Ed 

🧵 Here’s the tea on Design Tokens for Twitter’s new Visual Design Language. Specifically, the learnings that I gained working on Android, iOS, and Web for the Revenue, Marketing, and Consumer design systems. (1/7)

> its 2028 in san francisco > you are one of the last software engineers > “human in the loop” is your job description > wake up for your 9am standup at openai > scan your face to verify age > you join the call as the only human, the agents initiate slow mode so you can follow along > discussion around optimizing power consumption for models on autonomous weapons > consider raising an ethics concern > remember your job is symbolic > close laptop > $1.50 costco hotdog for breakfast. the last affordable meal in SF > agents ping you occasionally (less often now) > walk back to your studio with 2 roommates > see your ex-cofounder on the street > you two built a website for tracking what stores carried white monster in 2019 > you built that website by hand and had a blast doing it “must…. escape the… permanent underclass” he rambles “we never had a chance,” you think > phone buzzes > email from HR > you’ve been laid off > sama tweets that openai is 100% automated > openai stock booms > 90% of the world’s wealth is controlled by 8 people > you are the permanent underclass

AI creates a productivity ceiling that's decoupled from human understanding. People keep doing things, but don't learn while doing. The depth of knowledge underneath is eroding. The rate at which AI improves sets the speed limit for humanity.

16 oz = 1 lb. 12 inches = 1 foot. 3 feet = 1 yard. 1760 yards = 1 mile. 32° freezes, 98.6° body temp, 212° boils. Fluid oz ≠ oz. 😬🔫

@aakashgupta If this is the case wouldn’t all large cap IPOs want to price themselves extremely high? Investors get an exit and retail + 401(k)s bear the burden until lock up sinks the ship

SpaceX is engineering a $50B+ automatic buy wall before the stock even trades. Here’s why this is so much bigger than people realize. Normally, a company IPOs, waits 6-12 months of “seasoning,” then maybe gets considered for S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100 inclusion at a quarterly rebalance. That waiting period exists so the stock can establish a trading history, prove liquidity, and show it won’t collapse 30 days in. SpaceX wants to skip all of that. And Nasdaq is literally rewriting its rules to accommodate them. Nasdaq just proposed a “Fast Entry” rule that lets any new listing with a market cap in the top 40 of current index constituents join after just 15 trading days. The old minimum was three months. SpaceX’s expected IPO valuation of $1-1.5 trillion would make it a top-10 constituent on day one. The math on why this matters: roughly $16 trillion in assets directly track or benchmark against the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Index funds like SPY, VOO, and IVV alone manage over $2 trillion combined. When a stock enters one of these indexes, every passive fund and ETF tracking it has to buy shares in proportion to the company’s weight. For a company valued at $1 trillion+, that forced buying could easily exceed $50 billion in the weeks following inclusion. SpaceX is pre-negotiating an artificial demand floor before a single retail investor places an order. Think about what this tells you about how Musk and SpaceX’s advisers view the IPO risk. They’re targeting a valuation of 60-70x sales on $22 billion in expected 2026 revenue. At that multiple, the stock needs constant buying pressure to hold. Index inclusion creates that pressure mechanically, through fund inflows that happen regardless of whether any human analyst thinks the price makes sense. Tesla rallied 60% between its S&P 500 inclusion announcement and actual addition in December 2020. SpaceX watched that playbook, and now they’re trying to compress the timeline from months to days. Meanwhile, index providers are now competing to attract the biggest IPOs by weakening the very rules designed to protect index integrity. Nasdaq is proposing Fast Entry. S&P will face pressure to match or lose the listing. The indexes are turning into customer acquisition tools for trillion-dollar debuts. And every passive investor in a 401(k) will automatically become a SpaceX shareholder at whatever price the market sets in those first 15 trading days, whether they want to be or not.

@striedinger @sebastienlorber Typeahead would be a nightmare. You wouldn’t know what to match for. Even for 2 languages you’d probably get 30 results no matter what you type.

@sebastienlorber Do you know how many emojis x language combinations there are

As a non-native English speaker, there's nothing more annoying than localized emoji pickers I mean, can't you return me emoji search hits for ❤️ in both English and French? 😅

@JohnTitor @HighyieldHarry That’s not how a take private works.

@HighyieldHarry And if you sold your Twitter shares to protest Elon, you're retarded.

If you bought the X bank debt & HY bonds, back at ~13% yields you’ve now parlayed your way into being a Creditor to the largest IPO ever. What a journey.

There is so much to be said about this tour. My first instinct was to go into critique mode. But I have thought about this for a while. And honestly for a 21 year old I would say he has done something beautiful. Something that will be remembered for a long time. He did more for African tourism (once you remove the really embarrassing Nigerian part of it) than any tourism board in Africa in the past few years. He was a young man having the time of his life, coming with no pretence of expertise or philanthropy. Just doing random stuff he enjoyed. Sometimes chaotic. Often genuine interactions with people across the continent. We saw the funny, the interesting and the ugly (again, thanks Nigeria). I see a rare example of a young streamer who has gone beyond the sometimes banal streaming culture to do something truly worthwhile.

@alex_du @Bitcoineo In 1990s China, you could move cities for work, but your children couldn't attend local public schools. Schools were funded by hukou (household registration), not where you actually lived. Millions of families had to leave kids behind with grandparents or pay for schools.

@EdDaWord @Bitcoineo As someone who lives in China, I'm not aware of inter city movement restrictions. Can you elaborate?

I wonder if Chinese people who emigrated to the US in the 90s regret it, or feel some kind of "what if" nostalgia regarding China's economic boom. They sold apartments in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen for a few thousand dollars, worth millions today, and missed the golden age of career growth. For most, it took twenty years of grinding just to reach the middle class. On top of that, many lack a real community, have no friends, and must drive to go anywhere from their house. Some have reached a state of resigned contentedness. And for what? Better education for their children? They likely could have sent them to US universities without leaving China (and probably afforded it more easily). I have friends who benefited from that move who now feel a sense of embarrassment, even guilt. The pressure on their shoulders is huge. They feel they cannot waste the life their parents sacrificed everything to give them. Would love to hear your thoughts or stories on that @hotpot_dao, @QwQiao, and @howdymerry.

Coding with AI killed my flow state. I went from solving puzzles to picking dialogue options.

A single ICU Nurse is worth more to society than every ICE Agent put together.

They executed him on his knees in the street. I cannot believe what is happening to my country. I say this not as a Democrat, or a Republican, but as an American. They are boiling us like frogs, trying to acclimate us to the destruction of our nation.

@patrickmandia lol build generational company, lmao even.

personal software is such a fugazi. they're building tiktok-level dopamine machines that make you feel like a god while building useless throwaway apps. similar to tok, they lower the barrier to entry for creators, but i think the interest curve decays much faster than short-form video creation/consumption. how many times is bro gonna make personal software for tracking reps at the gym?

PSA: if you're on an H1B and are under 26 years old. Do yourself a favor and look into this: sss.gov

Silicon Valley venture capitalists love spreading slop about high speed rail like they didn't give 89 billion quintillion to WeWork

@ramit Correct me if I am wrong, but I suspect it’s a combination of optionality, support, and high expectations. The problem is when parents expect a single way for their child to succeed. Sometimes they get a grateful success story, sometimes they create a successful depressed adult.

Growing up in a traditional Indian household with high expectations, I've had a lot of time to think about achievement & pressure Personally, I love the pressure. I thrive under it. Now that I'm an adult, I look back and I'm thankful my parents pushed me to achieve in school. They had explicit expectations: - "Of course you're going to college" - "Of course you're going to get straight As" - "You're expected to play sports" It was never a question if we were going to college. We knew we would They didn't force us to stay involved in activities we didn't love, but they insisted we try it at least once. Some of the activities I did, thanks to their urging: - Tee-ball - Boy scouts - Playing piano for seniors in elderly care homes - Bhangra - Scholastic reading club - Soccer - Track - Tennis - Spelling bee - FBLA - Mock Trial - Volunteering at Loaves & Fishes The expectations are just part of it. They spent time, like my mom spending hours quizzing me on spelling bee words and my dad spending hours helping me understand calculus. They took us on college tours when were in middle school. They took us to India many times as kids When I only got an A-, they asked why I didn't get an A (frustrating at the time, but it taught me what excellence requires). Later, when I reached my capabilities with calculus, I was shocked to discover that my parents said, "Well, you did the best you could" and they eased off. That was especially amazing because I truly had done the best I could...and I just wasn't very good They also had non-academic expectations for us. We went to Gurdwara (Sikh Temple) every Sunday. My dad was principal of our Sunday school. We volunteered, we played sports. My mom found ways for us to do all of this on limited income Looking back, we thrived. I learned what it takes to work hard, especially as I got into junior high & high school with a competitive group of friends who pushed me to be better But as I later learned, not every kid thrives under this kind of pressure. I know some Asian/Indian friends who resent their parents. Some who are unable to rid themselves of purely transactional achievement. There is a real cost of this style: You focus on achievement but you're rarely taught what else matters besides grades, college, & grad school Some do well, some don't. I haven't been able to find a reason why some kids thrive and others don't under similar parenting styles In my case, I was lucky to be curious about all of the other ways to live a Rich Life beyond academic achievement. But I'm glad I had that academic foundation and I admire ALL the parents who push their kids to achieve more

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask: "What do you think about xyz"? There is no "you". Next time try: "What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?" The LLM can channel/simulate many perspectives but it hasn't "thought about" xyz for a while and over time and formed its own opinions in the way we're used to. If you force it via the use of "you", it will give you something by adopting a personality embedding vector implied by the statistics of its finetuning data and then simulate that. It's fine to do, but there is a lot less mystique to it than I find people naively attribute to "asking an AI".

@alex_du @Bitcoineo Inter city movement was restricted. Not everyone, regardless of academic achievement, could move to the three cities listed.

@EdDaWord @Bitcoineo This is not true at all. Most rich people in Shanghai are not originally from Shanghai. Most high earning jobs are not held by Shanghainess either. The big cities are just a platform for people from all over the country.

@alex_du @RockyTolt @Bitcoineo The original post is talking about relative mobility not absolute mobility.

@EdDaWord @RockyTolt @Bitcoineo "upward mobility in US is still better than China". This can't be more wrong. In the 80s, every Chinese person was poor. So every rich person in China today experienced exceptional upward mobility.

@RockyTolt @Bitcoineo Which are you talking about? a) If no where => SF, NYC, Seattle? disagree. b) If no where => random US city? I agree. Ultimately, even with the large wealth gap, upward mobility in US is still better than China. worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankin…

@EdDaWord @Bitcoineo Interesting point. The US doesn’t have great mobility if you’re from the hinterlands either.