Raza Shaikh

@MubarizSiddiqui @VLEKTRA

Raza Mohsin needed motor testing equipment for the @VLEKTRA factory. China was too expensive. A local engineer took an advance and delivered something that never worked. Then someone walked in with a different offer. No degree. No English. No CV. His only credential was 15 years of working alongside his electrician father. What happened next is the best argument I've heard for where Pakistan's real talent actually lives.

@DaveBlundin @BullTheoryio Love the claw/Boston reference

🚨Chegg $CHGG is now down 99% from its peak because AI has killed its business entirely. Chegg was a $14.7 billion edtech company that charged students $20 a month for homework answers from a database of 79 million solutions built over a decade. Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Five months later Chegg's CEO admitted it was destroying their business. The stock dropped 48% in a single day. Revenue dropped 49% by Q4 2025. Subscribers collapsed from 5 million to under 3 million. The company fired 67% of its staff in two rounds last year and shut down all US and Canada offices. AI does the same thing instantly for free and explains the concept behind it. It went From $14.7 billion marketcap to $114 million in 39 months. The first company to be officially killed by AI.

@GromaCorp @sethpriebatsch I didn't think he is a day over 28!

@sethpriebatsch You’re 41, don’t sell yourself short.

Look ma! I'm #50 (of 50).

@WillManidis amazon.com/Compounding-Li…

the greatest regret i have is underestimating the value of long term compounding. friendships, people, places, all get better with decades. beautiful things dont even start to reveal themselves for years. it is entirely what life is about. a few good things for a long time.

@elonmusk @BillyM2k Maybe instead of the thumbs down symbol it should be the spam symbol

@BillyM2k Just an experiment

don't make this site like reddit, people don't downvote spam as strongly as they downvote opinions they disagree with i feel bored typing this because it's so obvious so please don't make stupid decisions thanks

@nntaleb Consider bringing it back in-person?

Friends, registrations (and scholarships) are open for the Real World Risk Summer School, RWRI Number 21: June 29-July 10, 2026. Online. #RWRI realworldrisk.com

@AsfiShaheen @samraaj Reminds me of the type of stuff we used to say in middle school: B B G T P O P I J U P O

@samraaj Brilliant

The final boss: ❤️ 20 13 80 20 13e

@kyork20 Just learned of an $80M round at $1B valuation for a four year old company

The startup industry truly is Silicon Valley vs. everywhere else. Just saw a $70M seed round at a $700M valuation. Good luck! 🍀

@bhalligan @milesgrimshaw Token whales!

@milesgrimshaw I wonder when public investors will start asking companies about their token consumption on earnings calls.

The best teams are measuring token usage per person. They know their power users and learn from them. They push to operationalize intelligence. We all have to go through a behavioral phase change, ice -> water. Become a token maxi.

@umarsaif A pyramid is very hard to build, let alone build an inverted pyramid:

Pakistan's startup ecosystem has been a disappointing story. When I started Plan9 incubator in 2012, there was suddenly so much excitement around startups. It seemed, everyone wanted to setup a startup incubator -- and we had several hundred founders working on decent ideas. Fast forward today, it seems that's where it all stopped. As startups became fashionable, everyone simply replicated Plan9 and thought they were done. Small investment funds came and went; wealthy family offices tried to re-brand themselves as VCs mostly as a vanity play; conferences, meet-ups, TV shows ... so much activity, but no substance. At this point, despite a clear opportunity for unicorns in FinTech, EdTech, AgriTech, E-commerce, Food delivery, Grocery delivery, B2B e-commerce, Logistics, OTT etc -- there is not a single home-brewed startup even remotely close to a $100 M valuation. PropTech is the only exception at this point ... Even some of the mid-tier software houses ($10M -15M ARR), mostly live off of paltry upwork projects -- with very little intellectual property, products, or innovation. I want to genuinely learn why? Why can't we even replicate a fraction of the success similar countries in our neighbourhood have seen?

Build more housing in;

@bhalligan @bsierakowski @rywalker Best advice I got when I landed in America and Boston: learn to ski and you won't hate winter.

@bsierakowski @rywalker Cold is an upside if you like to ski.

I did a bunch of analysis of the AI 50 produced by Fortune this year (not perfect, but vaguely right). Of the 50 companies listed, 2 are Boston (actually Cambridge), Suno and OpenEvidence. OpenEvidence is headquartered in Miami. So, 1 out of 50 is actually in Greater Boston. Thank you @MikeyShulman! 17 of the 50 top ai companies have founders that went to school in Boston. The average age of those 17 founders was 28.5 years old when they started the company. We need to make Boston a great place to start a company. We need to make Boston an extremely attractive place for new grads to put down roots. There is a lot to like about Boston! A bunch of us are getting together on Wednesday night to talk about it. This is a problem worth solving. Lets continue discussing, debating, and engaging on how to improve the region. I'd like to see some of the elected officials who are DM'g me weigh in here.

@nntaleb Don't like individual personal trainer one on one - that is totally lame. But I haven't seen anything more effective than a group coach to push everyone in the group to really do more than I ever would myself. Group accountability and working hard with seeing others works!

Seems to me that self-employed & independent people tend to not like to work under personal trainers telling them precisely what to do. Is this observation correct?

@AsfiShaheen @supabase cloud flare issue?

@DegenRolf Super funny that just on my ride home I was listening the chapter exactly about this from @AnnieDuke's new book Quit.

The fall of "When prophecies fail": Another social psychology classic turns out to be based on fabrications and lies. In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. In “When Prophecy Fails “ (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, Festinger, Riecken and Schachter claimed that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. When Prophecy Fails is one of the most influential case studies in 20th-century social science. It shaped popular understandings of how belief survives disconfirmation, and became a touchstone for explaining the origins of religious movements... But the case was misrepresented. The cult did not persist, proselytize, or reinterpret its failure as a spiritual triumph. Its leader recanted, the group disbanded, and belief dissolved. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers. The newly unsealed Box 4 of papers contain transcripts, telephone logs, research notes, channeled messages, and internal communications among the researchers. Collectively, they reveal serious ethical breaches: fabrications, covert manipulation, and at least one instance of interference with a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study. This article shows that the authors of When Prophecy Fails misled their readers—and that scholars in psychology, sociology, and religious studies have been building theories atop a collapsed foundation. The full scope and variety of the misrepresentations and misconduct of the researchers needed the unsealed archives of Festinger to emerge, the full story could not be written until now. Every major claim of the book is false, and the researchers’ notes leave no option but to conclude the misrepresentations were intentional.

source news.ok.ubc.ca/2025/10/30/ubc…

@Jason In the meanwhile it is Luminous Robotics

It's obvious that humanoid robots will build and install an infinite number of solar farms and battery packs in ten years... Which means all energy will be 90% cheaper... And desalination of water is an energy-intensive process, so that will drop by 90%.... and food production needs labor and water... so that will drop 90%.... The biggest problem humanity might face is that too many people have too much free time!

@danprimack Even more if your brother has to run his six marathon and you worry about the cascade despite it resolving right now. It is crazy.

TFW you read about FAA shortages at the airport you're flying out of in 24 hours...

@danprimack This one wouldn't cut it anymore

Not too often that a record gets broken at America’s oldest country fair.

@nntaleb or do what paulgraham.com does

Friends, I am still using Medium (effortless to post) but a lot of people are recommending Substack. Any reason? Any censorship in one of the platforms? medium.com/p/7255aad3e18c