Andries Kerpestein

The number of startups / courses / self help books dying is in the millions. All human knowledge and software is getting commoditized to zero. Anyone got strong opinions on what's left that's valuable?

nobody is coming to save you.

Heard the unfortunate news about Network School. I’m not sure moving countries solves the underlying issue. It changes your sovereign dependency but doesn’t remove it, and for Balaji’s vision to come to life, it needs to own everything end to end. From a software analogy perspective, you need to own the full stack: land, laws, infrastructure, economy, and citizen experience. Otherwise, you’re an app running on someone else’s operating system, and they can change the rules or shut you down. I get that it’s a chicken and egg problem get users and citizens, build a community temporarily, then reestablish elsewhere once you have momentum. But you’re not competing with typical competitors you’re competing with nation states. And your users aren’t just dealing with a specific niche problem you’re solving, like shopping or payments. It’s all of it, from things like healthcare to where citizens stay, how they transport themselves, and more. So if you get too powerful, nation states will cut you off. Getting users acclimated to a new city is also extremely hard and will likely face adverse selection. Founders who want to get to PMF quickly will tap into Silicon Valley, NYC, or other global cities with established network effects. Praxis showed how hard this is. They built the network and raised capital but still struggled to secure land, legal autonomy, funding, and enough residents to build the actual city. I do believe in what Balaji is doing, and it is the ultimate fail safe plan. But I think it requires an Elon Musk level, Herculean effort, with large corporate partners or billions of dollars in capital to get it off the ground.

>mfw I’m elected Class President and can’t actually make recess last all day long

We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model. To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access to avoid detection. Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models.   The United States strongly supports the free and fair development of AI, including a thriving competitive ecosystem that spans frontier models, specialized systems, open-source frameworks, and open-weight models. Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models plays a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem. However, large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable.

A startup doesn't have to be your life's work, but if it is, you become much harder to defeat. You play the long game and you outlast everyone. Because practically everyone else is an opportunist by comparison.

balaji’s anti-western polycule that produced no economic output, a sex camp established in the great nation of malaysia with the sole purpose of trafficking brown “young adults” for wealthy american tech bros is officially OVER