Sam VJ
724 posts

Sam VJ
@samvj
Building AI-first tools ✦ Product ✦ Design ✦ Eng Previously @Apple, @YCombinator
San Francisco, CA Bergabung Mayıs 2009
278 Mengikuti826 Pengikut

SF 🇺🇸 are you ready?????
founders & GTM ops, we’re doing an informal rooftop hang 🍸
no fluff, just real convos on:
> ai ugc
> growth
> meta ads
> lead magnets
> influencer marketing
> print millions with X launches
> & more
when:
wednesday 6pm on a nice rooftop
when: wednesday, 6pm
where: nice rooftop (SF)
RT + comment “growth” and I’ll DM you the invite link
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Sam VJ me-retweet

Great Engineers are Also Artists.
“I characterize art as something that is done for its own sake, and done well, and often creates a sense of beauty or some strong emotion.
And a lot of engineers are introverts.
As an aside, I hate the term “incel.” It’s just a way of putting introverts down. It’s the new “nerd,” if you will. If someone says that somebody is an incel, I’m more likely to want to interview them. So let’s move away from the slurs.
But introverts tend to want to express themselves through other things rather than going out and expressing themselves directly. So what are they going to do? They’re going to express themselves through their craft. They’re going to create art.
In my current company, at least half the engineers have serious artwork they’ve done on the side. World-class artwork—everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art, to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorknobs, water bottles. There’s one who’s done incredible music videos, really good stuff. And I see a lot of the better engineers tinker with the AI art products, much more so than even so-called artists do. I think a lot of artists are scared by AI art products saying, “This is going to replace me.” Whereas someone who doesn’t have that identity of an artist and doesn’t feel threatened by it—it’s just a tool and they try it out to see what it can create.
Anything done for its own sake and done as well as one possibly can is art. And great engineers are also artists. They’re capable of anything. It’s just they’ve chosen to be engineers and focused on building things because engineering is the ability to turn your ideas and your art into things that actually work, that do something useful, that embody some knowledge in a way that it can be repeated and people can get utility out of it. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful.”
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@blakeandersonw Congrats on getting this out. It looks really good!
One question: what model are you using? And feedback: using a better one would be helpful so people aren’t lead astray.

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@karrisaarinen Most products are optimized for market efficiency. It takes an unreasonable amount of effort and care to create quality products.
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"take a year off" while we're in the most insane AI gold rush of our lifetime
right now is the time to throw everything you have at your wildest ideas
we're in peak accelerationism, right now is when you hit the fucking gas pedal
if you come back in a year the entire world will be unrecognizable
take a year off in 2026-27 when you've made it, not now when history is being written
Arushi Gupta | OffLens Design@Arushi_OffLens
"I highly recommend taking a year off, if you can" - @sama
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