Soups Ranjan
3.1K posts
@soupsranjan
CEO & co-founder @sardine. Writing about Fintech, fraud prevention, fincrime compliance and thoughtful company building.
I packaged up the "autoresearch" project into a new self-contained minimal repo if people would like to play over the weekend. It's basically nanochat LLM training core stripped down to a single-GPU, one file version of ~630 lines of code, then: - the human iterates on the prompt (.md) - the AI agent iterates on the training code (.py) The goal is to engineer your agents to make the fastest research progress indefinitely and without any of your own involvement. In the image, every dot is a complete LLM training run that lasts exactly 5 minutes. The agent works in an autonomous loop on a git feature branch and accumulates git commits to the training script as it finds better settings (of lower validation loss by the end) of the neural network architecture, the optimizer, all the hyperparameters, etc. You can imagine comparing the research progress of different prompts, different agents, etc. github.com/karpathy/autor… Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis :)
Quick advice I got from airline representative: Do not cancel your ticket by yourself and claim refund unless you are in urgent need of funds if you are stuck in Middle East. Airlines will give preference on repatriation flights to those with valid bookings. Claim refund once manage to leave the region.
If there was a need for an Agentic commerce solution that serves a real need, that is NOW during this terrible war in GCC. We have probably hundreds of thousands of people looking to evacuate on commercial flights I spent the last 48 hours quite literally just clicking and booking as many flights as I possibly could. Only to see ALL of them get canceled The situation is very fluid. Airspace and runways in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Riyadh etc open and close based on imminent threats Here's the cheat sheet I used to at least get as many bookings as possible Why isn't anyone vibe coding this right now? If I wasn't busy evacuating, that's what I would be coding to help myself and the hundreds of thousands of stranded travelers The cheat sheet: 1. Look for flights departing from an airport, say Dubai at flightradar24.com 2. Only look for flights with a future status of Scheduled or Estimated. Ignore the ones that are already Canceled 3. Be open to destinations worldwide. Only select destinations that are outside the GCC region. If there are multi hop flights, ignore them if the hop is via a GCC airport 4. Go to the website of the Airline which shows status of Scheduled/Estimated. Enter the Destination city and travel date along with passenger details. 5. Search for flight availability 6. If the flight is available, ask for credit card details from the consumer and purchase it If anyone is willing to vibe code this right now, please reach out. I have other ideas to make this more robust And I promise to be the first beta tester and I will personally angel invest in your idea if you can help me get a ticket And I promise you, your TAM right now is immense Agents were meant to remove exactly this kind of manual rigmarole After 48 hours of manually doing this, I got tired. And exhausted because still ALL my flights got cancelled. Then I recruited a tiger team of 10 people at my company @sardine to follow the same script. So I could have more options available while I caught my first sleep in 2 days And they quickly found me another 15+ flight options Fingers crossed one of them works out But doing this manually is a waste of valuable and strategic thinking time. In a war, human mind needs to be alert and focused on survival. So who is up for vibe coding this?
I crossed over to Oman from Dubai yesterday via the Hatta border Muscat airport is open for flights while Dubai airspace remains closed till March 7 Muscat is safe and calm (3rd pic). Almost surreal in this madness. People are kind and welcoming. I would come back here for vacation. And the border crossing over land was smooth. I wish someone told me all this information before - I would have crossed over much earlier. Sitting in a hotel room you start thinking of everything that can go wrong. I was thinking I am going to drive through mountains and deserts in maybe war torn territory. And that's why I didn't do it earlier. It was a scary proposition but honestly I was overthinking it Of course I don't recommend doing the border crossing at night time. The roads are great and the scenery is beautiful Do it at least 1 day before your flight. Also being cash. You would need 50 AED to pay for your visa stamping in Oman The entire journey door to door took me 8 hours. But that was when there were no lines at the transit counters. I am seeing reports of a lot of traffic at the Hatta border now, so account for an extra couple of hours ie you should expect 9-10 hours door to door The entire trip involved 2 private cars and 2 buses. Here's what to expect step by step: 1. Arrive in a taxi to the Hatta border. Couple of hours. Beautiful scenery through mountains (1st pic) 2. You are dropped off at the border on UAE side with your luggage Luggage is scanned and then you get an exit stamp on your passport This is where you might have the first queue of people I am not posting pictures of the border because of security reasons 3. Now you board a UAE bus with your luggage that takes you to a circular area You get off with your luggage and board a second bus, this one from Oman with your luggage 4. The Omani bus driver then asked us to give him 50 AED in cash for Visa fee You then disembark the Omani bus and enter the Oman border control office for your visa stamping You have to take out your luggage again for the 2nd and final scanning This is where you might have long queues again 5. You board your Omani bus again and it now brings you to a spot that is pictured below (2nd pic) This is where you get into another taxi if you pre-arranged for it. Or you can also find a taxi from here as I saw many taxi drivers there 6. Now you drive to Muscat for 2.5-3 hours Please share this with others who are stranded in Dubai and considering an option via Muscat
After multiple flight cancellations in UAE, we finally shifted to Muscat. Our friends and family arranged a taxi from Oman who came to Abu Dhabi and then drove us back to Muscat. Having a local driver made our transfer from UAE to Oman easier. Also our first land border passport controlled crossing.. And also it was all because all of us had US Visa..
Some of our best hires were totally unqualified on paper. They always had the same qualities: entrepreneurial, high agency, smart, mission aligned, and they got shit done. If you’re hiring, especially in early stages, seek out & bet on these people. Don’t over-index on resumes.
American Citizens in UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Israel: To receive departure assistance information from the Department of State about available aviation and ground transportation options, please fill out the following form: mytravel.state.gov/s/crisis-intake
