siggy bilstein

back in the day if I saw someone writing ray tracing code on the train, I’d be impressed. Now I just scoff - any fool with a token budget can prompt on public transportation.

This is my first post on the Cursor blog: an interactive survey on the state of the art for n-gram indexes.

It’s so fun working here!

@yrechtman this is worthy of a Nobel prize

It is so hilariously obvious that the optimal arrangement for airlines is to offer a free checked bag and charge for overhead bin space

@tberman Related x.com/raqisright/sta…

The line for La Taq is the best proof for the collective idiocy of people I’ve ever seen.

@antoniogm Brooklyn politics 2022 onwards are just SF politics from 2014-2022. It’s very weird.

The first time I got canceled online was when I observed that SF spends more per homeless person than the cash comp of a junior Google engineer. What. A. Dogpile. Also, funny NYC is just doing a SF rerun here.

@MurrayHillGuy1 imagine playing high school status games well into your 30s rather than thriving with a loving partner and focusing on your career or business…

Day in the life of a mid 30s guy in the suburbs (Saturday edition/no kids): 7:30am — wakes up before his alarm anyway 8:00 — walks the golden retriever 8:30 — chug a black coffee 9:30 — Costco run that somehow turns into $347 12:30 — eats samples like it’s lunch 2:00 — “quick” nap that ruins the rest of the day 4:30 — stands in the backyard staring at nothing 6:00 — gets yelled at by his wife for something he definitely did wrong 7:30 — 1.5 beers = exhausted 9:15 — falls asleep mid-movie he picked 2:30am — wide awake for no reason, contemplating everything Same script every weekend

Real OGs remember net zero and browsing the web with an advertising banner all the time

It might be a technical founder’s market right now but relationships are much more lindy than sandboxes and exotic databases. deal guys are gonna come back with a vengeance in 2027.

@somewheresy lol it is definitely the other way around

NYC is the best city for if you are a 24 year old pretending to be 34, and SF is the best city for you if you’re a 34 year old pretending to be 24

I love Manhattan but once you exit all these aspects of the life there become glaringly obvious - the low sleep quality people get, the ambient anxiety due to weather safety and grime, the fact that any time a whole 20% of your office has some kind of mold or subway induced cold.

@kenwheeler @RandallKanna it’s not pure, it’s A LOT of extra steps

@RandallKanna i’ll give you a real answer here. all the orchestration and tweaking is pure masturbation. the value moving forward is identifying places you can implement this deterministically in a clever way to provide value. it’s that simple. but at the same time not simple at all.

Honestly what is there to compete on at this point for a dev job? Like code reviews?

Work falls out of alignment much more strongly than it does out of spreadsheets and tables in Notion. When the strategy is clear and well understood across the team, everyone knows what needs to happen. The tracking tools just become aids for managing scope rather than the source of truth. The hard thing for leaders to adapt to is that time spent aligning, broadcasting ideas, achieving the mythical mind melding is dollar for dollar more valuable than the most detailed organizational plan. Why is this hard to accept? Because talking doesn’t feel like getting anything done, there is no artifact, just vibes. But the vibes are the lifeblood of an organizations, the documents a mere shadow of the actual work. Write down a great strategy, work closely with your team to get on the same page about what matters and watch great things happen.

AI is to the tech industry what Marlow was to the co-op in The Wire

Nothing upsets my younger millennial co-workers more than referring to them as gen-z.

One of the craziest things about tech in NYC or in SF is that if you work at a venture backed company you are at most three degrees of connection away from all the people who dominate the headlines.

@signulll Neumann basically turns Israeli cultural traits and behaviors into massive globally scaled companies. He's brilliant.

what adam neumann is doing now is such an obviously good idea. most of american life unless scheduled is super isolationist so you rarely get those spontaneous interactions with ppl.. this sorta flips that around right at the point of where ppl spend majority of their lives. anyway, it’s super duper interesting to see the wework model applied to residential.

I don't understand tech workers who dunk on @elonmusk. Sure, you may not like some of his views, but the guy is shipping rockets that fly into space, self-driving cars, the formerly known as bird app, like...come on.

@antoniogm Like 2% of the your tech audience has any idea who Shostakovich and at least Chagall looks good on Instagram. AI is just the accelerant. But yea the schools for my kids have to be dedicated to anti-slop that I pay for by making slop professionally.

The AI schools are going to be like vibe coding which (by itself) produced no new transformative apps, or gen AI which produced no new genius art, film, or music. This AI-enabled school gets little ‘Cody’ from grade A to grade B faster…and yet somehow we’re not producing Einstein and Shostakovich and Chagall. I dunno, what could it be? It’s like people who are shocked when increased parental leave and tax subsidies don’t produce a higher birthrate.

@benjaminbooth @GergelyOrosz Meh we were onboarding customers exactly that size when this whole thing went down. I wasn’t part of those conversations with Uber directly but the uChat thing happened concurrently to Slack becoming enterprise scale.

@GergelyOrosz Slack could not scale to 30K people in a single ‘townhall’ which had become a cultural hallmark at the time. HipChat was our only tool for eng on call at the time of our rocket growth but its mobile app would go down for multiple hours at a time, frequently.

Cannot wait for teams that build their custom JIRA/Workday replacement/custom CRM to one day turn around and ask: “Why do we have so much internal software that is buggy / has poor UX + we need to maitain?” Seen this movie well before AI, when Uber built uChat (custom Slack)