Elena

this is why i wish the tech/sci fi film canon were wider. im tired of references to Her and Bladerunner and The Social Network etc. in 2026 you should be watching: -Demonlover -Until the End of the World -Videodrome -World on a Wire -Solaris -The 10th Victim -Megalopolis -Stalker -Run, Lola, Run -Seconds -and so many more…

@nebnella ahhh im in a cellular automata it’s rapidly multiplying

@VirtualElena I’m currently stuck in an Altima

the most dangerous place to get stuck is the local maxima. you can immediately recognize a local/global minima & succeed in clawing your way out, but the local maxima will seduce you to the point that it won’t even occur to you to ask if you’re in one.

@ArtirKel i saw the wide-angle version this morning!

How it started, how it's going

@DrugNerd1 oh true true

@VirtualElena Boston biotech

the barbellificiafion of society also means we’re exiting the era of the “everything” city (eg nyc, london) and entering the era of the specialized, industry-specific city (sf, dc, taipei, maybe la if it gets its act together and turns into an ai entertainment boomtown). you shouldnt be hedging in the variety store, you cannot languish in the pleasure dome. pick a city and allocate all your time and attention and relationships there. or become irrelevant.

in the specialty category i missed austin, miami, tel aviv, dubai and maybe singapore, also its been correctly pointed out that la is defense tech not entertainment now

@keaganwernicke yeah you’re right, el segundo supremacy

@VirtualElena LA should be known for the Gundo startups

@KORGAONKAR yeah having top-down industrial policy really can be very effective i admit

you have to be motionmaxxing

couldn’t disagree more with removal, it’s one of my favorite statues! if they do install a de Tocqueville statue it should be in front of the bureau of prisons building because 1) that area around 1st street could use some beautification 2) de Tocqueville’s original pretext for visiting america was to study its penitentiary systems

Remove the stupid "Man Controlling Trade" statue by the FTC and put this one in its place. wsj.com/opinion/tocque…

@sriramk hell yes!!

back to writing

the other gentle singularity is people in cities nationwide dispensing with their cars and instead opting for scooters designed by @infinitemachine. great piece by @josephcohen!

these bitches love SOTA

@Madisonkanna @ad0rnai @katedeyneka @reelful two of my favorite sf ladies!!!

At AIE last week, @ad0rnai and I caught up with our friend @katedeyneka, former ML engineer at Snapchat, about the newest models, building in public and her new app @reelful

@tamarawinter omg i should’ve *known* you’d have this take too!!! also think for better or worse, both are cities that reward 1) extremely competent hard workers and 2) unapologetic snakes in equal measure

@VirtualElena yes!

am visiting my hometown dc right now and there are so many similarities between here and sf that im surprised people don’t talk about it more: -industry towns populated by hyper-ambitious but ultimately good-natured autist types with world-historical ambitions -people introduce themselves by employer, and employer functions as a caste marker -very low buildings with few exceptions (washington monument / salesforce tower) all downstream of policy choices everyone complains about (height of buildings act / sf zoning) -nonexistent separation between work life and social life -beautiful rowhouses -etc.

@vincentweisser congratulations Vincent!!

We raised $130M @ $1B for our series A To build the open superintelligence stack for everyone Pre-training concentrated frontier AI in a handful of labs. RL changes who can build frontier AI and just works across almost any verifiable domain. We want to enable everyone to train their own agents. Companies can now own their model optimization loop: train directly on your product, optimize for your specific workflows, and build agents that improve continuously in production Owning this model <> product improvement loop is how you build a compounding moat in the agentic era Super grateful to serve over 6k+ customers, including many leading AI startups, neolabs and enterprises already building on our stack, and to our incredible team for shipping hardcore! We train open frontier models and ship the same stack to our customers. Its spans the full stack of training, deploying and continuously improving models — compute, large-scale RL, environments, sandboxes, evals, and deployment. We're excited to be joined by angels who are building the frontier themselves, many of whom we work closely with: @johnschulman2 (Thinking Machines), @dwarkesh_sp, @AravSrinivas (Perplexity), @karimatiyeh (Ramp), @levie (Box), @_milankovac_ (Tesla), @winstonweinberg (Harvey), @amspector100 (Flapping Airplanes), @jeffwang (Cognition), @_arohan_ (Core Automation), @marksaroufim (Core Automation), @mikeknoop (Zapier, Ndea), @eastdakota (Cloudflare), @BrendanFoody (Mercor), @devanshpandey (Standard Intelligence), @hwchase17 (Langchain), @nicoup (Fleet) and many more We're a small team building open superintelligence > Reach out if you want to partner training, deploying and continuously improving your own frontier models for your use case > Join us to build open superintelligence — we're hiring across all roles including RL, inference, distributed systems, full stack engineering and compute.

when you want to cancel your subscription they put you on the phone with a guy named baumol who just progressively lowers the monthly price until you capitulate

nominative determinism: someone from the financial times named JEVON(!) who wants to make sure youre getting the maximum value possible from your subscription

@seema_amble @stevesi here's steven's essay on the topic: …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/230-mcp-its-…

it was a blast talking with @seema_amble and @stevesi about the prevailing narratives re: the supposed death of SaaS. it was also a lot of fun to grill @stevesi about the historical parallels between modern agentic frameworks and microsoft's status as a "middleware" provider in the 2000's. here he is on why the middleware dream never works out the way engineers think it will: "So much of it is driven by an engineering view of what would make for a good software architecture, and very little of it is being driven by the physical reality of the world." "No software wants to be disintermediated by some other layer above it. Nobody wants to just be put in a corner and said, 'Your job is to just store this SQL format for expense reports and do nothing more. And then we're piping you through to some other tool to analyze expense reports.' That's not a growing business. That's a decaying business." "This middleware layer, it's always, always very unstable. It looks great in a network hierarchy diagram of the OSI levels of networking, but it's just never that stable."