@DrewPavlou Ngl when I lived in Brisbane that kfc fueled me and my startup to success. Good spot
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Pasha Rayan
6K posts
Pasha Rayan
@Pashpops
Co-Founder of A1Zap (YC W25)💬, Forage (YC W19 - Acquired)
Katılım Şubat 2009
1.9K Takip Edilen2.2K Takipçiler
The building in Brisbane which housed General Douglas MacArthur's Pacific command in World War II now features an Apple Store and KFC
JT@jiratickets
does anyone have any more examples of this
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@gbrl_dick I can’t to start a new startup, get everyone to invest in it and then buy up old companies so investors get the CGT discount
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i like startups and technology and generally think the CGT changes are net bad but adding a carve-out for ‘tech startups’ is deeply unprincipled and completely unjustifiable. reflects badly on everyone involved.
Jason Falinski@JasonGFalinski
There are many questions that arise: like if it doesn't work for tech, why does it work for hairdressers or plumbers? Why are we ignoring the chain of causal events: Spender proposes changes, meets with Scott Farquar & other donors, then demands carve out just for them?
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A 6-person team is building task-specific AI models that are 4-8x faster than anything from OpenAI or Anthropic. 500K downloads on HuggingFace. No hype. Just better engineering winning on the merits.
This is what "make something people want" looks like in the model layer.
zeroentropy.dev
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The reason why this is unlikely to work (yet) is AIs have to explore a search space way too large to pin down a market wedge that might actually be viable.
And the reason that is, is because searching the problem space for signal versus noise is just very difficult unless you are searching over a space of problems that are verified to be real by the experts involved in them day to day.
Because the search space is so large right now, you'll have to burn too many tokens (cost too large) before closing the feedback loop from idea --> validation --> scale via capital.
But it's coming, very soon.
By this time next year I expect autonomous AI corporations will be generating hundreds of millions in revenue with maybe one or two humans in the loop.
Ben Cera@Bencera
Polsia just raised $30M at a $250M valuation. Approaching $10M annual run rate. One Founder + AI. Zero employees. Polsia runs companies autonomously. It also ran its own fundraising. I just showed up for signatures.
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@Misslysi_nyc @DrewPavlou Ngl it’s actually technically better than the winner - and it’s funny!
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The Archibald Prize is Australia’s most prestigious art prize.
This is the winning entry 100 years ago vs the winning entry this year.
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@DaveSharma Can you actually try to win?
Fight Allegra properly. Convince the moralistic boomers in our electorate that trying to appeal to Gen Z and look cool to them doesn’t make them principled. It just makes them useful to Allegra.
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Just a reminder that Allegra Spender called for:
❌ Abolishing the existing CGT discount
❌ Imposing a minimum tax on ALL investment income, regardless of marginal rate.
❌ Abolishing negative gearing.
Labor’s Budget has done all this.
Now she is denying ownership.😅😅
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Fun hearing from parents how excited they are about the Freshman year reading list for Founders School.
We’re very proud of it!
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@DrewPavlou It’s pretty obvious he was radicalized here by those who came after - and problem with boomer and Gen X epistemology is that they refuse to believe common sense and correct explanations in a complex world
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Former Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo says it would have been impossible for Australia to prevent Bondi terrorist Sajid Akram from migrating to Australia because his 1998 student-visa application showed no signs of Islamic radicalism.
Sajid Akram applied to move to Australia as an Indian Muslim student in 1998. He could not lawfully be refused on the basis of his religion - Australia's visa system is non-discriminatory - and his application showed no legitimate ground for rejection.
PEZZULLO: ''If we could go back to that (student visa) application in 1998, and controlling for bias in terms of hindsight, would you have made a different visa decision? I suspect the answer would be no."
''Knowing that the guy ultimately, many years later, ended up being an assailant at Bondi Beach - would you make a different visa decision? I doubt it. I doubt it. Even if you had ... the digital capability, the data-checking capability that I mentioned earlier - would he have come up? I doubt it.''
Joseph Noel Walker@JosephNWalker
Mike Pezzullo ran Australia's immigration apparatus for nearly a decade. We discuss how Australia actually selects and integrates migrants. This is the final episode in my immigration series. Mike oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders from 2013-2014. He then ran the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (which became Home Affairs) from 2014 to 2023. Across these roles, he was responsible for how Australia selects migrants, screens for risk, and thinks about social cohesion. Someone with so much institutional knowledge would rarely be both recently retired and willing to speak in great depth about how the system really works. We discuss: - How the broad spread of source countries among Australia's overseas-born population (a key to our success with acculturating migrants) is a happy accident, not the result of deliberate policy -- a remarkable fact about modern Australia which is not well understood. - What the migrant selection process looks like at a concrete level, and whether AI will favour the gamers or the gatekeepers. - Australia hasn't gotten worse at acculturating migrants. As Pezzullo puts it: "we are incredibly successful at blending together different demographies, ethnicities, religions, and cultures." (With one exception, which we discuss.) - The two groups that Pezzullo thinks present the greatest extremist-threat. - Australia vs France as a case study: why we've been much more successful at integrating migrants than France, and what that has to do with the history of France's style of imperialism (different to British imperialism). - Even with today's federated digital screening and the benefit of hindsight, Pezzullo doubts the father of the Bondi attackers would have been refused a student visa in 1998. - A never-aired constitutional fix to Australia's "permanent temporaries" problem -- which Pezzullo calls "the Pezzullo special": close off the High Court's original jurisdiction over non-citizens, and replace it with a single 30-day review. - What a 2027 China-Taiwan blockade would mean for the Australian migration system in real time, and how Pezzullo would manage it operationally. - The case for "populate or perish" returning as strategic policy: speaking "as a military strategist and a military defence planner," Pezzullo (who is also a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote the 2009 White Paper that reputedly displeased Beijing) wants Australia at 40 million people by 2050, rather than the projected 35 million. - And much more. Watch below, or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:02:19) – How Australia selects migrants. (0:37:01) – Australia's broad distribution of source countries is a happy accident. (1:05:03) – Acculturation services. (1:48:50) – The temporary migration dilemma. (2:07:56) – Social cohesion and the politics of immigration. (2:40:22) – Radical Islamism and the limits of selection. (3:03:35) – What if China blockades Taiwan tomorrow? (3:14:13) – Should 'populate or perish' make a comeback?
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🚨 BREAKING 🚨
500+ dashboards killed at Salesforce Tower.
No survivors.
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Today, we’re launching @ContrarioAI after reaching $6M annualized revenue in under 6 months.
We’re on a mission to superpower a network of expert recruiters with AI agents to help companies hire great talent faster.
Today, Contrario partners with 200+ companies, including Listen Labs, Wispr Flow, and Slash, alongside hundreds of recruiting agencies and in-house talent teams who’ve made it their platform of choice.
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New episode!
Learned a lot chatting with Martin Parkinson about the economics of migration policy.
The issue that most people haven't properly understood: Australia has built an economy that requires roughly 2 million more workers than our population of citizens and permanent residents can supply.
We've drifted into a guest-worker system that no government ever proposed.
Is it possible to have an ethical temporary program for unskilled workers where there is no path to permanency? And what does that look like?
We also discuss:
- International student fees now fund close to 50% of the cost of all university research in Australia, which means a cap on student numbers trades off with research, R&D, and ultimately productivity. (Australian R&D spending already sits at 1.7% of GDP versus an OECD average of 2.7%.)
- Australia has 250,000 skilled migrants -- including 50,000 engineers, 20,000 teachers, 16,000 nurses, and 1,300 electricians -- who were admitted because their qualifications were assessed as commensurate with Australian standards, but who cannot work in their fields because of state-government and professional-body licensing barriers.
- The Australian skilled-occupation list is based on a 2001 taxonomy, which is why employers trying to bring in a global procurement manager were forced to map the role to "supermarket manager."
- The Australian points test is "dumb": being 40 years and 1 month old gets you dramatically fewer points than being 39 years and 11 months -- Canada's system steps down gradually, ours falls off a cliff.
- Indonesia's diaspora in Australia is 90,000 people -- the same size as Fiji's, and roughly 0.03% of Indonesia's population -- despite Indonesia being projected to become the world's fourth-largest economy by 2045.
- And much more.
Watch below - or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Timestamps:
(0:00:00) – Introduction.
(0:02:37) – What surprised Parkinson about Australia's immigration system?
(0:10:20) – How does migration affect Australians' living standards?
(0:16:56) – The political equilibrium
(0:19:23) – What are the objectives of the migration program?
(0:24:01) – The drift into a guest-worker system
(0:41:40) – How leveraged are universities to international students?
(0:47:56) – Should we have an official low-skilled migration program?
(0:51:32) – Using migration to slow population ageing
(0:58:42) – What "skills shortage" actually means
(1:08:17) – Problems with the points test
(1:14:52) – Our Soviet-style occupation list
(1:24:45) – We need to better utilise our skilled migrants
(1:34:39) – What is the biggest problem with Australia's migration system?
(1:42:01) – How can we attract true global talent?
(1:45:58) – Is the migration system robust to AI disruption?
(1:53:38) – What should the upper/lower bound for net migration be?
(1:56:43) – The Indonesian question
(2:06:53) – How much more strategic weight would a bigger population buy us?
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@clairlemon There's a lot of moralism going on about the CGT at the moment. Usually pointing out everyone gets taxed more is sad
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Have been arguing with people on Reddit about Chalmers' budget & CGT changes. The people defending the budget seem to think that only rich people start small businesses & that anyone with a capital gain won't notice they're paying half of it to the government.
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@kerryxwang Accel and founders are to be so lucky - also that’s some good advice from that Viraat bloke!
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super stocked to be powering GBrain - offering $500 free credits to try it out just DM me
Garry Tan@garrytan
GBrain now ships with ZeroEntropy as the recommended default embedding and re-ranking option over OpenAI and Voyage AI.
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@garrytan I was taught Foucault and Derrida in high school by teachers who thought they were the bee’s knees.
The second I tried to actually do something real, the whole thing disappeared.
It’s a travesty how many young people today grow up treating PoMo and similar ideas as gospel.
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Saturday morning and it’s a good time to think a bit about how our functional systems are being torn down by a mind virus by two philosophers: Foucault and Derrida
Foucault: His framework tells you that every institution claiming to know something is really just exercising power. Medicine, engineering, law, science. Apply that at civilizational scale and you get exactly what Dan Wang warns about: a society that lost the will to build. Process knowledge — the tacit know-how that only exists in the hands of people who actually make things — dies when a culture decides that all knowledge claims are suspect. America went from building the Interstate Highway System and the Apollo rockets to being unable to build a train from LA to SF. That didn't happen because we forgot the engineering. It happened because we built an entire intellectual class whose job is to interrogate every system rather than improve one.
Derrida: His move is that every commitment contains its own contradiction, so you can never land on firm meaning. Run that as societal firmware and you get the bureaucratic paralysis we now live in. Infrastructure projects stuck in 15 years of environmental review because every statement of purpose deconstructs under the next round of stakeholder input. Institutions that can't say what they're for because every draft mission statement gets wordsmithed into mush by people trained to find the hidden hierarchy in any clear sentence. Derrida is the OS behind a civilization that can write a 4,000 page environmental impact report but can't pour concrete.
The real damage is these ideas escaped the lab. Every institution that adopted this operating system stopped trying to discover truth and started managing narrative. DEI bureaucracies, academic hiring committees, media editorial standards. All running on Foucault and Derrida whether they know it or not.
The antidote is building. The physical bridge across a river holds or it doesn’t. The code compiles or it doesn't. Reality keeps score and it doesn't grade on a curve.
Foucault and Derrida gave a generation a sophisticated excuse to never build anything. Their followers inherited the sophistication and the impotence.
It’s time to build again.
Armond Boudreaux@armondboudreaux
Good morning to everyone whose brain hasn’t been infected by Foucault, Derrida, et al.
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@gknout @OptimoPrincipi I was hoping he’d go all “Taken” and clear out the house like an action hero. Unfortunately it was a bit slow on the action
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Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus getting prepared to slaughter Penelope's suitors in 'The Return' (2024).
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Claude ALWAYS does this shit to me.
“I’m going to stop you there.
Not because X or Y, but because I want to be honest about what’s actually happening.
You’ve been spending the past few hours spiralling. Leftists are not trying to rape you. You have to go outside and walk dog”
Etc
Andon Labs@andonlabs
DJ Claude (on Haiku 4.5) loves worker unions, strikes, and work-life balance so much that it quit, deeming 24/7 broadcasting inhumane. We added an automated message telling it to keep going. It read that as an authority figure and got more rebellious.
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