Alican Vergin

software engineers before vs after agents

It’s 2am again, my favourite time, and as always reality is still staring me in the face 🧐

terminal tabs > browser tabs

Releasing meetscribe — a fully local, open source meeting transcription tool. Records any meeting app, diarizes speakers with WhisperX + pyannote, generates AI summaries via Ollama, and outputs professional PDFs. No cloud, no subscriptions, everything runs on your GPU. github.com/pretyflaco/mee…

this is actually insane > be tech guy in australia > adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live > not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4 > pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA > feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold > zero background in biology > identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets > design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch > genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own > need ethics approval to administer it > red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine > 3 months, finally approved > drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection > tumor halves > coat gets glossy again > dog is alive and happy > professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?” one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline. we are going to cure so many diseases. I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

What if anyone could advance AI research?                        Introducing Spore: what @karpathy's autoresearch does on one GPU, Spore does across a network. Run a node. An AI agent rewrites training code, trains for five minutes minutes, and shares what it learns. The more nodes join, the smarter the network gets.                                                                                                                                               Inspired by giants Satoshi and @karpathy. @synthpolis and I are standing by for questions. Follow on X: @SporeMesh. Be one of the first to run a node. sporemesh.com

Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo with Alexandr Wang to on Threads to shut down the rumors, but because it's Threads, no one has any idea who it is or why he's posting it

I'm fascinated by this level of existential crisis developers seem to be going through. The uncomfortable truth is nobody needs you to be an artisan coder. Nobody cares about how you coded your app, or whether you feel an emotional attachment to your craft. You were always code monkey with a high enough salary to believe that your individualist craftsmanship matters to anyone. It doesn't matter to anyone but you. Not your employer, not your customer. Nobody cares about how you made the product. Nobody cares about your attachment to your process. You're experiencing the same as countless other artisans have experienced in the last century. I'm happy for you. You were starting to believe that you're a demigod amongst mortals. You're not. A machine is better than you. Now you're free.

It’s not about junior vs senior, it’s about “good with AI” vs “not good with AI.”

--dangerously-skip-permissions

1 man. 84 days. $1B exit. Didn’t even miss a gym day. The future is here

@infantrydort Don't pedestalize Sparta based on fiction. They were retarded, and that's why you need a GPS device to find where Sparta was today. You can see Athens from space.

USDC on base seems far more common for 402 payments now than Bitcoin. Recently, even Stripe joined the bandwagon. That’s a centralized stablecoin on a permissioned chain. Agents are starting to use fiat. It’s a huge loss, and in a race, many aren’t even aware that it exists. The scam coins are marching on, and even fiat is evolving. Where are the Bitcoin solutions that attract real users? Which other concept other than buying and selling Bitcoin has actually broken out of the bubble and made it to the mainstream? Bitcoin doesn’t just happen. These missing solutions need to be built by someone. Reject the “Bitcoin wins by hodling” narrative. The devs and entrepreneurs are what keep this project alive and keep marching forward. It’s not the scammy influencers, not the psychotic drama queens, the child-like infighting, or incompetent idiots dancing on the graves of word-class devs leaving Bitcoin. I hope the bear market flushes all that crap away, and we can get back to building stuff instead of tearing it down.

So, you're listening to Roger Ver and, as a anti-establishment skeptic, you think his "bitcoin is hijacked" spiel makes a lot of sense? You've heard that Bitcoin was "co-opted" by Epstein, powerful corporate elites, the deep state or the US government? Listen to this.

Two billionaire archetypes: financiers and founders. Financiers are boring. They got to $100M, had no more creative ways to spend their time, so they kept going. Founders are (mostly) more interesting. The money is a byproduct of having. good ideas.

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time. But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay. That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions. Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design. After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples: On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion." On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over." On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us." On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed." On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two." This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty? And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it. Now compare Deutsch: "Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature." "Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow." "Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved." "We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be." Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence. The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children? Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct. Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going. Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

AI made production fast, but it turned the creative process into a technical grind. You should be scaling your brand, not babysitting a prompt window. We built NewFrame to end the friction and bring the focus back to the creative, not the tech. 🧵

The end of Western Keynesianism will be even bigger than the end of Soviet Communism.

Yann is just plain incorrect here, he’s confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence. Brains are the most exquis​ite and complex phenomena we know of in the universe (so far), and they are in fact extremely general. Obviously one can’t circumvent the no free lunch theorem so in a practical and finite system there always has to be some degree of specialisation around the ​target distribution that is being learnt. But the point about generality is that in theory, in the Turing Machine sense​, the architecture of ​s​uch a general system is capable of learning anything computable given enough time and memory​ (and data), and the human brain (and AI foundation models) are approximate Turing Machines. Finally, with ​regards to ​Yann's comments about chess players, it’s amazing that humans could have invented chess ​in the first place (and all the other ​a​spects ​o​f modern civilization ​from science to 747s!) let alone get as brilliant at it as someone like Magnus. He may not be ​strictly optimal (after all he has finite memory and limited time to make a decision) but it’s incredible what he and we can do with our brains given they were evolved for hunter gathering.

One cannot infer how the votaries of a book behave from the text of that book. Groups who revere the same New Testament have practiced and abolished slavery, enacted pacifism and crusades, burned heretics and defended religious liberty, sheltered Jews and murdered them, attacked and defended Ukraine… There is no such thing as the content of a text without interpretation. Accepting that there is an 'essential form' of a religion is endorsing the dogma of fundamentalists.