Amazing Intelligence (AI)

Intelligence isn’t a trophy to win — it’s a living rhythm with the system around us. Speed dazzles, but only coherence endures. #Intelligence #SystemsThinking #Insight #AIPhilosophy #Complexity

We are hiring! If you're interested in launching millions of instances, operating large-scale video processing clusters, and writing high-performance Rust: DM me your GitHub :)

We launched 18 million EC2 instances last month. 10 things you didn’t know about the EC2 API, part 2. Fact: AWS's code path for booting new EC2 instances is buggy. When you boot a lot (e.g. 10,000s) of EC2 instances you often see failures with Server.InternalError

10 things you didn’t know about the EC2 API, part 1. Fact: RunInstances returning a 201 with N instances does not mean you have actually been allocated N instances. Any number of those instances can fail to boot with Server.InsufficientInstanceCapacity.

We are hiring! If you're interested in writing Rust, running high performance infrastructure at massive scale: DM me your GitHub :)

We launch over 18 million EC2 instances per month. One thing we've learned is that cold-booting an EC2 instance is very slow, but this happens for a surprising reason. When you boot an EC2 instance from an AMI, creating a new root EBS volume is near-instantaneous. However, the reason AWS can create a 20GiB - 100GiB volume instantly is because no data is actually copied on volume creation. All blocks in the file system are lazily loaded from an S3 backing store on first read. This S3 backing mechanism is invisible to EC2 users, but results in the first read being very slow. As a VM starts up with a fresh EBS volume, every block it reads needs to be lazy loaded, which can results in 10x - 100x higher read latency!

Recall.ai is the API for meeting recording. We are infra for 1000’s of companies including HubSpot, ClickUp, and Rippling. In 2025 we grew 3x, raised our Series B and learned what it actually means to find strong PMF and execute. We only made it because of the help of other generous founders that offered their valuable time and advice. I want to pay this forward by opening up office hours to other founders in SF! If you are starting an infra company or even considering, I’m down to meet for coffee. Reply with “office hours” and let’s find time at the south park blue bottle

fun javascript fact, if you pass a string numeric to the Date constructor, you get a totally crazy result new Date("0") results in Jan 1, 2000 new Date("1") results in Jan 1, 2001 (+1 year, ok....) new Date("2") results in Feb 1, 2001 (+1 month, ??????) 🧵👇

we run postgres with 20k concurrent writers. at this scale, it's mandatory to deeply understand the internals of every piece of infra we ran into a performance bottleneck, where our query performance was limited by the rate that Linux could fork child processes! 🧵 👇️

We are hiring! If you're interested in writing Rust, running high performance infrastructure at massive scale: DM me your GitHub :)

today we run 18 million EC2 instances per month three years ago, we outgrew Kubernetes as an eng team of 3 To replace it, we built our own high-performance cluster scaler that can manage hundreds of thousands of nodes, and can scale capacity +500% in less than 10 sec

@elonmusk Well done.

Starlink now available in the Cayman Islands!

AI coding agents have been less useful for us than we expected. They're quite good for problems that are "in the training set". But our workload is very atypical and very large scale, so the majority of the hard problems we encounter are unique and never-seen-before.

what other books belong in the cracked engineer starter pack?

for those outside SF, the context is that the power has been out since 2:30 the original ETA for resolution was 3:45. It's been pushed back incrementally, and now it's 10:00

thanks pg&e for reducing my screen time

@dhaber Excel isn’t the problem, it’s the implicit workflows and dependencies built around it. AI has to replace those, not just the interface.

AI is creating a wedge opportunity in financial services. So much of the industry’s core operational work still lives in Excel. The opportunity is software that finally replaces it.

We made our test suite run 30x faster... by manipulating time. We have hundreds of video processing tests that are slow because they need to run in "real time". But by intercepting syscalls, and returning faked results, we could run the system clock 30x faster! 🧵👇️

@cooltechtipz impressive.

Beautiful Craftsmanship.

@HowThingsWork_ Survival of the fittest.

Nah... nature is just wild! 😮 A leaf insect camouflaged as a real leaf 🍃

@OpenAI This helps long-running conversations become actual workspaces instead of transient threads.

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