Marcus Storm-Mollard

this is excellent >GitLab founder diagnosed with rare cancer (osteosarcoma) >standard care works but cancer comes back later >medical team says there's not much else to do >"It became my own job to keep myself alive. Nobody else was going to do it for me at this point" >starts researching, assembles his own medical team, uses AI for deep research >“I’ll talk to anyone, I’ll go anywhere, and I can be there anytime" to collect information >does as many diagnostic tests as he can find as often as he can (maximal diagnostics) >develops his own therapeutic ladder with repurposed drugs, personalized medicine, etc >Sid’s cancer currently in remission

Engineering job openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over 3 years There are over 67,000 (!!!) eng openings at tech companies globally right now, with 26,000 just in the U.S. We don’t know if there would have been more open roles if not for AI or if AI is actually leading to more open roles, but since the start of this year, the increase in open eng roles is accelerating even more.

Every additional minute your toddler spends on a screen, they hear about 7 fewer words from you. By age 3, they also make 5 fewer attempts to talk back and lose one back-and-forth exchange with a parent. That’s from a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics study that put speech-recognition recorders inside actual homes across Australia. The 49% stat in this tweet is real. It comes from a 2017 study at SickKids Hospital in Toronto that tracked 894 children aged 6 to 24 months. For every 30 minutes of handheld screen time per day, the risk of a child being slow to form words and sentences increased by 49%. But only the speech output was affected. Gestures, body language, and social interaction were all fine. The mechanism is displacement. A toddler’s brain learns language through something researchers call “serve and return”: baby babbles, parent responds, baby tries again. That loop is how the brain’s language wiring gets built. When a screen is on, that exchange drops off. And we can now see it on brain scans. A 2020 JAMA Pediatrics study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital scanned the brains of 47 kids aged 3 to 5. Kids with more screen time had weaker white matter, the insulation around nerve fibers that helps different parts of the brain talk to each other. The weak spots were in the exact areas that control language and early reading. A 2023 study at Tohoku University in Japan followed 7,097 children from birth. More screen time at age 1 was associated with higher rates of communication delays at ages 2 and 4. Each additional hour widened the gap. The AAP recommends zero screen time for children under 18 months, except for video calls. The average child under 2 already gets over an hour a day. But a 2023 systematic review found that when kids with speech delays stopped using devices for six months, 36.7% showed measurable improvement. The word in the tweet is “destroys.” The data says it’s closer to “delays,” and in many cases, delays that respond when the screens come off.

We’ve trained a multimodal AI model to turn routine pathology slides into spatial proteomics, with the potential to reduce time and cost while expanding access to cancer care.

Boil the Oceans You know the phrase: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone’s said it in some overly ambitious meeting. It’s good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think it’s time to retire saying it. Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first. I was recently with a university endowment’s head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it — that’s the natural first reaction. But it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment. Instead of worrying about doing the same thing we’ve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why can’t that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why can’t a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why can’t we have fusion energy? Why can’t we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product? These aren’t rhetorical questions anymore. They’re engineering problems with paths to solutions. Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten. If you’re a worker — someone who trades labor for a living — this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if you’re already management or capital, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now? The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now — if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves. Buckminster Fuller coined the term “ephemeralization” in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables — each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasn’t describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization. This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t use less of it — you use vastly more. Steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine. But Jevons Paradox doesn’t activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions — to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee That’s what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present. Time to start.

Anthropic is valued at $380 billion. For nearly a year during its fastest growth period, their entire marketing operation was one guy. Austin Lau, a non-technical growth lead, was running paid search, paid social, email & SEO completely solo. Just Claude Code & some insane automation he built himself without writing a single line of code. Here's the exact workflow: - Export ad performance CSVs into Claude Code - AI flags what's underperforming - Sub-agent 1 writes headlines - Sub-agent 2 writes descriptions - Figma plugin auto-swaps copy into 100 ad templates - MCP server pulls live Meta data to close the loop Output went up 10x. Creation went from 2 hours to 15 minutes. Conversion rates beat industry average by 41%. This isn't AI helping a marketing team. This is one person replacing what used to be a 50-person department.