Warfa Jibril

I'm excited to share a bit more about Pax! Building UIs has evolved significantly over recent years, but visual tooling hasn't kept up. We think a visual portal is a win for anyone wanting to craft beautiful software 🎨

We just fixed the worst part about Browserbase. Our browser recordings sucked, and it was all my fault. The team rebuilt it from the ground up, and now it's one of our best features. It's live today, free for every customer on every plan!

@manifest__ai has been cooking 🧑‍🍳🔥

Today, we’re releasing Power Retention, a new architecture beyond Transformers. It enables LLMs to handle millions of tokens efficiently, unlocking long-context applications that were too costly before. manifestai.com/articles/relea…

@ishani_jp Code search via embeddings has been my favorite use-case so far that doesn’t seem to degrade my skills over time

"Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot"

Insane progress from @pk_iv and @browserbase! Excited to see what comes in 2025 🅱️

@pk_iv Casual customer request speedrun! BB is moving different 🏎️💨

AI can really do anything... someone asked me how to build an AI Agent that books meetings with a calendar link. I built this in 2 minutes with Cursor and npx create-browser-app 👇

Anyone – of any race, creed or nationality – who came to America and worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect. America is the land of freedom and opportunity. Fight with every fiber of your being to keep it that way! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

@khushkhushkhush 🔥

In a world where intelligence will soon be too cheap to meter, the ultimate American advantage is a rich culture of ideas — which should be lauded and celebrated as a feature, not a bug. I arrived in Westlake, Ohio at four years old in the early 2000’s. My dad had been in the US since he was 21 - managed to get his Master’s, PhD, and MBA all on full scholarship and obtain citizenship with relative ease in under a decade. His adoration of Pink Floyd, sunny-side up eggs, and lazy Sunday afternoons were part of the binding glue that helped my mother and I assimilate much faster. Assimilation—a word that has soured over time, now burdened with the implication that it requires sacrificing a part of your core identity. Today, in places like Palo Alto, Naperville, and undoubtedly somewhere in New Jersey, assimilation is no longer a mandate. Technical talent arrives on H1B visas, often to work more cheaply and diligently than their U.S. counterparts. In most of these enclaves, close-knit communities thrive without ever integrating into the broader cultural fabric of their new home. I did not have such privileges in Westlake, or in Chicago. I could pen the sob story of how I sucked at the game Dominick’s, which was just a bunch of young boys and girls pushing shopping carts around a fake grocery store — to this day I still don’t romanticize household labor. I could talk about how my high school classmates (89% minorities, mind you!) said my sabudana ki khichdi was giving tadpole eggs. But Mindy Kaling and others have these storylines more or less covered. I find most, if not all, Indian-American coming of age tales to be horribly contrived. They all hinge on this cultural divide across two clashing worlds and the horrific plight of the too-smart, too-awkward protagonist instead of simply telling a good story with the third culture kid stuff as depth to the plot. The greatness of many immigrants we revere today lies in channeling grit into American ambition. Every famous immigrant is a businessperson first, technical savant second. The tiger mom’s baby quant doesn’t learn these skills at Kumon, they are developed and honed on the metaphorical playground of life — for me, between cigarettes outside a dive bar while the Talking Heads play in the distance and at seven am Big 10 football tailgates. I took calculus at a local community college when I was 14. I think I got a B, which was deeply mortifying to my parents, and my mom spent two weeks ensuring only the credits would transfer so as to not tarnish my GPA. I would get dropped off on campus with my pink backpack and a packed lunch, and picked up eight hours later. I couldn’t do soccer camp that summer, and I remember lying to my friends that I was in band camp (in hindsight, equally embarrassing). I spent early evenings kicking a soccer ball around under the apple tree in our backyard to stay ‘sharp’ — though my soccer skills were hopeless anyway. In summer school commmunity college calc I made a few friends that really wanted my class notes - I got introduced to chance the rapper, hot fries with cheese sauce, and newer crasser vernacular in exchange. When I told my parents that I didn’t want to take Calculus II because I would never recover from the social implications, my mom wept for her lost prodigy. My dad, instead, asked me if I wanted to spend my free time experimenting with watercolor paints or writing vignettes instead. His American indoctrination in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he was one of the first men of color to get a PhD, taught him a valuable lesson that is lost on many tiger parents. Once you master the basic technical foundations, soft skills matter more. One of the core tenets of American, particularly Midwestern, culture is to simply listen to thy neighbor. Make thy neighbor laugh. Ask about their day. Tell a self-deprecating story and make small talk. There’s a reason your genius first generation son got rejected from Harvard - he failed to come across as compelling in his alumni interview. And he aced the McKinsey case but didn’t pass the airport test. Many such cases. Academic excellence is the only path to success most immigrant parents know—a direct ticket to stability, a happy life, and retiring the parents who made their kids their retirement plan. This fixation on academic excellence has been praised, dragged, and resurrected three hundred times online. It’s an edge immigrants have over their domestic counterparts, but it comes from necessity, not luxury. There’s this common trope about immigrants being engineers or doctors, and their kids being business majors, and their kids being artists. However, the pivotal difference with my upbringing is that my parents gave me the classical education they could afford. My mom is an artist, fashion designer, yogi, and jewelry maker. My dad is a super genius materials science savant turned businessman, that would’ve been a philosophy major had his background afforded him such leisure. I spent every single weekend possible at the Art Institute of Chicago or at a public library, I wrote essays on art pieces I really liked and read them aloud to my family on long drives, my first book was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and I was always encouraged to formulate an opinion on everything I saw or read. To this day, there is still a two book per week maximum at my local public library because I would often read seven novels at once and my dad thought I should spend more time climbing our apple tree. Growing up, I felt lucky to be a sponge in this world, and though SpongeBob would have been a more productive social lubricant in my early teens, the prescribed foundations in art, music, and history I developed are the very things that allow me to have a ‘thinking’ job today. Ronald Regan’s final speech as President was a love letter to America. In it, he says, “A man wrote me and said: ‘You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’” The path to societally recognized Americanism was much more clear thirty-five years ago. There was simply no place to hide - and our country was much more of an amalgamation of backgrounds and ideologies than it is today. There has been a conscious and mutual segregation of immigrant communities that doesn’t benefit either party. There’s a reason American inventors are the blueprint for much of foreign technology and innovation. I would argue the ultimate American dream is to become an ideas guy or ideas girl, where your thoughts are worth more than the computational capabilities of your brain. Maybe we do need more jocks, but it’s more likely we need more well-rounded geniuses, and prescribing more militant parenting won’t get us there.

we’re building a culture of maniacs on a mission. erik (below) is one of them. want to join? check out the open roles on our website.

CobolCopilot is building language models that help the world’s largest banks and fintechs make sense of their legacy COBOL systems. Over 30,000 enterprises collectively rely on over 800B lines of COBOL code, and yet it’s nearly impossible to hire a COBOL developer (the average COBOL dev age is almost 60!). cobolcopilot.notion.site/Founding-AI-En…

Honored to moderate a panel discussion with humanitarian operators and aircraft manufacturers at the 16th GHAC today. Our focus was on establishing a collaborative working group between aviation operators and manufacturers.

Congratulations to Paul and the team @browserbase!

the best way to get good at something is usually to just practice actually doing the thing in question. a lot of very capable people outsmart themselves with complex plans that involve working a lot on fake prerequisites.

Don’t forget people

there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see

Schopenhauer, good morning

gm

New driving meta: use Waymos as merge points. They will always let you in, no matter the traffic situation. I expect this will be patched once they are on highways.

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“Blood is not the foundation of civilization… but it suffuses its mortar at every level.” – Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio