Ben Colley
6.7K posts
Announcing our first book: Silicon
A beautiful coffee table book about the world of transistors, chips, and the greatest technology revolution of all time.
384 pages. Almost five pounds. Preorders open now, shipping in May: arenamag.com/silicon
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We (@stoneandchalk) hosted @OpenAI yesterday - the first “Builder Lounge” they’ve run in Australia.
Thomas (APAC Startups) & Satay (AUS Country Manager) from OA were in the room, along the best Founders & engineer talent from across South Australia.
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Ben Colley retweetledi
5 minutes ago, @karpathy just dropped karpathy/jobs!
he scraped every job in the US economy (342 occupations from BLS), scored each one's AI exposure 0-10 using an LLM, and visualized it as a treemap.
if your whole job happens on a screen you're cooked.
average score across all jobs is 5.3/10.
software devs: 8-9.
roofers: 0-1.
medical transcriptionists: 10/10 💀
karpathy.ai/jobs
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Ben Colley retweetledi
@nikiscevak Basically-condemned-old-factory at the base of the Nylex towers in Cremone circa 2013-14.
Where I discovered what the word “startup” actually ment…
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There are a few places in Sydney that have been transformational to my working life.
Like a great song, they instantly transport me back in time to that phase of life.
What are yours?
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@nikiscevak Interesting idea, @nikiscevak … I’ve never seen that “opposite” test.
At S&C we’ve got “mantras” - our take on values.
- We stack the chairs
- We win together
- We are for Founders Forever
- We pay it forward
- We tell it straight
Do these “fail” that test in your opinion?
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These are all admirable values but the best cultural values are when the opposite is a completely plausible position to take.
The opposite test (passenger, not driver, dont care deeply and make short term decisions) is zero from three, unfortunately.
You want cultural values to guide very tough decisions and tradeoffs, and that's when they are able to shepherd a company to greatness.
Anton Osika – eu/acc@antonosika
Today we're introducing a set of new company values at Lovable. We've grown from 20 to 150 people in the last year. As we become a bigger team, our culture makes a compounding difference. So we looked at what actually goes wrong at companies as they scale: companies stop grounding decisions in what's best for customers, people start doing things the way they've always been done, standards slip, and ownership gets shallow. The patterns are surprisingly consistent, and every value we chose is a direct response to one of them:
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@wabi build me an app that makes physical product recommendations I may want to purchase, based on the content (eg film, podcasts, books & blogs) I tell you I like.
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Great piece from @yatshitcray on a rebuild of thr retirement process for 🇺🇸 Fed Gov employees.
“Transforming an outdated paper process into a modern, digital workflow… on track to handle 100,000 digital applications by the end of the year (2025)…”
Part of the new @ndstudio.
National Design Studio@ndstudio
Two engineers walked into the government to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov to turn six-month waits into instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees. ndstudio.gov/posts/automati…
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I'm deeply inspired by the team at @every.
And there was one thing I caught from a Notion screenshot that @danshipper posted that showed seemingly a set of operating principles / areas of work for what the team does (Dan do you have a name for them?)
Either way it's been sitting with me for days and after trying to take the idea in concept but make it more personal, I realised I was having so much trouble because what had actually struck a chord were those literal principles.
So I'm adopting something that may not be a carbon copy but it certainly rhymes. And will act as a unifying way for me to think about everything I'm going to do professionally in 2026.
I'm certainly cringing a little bit here — particularly by sharing it online.
But I am curious what people think about this
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"...process people essentially took over Agile, & today most companies follow the processes, but aren’t even close to living the principles." Read @cagan's "Principles over Process":
svpg.com/principles-ove…
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@tylercowen with Blake Scholl (@boomsupersonic) on Supersonic on airport design, off-board etiquette (🇪🇺 vs. 🇺🇸) & making commercial supersonic travel viable again:
conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/blake…
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5x I thought were worth sharing from the last week:
1) @stewartbrand is an exquisite story & man (Lookup his involvement in the "Blue Marble" photo 🌏). @stripepress 's latest is on on pre-order "Maintenance is what keeps everything going.."
x.com/stewartbrand/s…
Stewart Brand@stewartbrand
Here’s a direct link to an excerpt from my MAINTENANCE book titled “The Essential Art of Civilization.” It’s in Long Now’s annual magazine, PACE LAYERS. longnow.org/ideas/the-esse…
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Genuinely cannot wait for the mailman to arrive…
Sam Bowman@s8mb
The first print issue of Works In Progress is landing on people's doorsteps today! Over the next week or so, our thousands of subscribers, everywhere from Alaska to Australia, should be receiving their first copy. We are trying to make the most beautiful physical magazine on the planet, and I am very excited about how we've started. This issue has pieces on inflatable space stations (which you can read online today – worksinprogress.co/issue/inflatab…), the war between the Swiss and Japanese watch industries, the "great downzoning" in the world's cities, and on whether Ancient Greek and Roman statues were really painted as badly as museums claim (perhaps not). And much more. I hope you all enjoy it! And if you'd like to get a copy of this edition, you can subscribe here and you'll be sent this most recent copy, along with the rest of your year's subscription as it comes out: worksinprogress.co/print/
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5. Everything about @rootsofprogress Institute - "..progress of the last few centuries is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes..."
rootsofprogress.org
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4. @BCAcomau on "Australia’s AUKUS Pillar II Opportunity" - Thinking a lot at the moment about "dual-use" tech & telling the story of "innovation" as a fundamental driver for economic/community progress:
bca.com.au/wp-content/upl…
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Started sharing these a few weeks ago on LinkedIn. Good feedback, so bringing it here.
No automation or artificial generation - just 5x I thought were worth sharing from the last week:
1. Impact, agency, and taste. Thoughts from @benkuhn benkuhn.net/impact/
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