nishchith

distilled my notes into a writeup on how SQL parsers work. nishchith.com/sql-parsers

@vazzupk if it matters, they'll hunt you.

@inishchith But if you don’t yap, People won’t know you’ve shipped.

timely reminder. okay bye

YOU CANNOT COMPETE WITH SOMEONE WHO IS HAVING FUN

less yapping, more shipping

i love deleting code

Our Work Is Never Over

they say people fall back down to the level of their training but I think people fall back down to their incentives.

Work doesn’t suck when you have purpose. It’s shockingly fun and makes you realize what can truly be accomplished in the 24 hour period of a day. Measuring that day in minutes (not hours) based on your (real) output is the true reflection of your impact. Grinding until 0330 or starting work at 0330 is the same when you have purpose. Those that do not will never understand this.

There’s the joke when you ask a dev or dev team how much of the project is done: “We’re done with 90% of it roughly.” The correct answer is: “OK, so what I’m hearing is first 90% done, only second 90% is left” It’s actually not a joke. It’s *often* the reality with software

Thank you for doing this @patrickc Jony: “When you care, it shows up in everything.” Design is an act of responsibility. You’re deciding how someone will feel when they encounter it. That level of care isn’t extra, it’s our job.

Jony mentions the Quakers, and his message is in some sense a Quaker exhortation. "Work as though you are being watched by God and for the good of mankind."

I am inviting someone with an active Bloomberg Terminal subscription to work with us. Together we will build the future of finance research and make it widely accessible. The alpha should be based on who knows to use AI, not who’s paying more for the legacy tools. DMs open.

AMD 💕 @__tinygrad__ we are looking forward to working closely with @__tinygrad__ to help commoditize the petaflop geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/u…

everything in life is easy, except if you are tricked into that thing being hard remember that all people who are really good at something have huge incentives to tell you how hard it is, as that is the only thing that makes them special

>70% of people are in permanent slight suffering because they are allergic to making ANY mentally tough decision when there is also an option to do nothing. rant:

Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

Intelligence is on tap now so agency is even more important

hanElon’s razor