Alexander Wang

@TheBuilderJR This was just for reviewing my own changes, but also yeah I want to write comments for AI on this interface so it can make targeted fixes. I do this occasionally on GitHub but the downside is the comments are public and makes the PR noisy.

@alixanderwang Interesting! Do you want this purely to write comments via vim/cli or you want an interactive dev environment (eg. sync entire repo state, build artifacts, etc.)

I’ve got a month off work to really crank on a new project. Anyone experiencing any pains in this new age of agents? Some top of mind ideas: 1) fast cloud test cli tool so agents aren’t blocked waiting on tests 2) cloud bisect cli tool to find which commit broke a feature …

@charlesli09 What's on your peninsula/south bay list 🙏

another few bangers top of mind - beeps burgers - go duck yourself - ma’s dimsum - manna - jjamppong - happy family gourmet inc probably the best dumplings in sf - besharam

@nearcyan All the IP people care about are definitely not the ones any of the current animators have ever touched lol

man the animators must be not particularly happy at disney rn i'd pay to see the slack thread protesting this

larger OpenAI news imo is the Disney deal / enterprise doubling down Disney owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, *and* will allow Sora->Disney+ distribution. first large pure AI<->Hollywood partnership also the Sam+Fidji enterprise PR + Slack CEO hired as new CRO, well-timed

@Stammy @mmmforkable Adding these menu pics from a new local dumpling restaurant to the discourse

nothing has outraged our team more than @mmmforkable starting to use horrible AI photos for meals

@SherryYanJiang youtu.be/dEDEMBMPsvg?si…

this might sound contrarian but as a pre-pmf team we’re basically running a 24h circadian dev loop rn. i’m in the us, my team ships while i sleep in asia, and we test in prod EVERY day. new feature, new insight, rinse, repeat. most people do week-long sprints. we’re effectively doing 1-day sprints. it lets us test at like 5-7x the speed, so the product iterates fast enough to actually find the ground truth.

This genre of "plausible science on why good thing is actually way better than you think" (or inverse) is falling apart. From that sleep book to fasting book to this. I fell for it too, read a whole ass book on why breathing was good for me

@0thernet @Cloudflare what do we think

experimenting with this scroll-synced entrance animation what do we think?

I don't like it when biographies start off with their parents' childhoods. We don't need to go that far back

@anabology Have you seen this recent paper that demonstrates cancer cells use vitamin E to protect themselves too, and blocking the vitamin E slowed tumor growth (in mice) nature.com/articles/s4139…

Vitamin E can stop seed oil sunburn too btw

The current set of AI tools is just too oriented to vibe coding which I hope is just a phase. I don't want to see "whatchamacalliting..." and little jokes, eg "trying to exit vim..." in my everyday dev tools. Just say "thinking"

@eshear Yeah my workflow is that if Claude starts not making sense or going in circles, I ask it to describe the problem and everything a smarter AI needs to solve this. Then crunch it on ChatGPT pro. Works 90% of the time.

Increasingly, ChatGPT is much better at doing what I tell it to do, but I can actually collaborate with Claude. The difference keeps getting more stark. A tool vs. a being.

You can just condition a human to love any food that has strong taste. If your cultural food is unhealthy, you can just make your kid grow up to crave miso soup and sashimi instead of eg burritos and fried chicken. Like they'll permanently just prefer the healthier option with no downside.

Ppl prefer the food they had growing up. I've never met an Indian that favorites Chinese food or a Mexican favorites Korean. Since it's all nurture, there is no objective best food on the basis of taste. Therefore we must fall back to the second most important consideration for food choice, which ones cause the least health problems. Japanese food is the best. QED

@patrickc I think this is where ChatGPT shines as a doctor. MDs have to stick to the clinical trials (and many are even anti ground truth), while AI also trains on Reddit and can at least inform you of crowdsourced findings.

Observing some people close to me with chronic health conditions, it's striking how useful Reddit frequently ends up being. I think a core reason is because trials aren’t run for a lot of things, and Reddit provides a kind of emergent intelligence that sits between that which any single physician can marshal and the full rigor of clinical trials. Why aren’t trials run for a lot of things? Well, they’re of course slow and expensive (median cost of $19M for a pivotal trial in 2015[1]; after adjusting for inflation and other phases, maybe that corresponds to a total of $40M today?). But they’re also hard to fund when the intervention in question lacks IP protection since the ensuing knowledge can’t be monetized. As such, trials for diet, over-the-counter supplements, and lifestyle interventions are under-pursued. To give one prosaic example, lots of people think that magnesium improves sleep, but, as far as I know, no trial has ever been run assessing its ability to improve sleep in non-elderly adults without sleep disorders. So, Reddit — in a pretty unstructured way — makes a limited kind of “compounding knowledge” possible. Best practices can be noticed and can imperfectly start to accumulate. For people with chronic health problems, this is a big deal, and I’ve heard lots of stories between “I found something that made my condition much more manageable” all the way to “I found a permanent cure in a weird comment buried deep in a thread”. (Of course, one also sees this outside of medical conditions. I’ve enjoyed the recommended routine in the BodyWeightFitness subreddit, as a comparable kind of distilled practical wisdom[2].) An interesting and somewhat more formalized example of this approach was recently used for long COVID and published earlier this year[3]. After surveying 3,900 individuals, the paper analyzes patient-reported outcomes for 150 different treatments, yielding the figure reproduced below. There are evidently no silver bullets, but it is striking that, say, about half of people find that antihistamines are helpful. I know a number of people who found the learnings from this study to be impactful in improving their daily quality-of-life. Seeing this paper and the Reddit experience makes me wonder whether the approach could somehow be scaled: is there a kind of observational, self-reported clinical trial that could sit between Reddit and these manual approaches? Should there be a platform that covers all major chronic conditions, administers ongoing surveys, and tracks longitudinal outcomes? I don’t really know what the best way to go about this would be, but it feels to me that there could be something important here. There’s a lot of latent data in patients’ subjective experiences that is not today being properly gathered or analyzed.

@powerbottomdad1 @SumonaChakrabo8 Yeah. Don't you? Morality aside, I think the specific case of family depending on you is way more powerful than the average motivation of an unemployed college grad.

@alixanderwang @SumonaChakrabo8 Lol well I work hard because I was raised to work hard and I think it's good for the world, I'm just trying to understand if "not being able to quit easily" is a good incentive structure for the employee and leads to real gains for employer. sounds like you think it does

There's a lot of Indians on twitter and a lot who follow me. Will any of you at least make the case for why this is good for America and should continue? I will be cordial I am just trying to understand

@powerbottomdad1 @SumonaChakrabo8 I feel like it's exactly sensitive American culture that'd see a fantastic deal like that and say "soo, it's indentured servitude?" that makes hiring them more baggage than the immigrant.

@powerbottomdad1 @SumonaChakrabo8 If you can't understand that that trade for an American tech salary which can feed their entire extended family back home, I don't think you understand the immigrant mindset.

@jaesmail What app is scaring you

“In this crowded market, it's a huge win to build something that gets attention and evokes user emotion” If that emotion is anger or annoyance or or fear, then no, that’s not a win.