Sullivan McIntyre

For the last 28 years I have been involved in startups and I am passionate about the founder journey and the critical (and largely misunderstood) role that startups play in the prosperity of this country. For 14 years my involvement was as a co founder at @seekjobs and for the past 14 years as a co founder at @SquarePegCap I am also passionate about the future of Australia and the need for good public policy to drive future prosperity and that is why a group of us set up AMPLIFY in 2024. At AMPLIFY we are focused on housing as the biggest fault line in Australia and a source of huge Intergenerational inequality in this country. On the face of it a budget that puts housing front and centre is a good thing and all of us should wait to see what the budget brings. Hopefully on an overall basis it makes it easier for (mostly) younger Australians to be able to buy their own home. However in the debate about CGT there has been one critical issue missing. The doubling of the CGT rate and the ongoing exemption of the family home will make home ownership even more elusive for those that don’t own their own home today. This policy change will create further distortion. Owning your own home has always been the fastest way in Australia to increase your wealth: homeowners like me and many others in my generation have had the benefit of rapid appreciation and tax free gains. The ability to leverage the home to ~80% has amplified these gains and has created a triple benefit for homeowners. A doubling of CGT means that homeowners are even more incentivised to own their own home as long as possible and not downsize and to do renovations to their houses. Having your capital tied up in your own home will become even more attractive relative to other assets. It is going to further entrench the advantage of home owners vs renters and is going to reduce the propensity of older Australians to sell their homes and free up stock. A doubling of the rate of CGT will be a double own goal, both because if its direct impact discouraging investment in productive assets and its second order impact on reducing supply of existing homes in the market.

If you think about it, Catherine West essentially called for a leadership spill in Keir Starmer. You can take the politician out of Australia, but you can't take the Australian out of the politician.

The source of the myth is @_KarenHao she wrote a book called Empire of AI claiming a data center would use over 1,000x more water than a nearby city because she misunderstood the units of measurement. It made international headlines and the mistake / lie has been unstoppable.

Not just in temperament, Australia in general is proof of the innate potential of the British working class, how ‘Free-Range’ Anglos will develop into a physically more robust, taller and healthier version of the type when they aren’t cooped up on a grey, rainy overcrowded island

this is traditional australian meal. wow! i love experiencing our vibrant culture

Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.

It was probably inevitable with mass transatlantic communication, but watching centuries of British parliamentary tradition devolve into petty American-style grievance politics has been depressing.

One of the worst political tweets I’ve ever read.

The big problem with everything legal I’ve ever done is MS Word and redlines. Legal needs a github - markdown, diffable, mergeable, etc. I’m sure everything changes with AI, but if legal collaboration is still emailing fucking docx files around, I tell you thats not the answer.

A well curated Google Reader feed was 100x better than any of these algorithms.

Gent in yellow, "I'm an engineer, a scientist by background, and what I really care about is energy" "And that's one of these things which I feel has been turned into a culture war" "So let me say one thing" "We know that heat pumps, insulation, EVs, etc can save half your energy usage" "It's a massive difference" "And Iran, while, and this is not just about climate change, we can use as a strategic reserve" "We can use that oil for aviation or AI data centres" "But we've got politicians here on the table today, I believe, who deny these facts" "And why should we platform you when we can save that money? The energy. The money" "And this also means that we're not paying the oil money to Russia, which uses it to strike Ukraine every day, and we pay again for defence missiles" "So it's a very serious question. And this is the science, this is the fact. You cannot say that that does not save half the energy."

3 out of 4 of @dwarkeshpodcast's latest guests have been Australians. AI = Australian Intelligence.

a boomer is anyone born before me. a zoomer is anyone born after me. i stand alone, the one true millenial chungus

unfortunately san francisco is the exact opposite

Battlestar Galactica cinematographer validated

@fleetingbits agree, the whole Accelerated Computing positioning just feel a bit daft now; people aren’t buying megasheds full of Blackwell to model molecule behaviour

some thoughts on the jensen dwarkesh interview 1) jensen is a ceo that talks his book; i think the throughline is that jensen says what's good for nvidia 2) as an example, his discussion of gpus vs tpus is very unsatisfying, but it is good for nvidia; he doesn't want to concede their overwhelming use case will be ai 3) this is because, if the overwhelming use case for gpus is ai, then maybe some of the value nvidia has built for other kinds of scientific computing are less valuable and are less of a moat in the primary market 4) and then, it's harder for nvidia, on the long term, to defend its margins against google, broadcom, etc... 5) i think an interesting argument he gives for why nvidia has a moat is that nvidia has a longstanding relationship with suppliers and aggregates demand 6) and, tsmc and other vendors will expand capacity because he says so, because they trust that he will buy the demand he encourages them to build out 7) so, he will get this allocation from them, which other parties cannot get, because they both trust him (more than openai, for example) and are risk averse 8) outside of the china export control conversation, there isn't much else interesting in the interview 9) the export conversation is quite weird because he contradicts himself; i put a lot of this down to him talking his book, and nvidia benefiting, in a p&l sense, from selling to china 10) some of the contradictions: 10a) nvidia exports won't improve chinese capabilities at all but nvidia chips are so far ahead that they greatly improve both researcher productivity and inference efficiency 10b) the us compute lead means us should have ai leadership, but china has enough compute to build frontier models so it doesn't matter if china has more compute 11) anyway, i think he believes two things that might make his position a bit more understandable 12) first, he just doesn't seem that agi pilled, he seems to think the value of ai will accrue to the application layer, not the foundation layer 13) second, he thinks that open source ai will dominate at the application layer and if it's trained in china on huawei chips, then it will be optimized for those chips, and nvidia will lose the global market 14) he doesn't say these points quite clearly enough, so i think they were not sufficiently identified in the interview as at the root of the disagreement 15) also note, this view is beneficial for nvidia; the reason why nvidia wants the application layer to win with open source ai is it means nvidia has a fragmented downstream market 16) harvey isn't going to build its own ai accelerator but openai will; and in a world where harvey uses open source nvidia can take more margin 17) so, this is really another example of jensen talking his book at some level, since in his world he both gets better margins and he gets to sell into china

@allgarbled @CliffordNash14 study the finer points of linear algebra, optimization theory, learn about the computational biology of the brain, hone your craft for years ant/oai/etc: put the TurboTax MCP in the bag mf

So much of Australian politics is people trying to import UK-style poverty for mad ideological reasons.

Young people move to cities because that's where the opportunities are - employment, educational, cultural, social. This isn't because of some conspiracy, cities are the natural economic engines by which these opportunities are generated, it cannot be redistributed effectively.

Texas has blown passed CA in utility solar and they are about to pass us in batteries. Not because they care about the environment, but because it is actually legal to build there.