that o1 is very good at math physics and programming. It'll keep getting much better here. Presumably this is the path for AGI to lead to abundance and cheaper energy by "solving physics"

I'll note that both photoshop and changing the timestamp of images (mentioned below) are only easy for a very small percentage of the population. It'd likely be different if >30% of people could easily do these things.

Is this Jim Neilsen related to Jakob Neilsen (famous UI guy)?

Overview: https://storm-project.stanford.edu/research/storm/

I'm optimistic that hallucination rates will go down quite a bit again with the next gen of models (gpt5 / claude 4 / gemini 2 / llama 4).

I've noticed that the hallucination rate of newer more SOTA models is much lower.

3.5 sonnet hallucinates less than gpt 4 which hallucinates less than gpt 3.5 which hallucinates less than llama 70b which hallucinates less than gpt 3.

> I can't help myself but think that some fundamentals changed over the past 2-3 years in the software space.

LLMs enabled many new companies & created demand for more products/startups.

Related note: It'd be great if cities were more child friendly. A big challenge is cars, the 4000+ lb fast moving metal boxes... It'd be great if there were more car-minimal areas in cities, enclosed areas with parks and restaurants that had parking on the outside, but no cars and parking on the inside. And, in areas where there are cars, it'd be great if it went: sidewalk, bike lane, barrier, parking, then cars. That way there's a big "margin of safety" between where kids walk and where the cars are.

tough to answer. depends on the llm, on the api provider or hosting method, on the prompt

but you could get a simple estimate by running a CoT prompt, copying the output tokens, and then using an online token counter to count the length & tokens of the CoT part of the completion

mostly they're going straight to code, designing in code

it'd be cool to have generative ux tools for wireframing though, if that's what you're getting at

"Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" [Sutskever] said.

Any guesses?

Sonos owner; I strongly dislike it. I disliked it on the old app, too. Will get Apple homepods next.

What is this / what does it do? I'm confused by the site and the OP :)

Founder mode examples I've noticed:

1. Steve Jobs approach:

- Multiple teams tackling the same problem with different approaches (done for Mac OS X and iPhone)

- Let the best approach win

2. Nat Friedman's take:

   "The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful. Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment. The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension. The downsides are worth it"

3. Stay connected to the customer

- Have a separate early adopter version of your product even when your company is big

- Founders taking customer calls (Eric Yuan, Zoom)

- Checking customer notes on X (Brian Chesky does this)

- Reading external cold emails from customers to the CEO, and replying to some (Steve Jobs and Bezos did this)

4. Stay connected to the reality of the company

- Anyone internally can email the CEO and suggest ideas, critique things

5. Have redundancy

- For any areas of the company that are critical, run two separate versions for as long as possible

- Humans have two of basically everything critical (except the brain, likely due to energy constraints): reproductive organs, hands, legs, eyes, ears, nostrils, why don't companies

I've done similar. Check Upwork, codementor, clarity.fm, now also intro.co. Also post specific questions on niche forums and subreddits and DM the people who give the most helpful answers.

If you take this route OP, I hope that you'll ensure the freelancers are in person and on site. It's much easier for them to build the right software if they can sit next to the users.

If this isn't by Nous Research, may want to consider renaming (https://x.com/NousResearch, https://nousresearch.com/)

Yes, and in comparison to whatever your best alternative would be (i.e. max increase of success odds of giving someone else the same equity and same time commitment).

This is a great offer, and I can see how it'll be helpful both to you (for need finding) and for the people you coach.

However, it gives me a weird vibe to see it be anonymous.

What was the peak? I see estimated 211 million visits in June 2024, vs 86 million in Feb 2023.

They are likely unprofitable.

Yes that seems right. Though I think they could've gotten a new investment round if they wanted one, I'd be surprised if that was the cause.

I imagine he still had 15%+ of the company, so if there was a big payout, he would've gotten a big slice. Treat all my estimates with a grain of salt, though, please. I'm imagining he didn't get a huge payout and he actually kept most of his equity?