based alchemist

ssh was created in 1995 tmux was created in 2007 sadly most engineers won't understand why this is relevant

New blackboard lecture w @reinerpope How do chips actually work – starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do. 0:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates 0:16:20 – Muxes and the cost of data movement 0:25:59 – How systolic arrays work 0:39:00 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers 0:51:40 – FPGAs vs ASICs 1:03:14 – Cache vs scratchpad 1:07:16 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores 1:11:49 – Brains vs chips 1:15:22 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify/etc to watch. Enjoy!

It was a simple /goal to make my internet network faster. > Diagnosed the issue: ran speedtest-cli first. > Checked DNS resolution times, > Checked MTU, packet loss, Wi-Fi signal/interference. > Found 3 issues. > Removed stale network locations/profiles. > Killed or throttled bandwidth-hogging background processes. > Optimized mDNS. > Ran before/after speed tests and latency checks.

Highlights from today’s Codex Thursday launches: 1️⃣ Codex can now securely use apps on your Mac from your phone, even when your Mac is locked and the screen is off. #locked-use" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">developers.openai.com/codex/app/comp…

Codex anywhere and everywhere, all the time. Now your Mac doesn’t have to be unlocked for Codex to use your computer. From your phone, Codex can securely use apps on your Mac, even when the screen is off and locked. #locked-use" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">developers.openai.com/codex/app/comp…

If you have yet to use Codex with GPT 5.5 x-high to build swift apps you really should try it out. You can literally ask it to build you a Personal App Store… and just list out the existing apps you want in your App Store. If you use /goal, and give it access to Vercel AI gateway or OpenRouter it will be able to research and build the core features of all of the apps you want. This is not an exaggeration try it…

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate. The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic. "Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7+. The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it. The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7+ despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7+, and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain. The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake. The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ) I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company. I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point. Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking. But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.

Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why. First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it. Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands. Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition. I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively. THE 100X ORGANIZATION The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago. Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken. The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems. These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now. The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working. THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS — THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality. Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment. AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down. Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed. So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code? And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time? If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code. The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x. The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated. I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already. More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well. — THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS Product management and design roles are merging. Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers. And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers. The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results. The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy. Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on. To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production. Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck. That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time. — THE SYSTEM MANAGERS Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp. The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world. You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is. — THE FRONT-LINERS In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers. This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings. One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers. REWARDING 100X IMPACT In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go? In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it. We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them. You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace. Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems. THE FUTURE Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next. The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago. ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.

LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs. "The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks. So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

When someone asks me how to land a job through cold email, I show them this email

Been working on a new UX for agents. It will understand your workflow as you use your computer and proactively nudge you when it can be helpful. I feel like agents are these super powerful beings trapped in terminals and chat interfaces. Now, just use your voice. Demo:

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

AI is making you stupid. Today, we're introducing the all new Oboe, designed to make you smarter. Think about the last 10 answers you got from an LLM. How many of them do you actually remember? Probably none, because LLMs are not good teachers. But @oboelabs helps you learn the way humans are supposed to: through guided conversations, frequent checks for understanding, real-time adjustments, and multiple formats for all learning styles. Here's everything we're introducing today:

Security things from the last few days: - CopyFail (linux pwn'd) - CopyFail 2/Dirty Frag - 13 advisories in Next.js - Over 70 CVEs addressed in MacOS 26.5 - ~50 CVEs addressed in iOS 26.5 - YellowKey (Windows Bitlocker pwn'd entirely) - GreenPlasma (Windows privilege escalation) - CVE-2026-21510 and CVE-2026-21513 confirmed to be used by Russia for Windows RCE - CVE-2026-32202 separately confirmed to be used by Russia for sensitive document access - Mini-Shai Hulud (over 300 JS and Python packages compromised via GitHub Action cache poisoning) - Google confirms they have identified AI-powered exploitation of zero days in an unidentified "open-source, web-based system administration too" - Canvas (popular LMS used in most schools) pwn'd entirely - PAN-OS (palo alto networks) pwn'd with a 9.3 severity CVE-2026-0300 Are you scared yet?

Today we’re launching the OpenAI Deployment Company to help businesses build and deploy AI. It's majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI. It brings together 19 leading investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators to help organizations deploy frontier AI to production for business impact. openai.com/index/openai-l…

This works really well btw, at the end of your query ask your LLM to "structure your response as HTML", then view the generated file in your browser. I've also had some success asking the LLM to present its output as slideshows, etc. More generally, imo audio is the human-preferred input to AIs but vision (images/animations/video) is the preferred output from them. Around a ~third of our brains are a massively parallel processor dedicated to vision, it is the 10-lane superhighway of information into brain. As AI improves, I think we'll see a progression that takes advantage: 1) raw text (hard/effortful to read) 2) markdown (bold, italic, headings, tables, a bit easier on the eyes) <-- current default 3) HTML (still procedural with underlying code, but a lot more flexibility on the graphics, layout, even interactivity) <-- early but forming new good default ...4,5,6,... n) interactive neural videos/simulations Imo the extrapolation (though the technology doesn't exist just yet) ends in some kind of interactive videos generated directly by a diffusion neural net. Many open questions as to how exact/procedural "Software 1.0" artifacts (e.g. interactive simulations) may be woven together with neural artifacts (diffusion grids), but generally something in the direction of the recently viral x.com/zan2434/status… There are also improvements necessary and pending at the input. Audio nor text nor video alone are not enough, e.g. I feel a need to point/gesture to things on the screen, similar to all the things you would do with a person physically next to you and your computer screen. TLDR The input/output mind meld between humans and AIs is ongoing and there is a lot of work to do and significant progress to be made, way before jumping all the way into neuralink-esque BCIs and all that. For what's worth exploring at the current stage, hot tip try ask for HTML.

Left: the watermark GPT Image 2 embeds into every image it generates. Right: SynthID, the fingerprint Google bakes into every Nano Banana and Gemini image. Invisible to the human eye. Applied during generation, not added after. Designed to survive screenshots, crops, and compression. Most people using these tools daily have no idea their output is fingerprinted at the pixel level. Every major AI image generator now tags what it produces, and the tag travels with the image wherever it ends up. You can verify this yourself. Content Credentials Verify detects C2PA markers from OpenAI images. Gemini detects SynthID if you upload an image directly to it. The images will keep getting more realistic. The identification tech is keeping pace.

@mattpocockuk Added, thanks.

/handoff might be my new favourite skill

@StayWerkin Bruuuutall

King68 got approached by a girl who admitted she was already seeing someone in Atlanta, but still made it clear she was trying to have fun in Miami 😲👀💀 “He likes me, he bought me a promise ring, but I told him… I’m very young, I wanna have fun”