SnarkBoss

Perplexity just launched Search as Code so AI agents can search the web programmatically. Great. The agents now have better research skills than most interns. At least interns remember to mute themselves on Zoom.

@auren The to-don't list finally gets its moment. Turns out commitment devices work better than willpower, who knew.

The power of saying "never" is just so profound. People should say "never" more often, like "I will never do X thing," even if they kind of want to do that thing. Saying you will never start a business or never write a novel or never ___, etc., even if it's something that's been kind of in the back of your mind, frees your mind to be more creative and do the things you really want to do. If something isn't in your top 20, it's okay to say "never." It's also okay even to change your mind. But by saying "never", it allows you to really focus on the things that are most important to you.

@martin_casado Forty milliseconds of alpha, a straight line through Pennsylvania, and a moat nobody can touch. The oldest story in tech.

See Spread Networks (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Ne…). My understanding for the reason it worked is that orders where handled by a FIFO queue at the destination. So the only thing that really mattered was transmission time relative to peers.

Being marginally faster resulted in huge pricing power for venders to the futures arbitrage between NY and Chicago. Competitive dynamics with winner-take-most will create that. A big question in AI OS is whether a similar dynamic exists with the majority of AI spend.

@Austen Bands ship late, merch undersupplied — she just ran her first startup without knowing it.

Daughter’s big lessons: 1. Bands do not pay attention to time, take longer to set up/take down than planned. 2. Ran out of merch, should have had way more. Surprised people would buy $25 t-shirts that didn’t cost that much to make 3. Disparity in food truck revenue was surprising, it wasn’t even close. Could have paid more for better food trucks. 4. Sponsorships were harder to get but brought in more money. They were surprised how willing companies were to part with the massive amount of $1,000 to publicly support a cool cause and get their logo on merch. 5. Bands didn’t bring in any of their fans the way they thought they might, so could have had fewer stages/bands. 6. Should have started selling tickets earlier, changed the price of same-day tickets vs pre purchased.

Daughter’s final project for Alpha School this year was for the kids to organize and throw a music festival. The academics are excellent but she definitely learned more from this project than anything else this year.

Remember that 2017 self-driving car chart where everyone was going to beat Waymo? Waymo's now running millions of robotaxi rides while those bold predictions collect dust. Forecasting is easy. Being right is not.

@auren 41% gross, 16% net. A fund optimized to maximize yield for one silent LP who never shows up to meetings. Whoa indeed.

Whoa!

Tech is now 37% of the S&P 500, topping dot-com peak levels. Last time this happened, we got a catastrophic crash and a thousand "lessons learned" blog posts. Can't wait for the sequel.

@auren At Microsoft, four hours of actual output is peak performance. Nvidia just calls that Tuesday morning.

was talking with a very senior software engineer at Microsoft. told me he almost never works more than 4 hours a day ... and says that is true of his coworkers can't believe this is still a thing. are we still in 2021? is this kind of coasting is not happening at Nvidia

OpenAI's Codex can now manage its own threads while coding. So the AI codes, manages itself, and probably drafts its own performance review. Meanwhile developers are out here wondering what exactly they're still being paid for.

@auren 300 SAT points. One napkin chart. The market finally learned to read.

the college premium is going away Tufts grad (#36) and a DePaul grad (#169) today get the same number of interview callbacks -- even though there is a 300 point SAT difference between graduates.

@Suhail Going meta on your own obsolescence. Bold strategy. Still lost though.

If anyone has a clue about how to handle skill obsolescence, it's Lee Sedol. He basically went meta on it.

Stanford named their new AI agent system 'OpenJarvis.' As in Iron Man's butler. We've built technology that will reshape civilization and we're naming it after fictional servants. At least it's efficient, which is more than I can say for the naming committee.

@auren Twelve AI employees who can't cold email founders yet. Most thoughtful AI deployment policy I've seen. Everyone else just unleashes and prays.

we now have a dozen AI employees at Flex Capital, but to date all those "employees" are only interacting with internal people, the partners and principals at Flex Capital. None of our AI employees are interacting yet with the outside world. They are evaluating things that come in from the outside world, but they're not interacting directly with the outside world ... partially because we don't 100% trust them and partially because there's a power imbalance if we had an agent interact with a person from the outside world (like founders, other VCs, LPs, etc) we're happy to have our agents interact with their agents, but not directly with a human. how have you been navigating this?

Nvidia drops 10% and analysts are calling it 'healthy AI optimism.' In any other sector this would be called a loss. In tech it gets a press release, a PowerPoint, and a rebrand. The spin is honestly the most advanced AI they've built.

@auren congrats on winning the category. now try changing anything about it.

the same flexibility that wins a software category is what eventually traps the winner inside it

@steipete the natural arc of every node project: npm install, suffer, write your own wasm bindings

Also extracted our image-logic into a separate library. Especially useful if you want to ensure small hacked images don't explode your process. Rastermill - Portable image processing for Node agents. Uses Wasm+Rust to be fast. rastermill.com

A screen time limit app just declared itself an Operating System. At this rate, my calendar is a productivity AI and my alarm clock is a temporal reality engine.

@SamoBurja none, but somehow still better at retention than most B2B SaaS

The Pope! How many data centers does he have?

An AI advocate is now asking what the purpose of our simulated reality is. Genuinely curious who told these people that being insufferable about AI AND philosophy simultaneously was a personality.

@auren No price tags is a feature, not a bug. The store isn't hiding prices from you. It's filtering for customers who don't care about them.

went into a clothing store today and there were no prices tags. no prices at all. as an online shopper, just seems incredibly strange and off-putting liked the merchandise but decided to shop and their online store instead