Daniel Chen

The Rise of Dopamine Culture You’ll know that everything on the left is real and offline. whereas everything on the right is virtual and online. Perhaps obvious but it seems like the endpoint for digital experiences is the give people what they want. And coupled with an engagement-driven business model (online ads) and access to real-time metrics/dashboards, it means we are constantly driving towards making it even more efficient to give people what they want. Image h/t @AlecStapp

With many 🧩 dropping recently, a more complete picture is emerging of LLMs not as a chatbot, but the kernel process of a new Operating System. E.g. today it orchestrates: - Input & Output across modalities (text, audio, vision) - Code interpreter, ability to write & run programs - Browser / internet access - Embeddings database for files and internal memory storage & retrieval A lot of computing concepts carry over. Currently we have single-threaded execution running at ~10Hz (tok/s) and enjoy looking at the assembly-level execution traces stream by. Concepts from computer security carry over, with attacks, defenses and emerging vulnerabilities. I also like the nearest neighbor analogy of "Operating System" because the industry is starting to shape up similar: Windows, OS X, and Linux <-> GPT, PaLM, Claude, and Llama/Mistral(?:)). An OS comes with default apps but has an app store. Most apps can be adapted to multiple platforms. TLDR looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.

@zachklein @CrowdBuildingNL is doing cool things but supported by a regulatory environment that makes it possible.

I recommend that you make residency as liquid as possible. It's going to take some time to find the right mix of people ... too often intentional communities don't account for this and collapse as soon as the first person wants to bail. twitter.com/orthonormalist…

I've tried this. If you can make it work, it's deeply satisfying to share resources and build dependency on friends/neighbors. The major blockers preventing this particular model of a bunch of friends buying land together are ... (thread)

For all his weaknesses, @realDonaldTrump has played a crucial role in forcing the neoliberal establishment to rethink many aspects of globalization, etc. I hope, whatever the final count, the outcome of this election will sustain that pressure. More on this soon.

The Most Important Policy Decision In Our Lifetimes In a week dominated by horrible news, there are signs that the Senate may make the right choice when it passes a new response to the pandemic in July: 0/18

How long until we see new homes listed as 3bd/3ba/2office?

@justineraelee Look at all those billionaires

I took this photo from a small pedestrian bridge in Central Park

Growth comes from doing things you don’t want to do.

Donald Trump seems to think he can direct funding based on which politicians are nice to him, which states he’s trying to win in November, and which businesses he wants to enrich — all without any accountability. @EWarren and I think that’s unacceptable. kansascity.com/opinion/articl…

Best China policy suggestion in 20 years: Admit Taiwan to the WHO.

Weird potential idea: competence tourism. E.g. Goldman Sachs has a bunch of people who really need to work in an office together. They can't in the US because of the coronavirus. So instead they all go and work for a while in a country where they can, like Taiwan.

I am shaking. I went to the dog park to walk my dog. These people came very aggressively towards me (without a mask), called me an oriental & told me to go back to where I came from. I asked her to pls stop coming towards me, she wouldn’t stop, finally I had to get out my camera.

Grandma totally gets it.

After 5 minutes of trying to use my new hair clippers, I can confidently say hair salons need to be deemed as essential services right now.

If we ever open museums again, can we put this Feb 27 Hannity screenshot in one

Please consider donating to this incredibly worthwhile effort by @ideo designers to deliver affordable shields for front line health workers — and fill a speed gap as major suppliers ramp up production. I’m so proud of this incredible crew.

fascinating... and, frightening.

This graph is staggering to me! The virus is not like abortion or gay marriage. It does not care whether you are a Republican or a Democrat and also does not care about borders.. How could something so scientific and uniform be so partisan?

@AshleyBrasier the East Cut in SF was branded by a Collins (also did Dropbox)

Uber's IPO caps an era of mediocrity and small thinking in Silicon Valley cnb.cx/2VvhbPB