Sean Masters™

Strategy isn't about merely thinking many moves ahead, but ideating more opportunities or paths forward than your opponent.

@HackingDave This summarizes roughly 90% of my LinkedIn feed lately. It's awful.

What I’m realizing is 99.9999999999999999999999999% of AI posts are from people that are trying to get more followers and clicks and has no real world experience on actually deploying. “Improve your workflow 80% by this one Claude skill” “Omg they just released this and it changes the industry completely” It’s all bogus. Create your own workflow that is tailored to you. Don’t buy into this garbage.

@buccocapital Also true in large caps. See: Microsoft under Ballmer (silos, fiefdoms, only doubled revenue in *15* years [!!!!], flat stock price) versus Satya (broke the silos, distributed authority and accountability, revenue skyrocketed, stock price slyrocketed).

90% of the bloat in midcap tech companies is the result of weak, ineffective leaders who are unable to stand up their their good VPs and fire their bad ones They let their good VPs build redundant and bloated fiefdoms. They promote them to CXO titles to retain them, which slows down the organization as everyone else becomes confused on who calls the shots Then, instead of firing their ineffective VPs, they build defensive and redundant scaffolding around them. This protects the organization from catastrophic failure but adds more bloat This all works (well enough, at least) when revenue is growing quickly and profits don’t matter. And it is catastrophic when revenue slows and profits matter At almost all of these companies the problem is the CEO. It is war time now. If you are going to bet on a company that is down 50-70% already, you had better be betting on the right jockey. If they are guilty of these sins, and many of them are, do you believe they have seen the light? Are they willing to do what needs to be done to fix it? I think the safe and correct assumption is that many are not up to task. It should have happened in 2022. Ask yourself: Why will it be different this time?

@ds_lily_ Majority of the player base farms chaos and trades up for divs. Takes a lot longer to make 200 div for a Mageblood when div are 400c rather than 100c.

out of touch streamer take: why do people care about so much about the value of chaos orbs? isn't the entire point of PoEs currency system to have different use cases for each orb and not end up as a de facto gold?

@austin_rief Market cap is only story of the street, which is nearly all subjective and emotional rather than factual. Revenue is the real story. -Hood 4.5B or 1.8M RPE -Coin 7.2B or 1.6M RPE -Block 24.2B or 2.4M RPE... or now 4M RPE Block is very clearly leading the rest, here.

Everyone is talking about the Square layoffs but just a reminder... - Robinhood has 2500 employees (market cap of $70b) - Coinbase has 4500 employees (market cap $50b) Square (market cap $30b) just cut to 6000 employees. I wouldnt say this is all the sudden a symbol of AI transformation and leanness.

@jack @blocks Unrealized 3rd option: scale the skills and capabilities of the entire organization to match those of the 4000 kept, grow at 2x or more the relative growth rate.

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

@askeletalghost @bearlyai My mistake and thanks for the welcome correction!

@SeanMMasters @bearlyai 2003 even en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(no… This genuinely spooks me.

Burger King is launching this AI chatbot called “Patty” that talks to employees through the headset. The AI clarifies what to cook and reminds the employee to say “Welcome to Butger King”, “please” and “thank you” to customers during interaction points.

@karpathy IYKYK

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

@CoachDanGo No carbs. No snacks. Drink more water than probably 90% of the population. That's it.

Question for people who keep themselves under 15% body fat: What are the main things you do to stay lean?

@moseskagan No reason for universities if AI can just do it all...

Another big (temporary) problem w AI Since AI can now do ~all of the work junior analyst types have traditionally done, there is little incentive to hire and train them. Eventually, this won't matter, bc AI will do everything and we will all just sit by the pool. However, during this transition phase, we're going to end up shutting off the young talent pipeline into a whole bunch of industries (which is going to be pretty rough for young people!).

@HackingDave Her: calm, confident, knows where she is going in life Him: omgwtfhaveIdone

Driving to Cleveland with my daughter to get her some hours for temps. First time driving in the city. 💀

@Austen @fawiatrowski @getdelve As @getdelve says it's a minimum of 1 week, we have to assume no they aren't compliant, but will be soon.

@fawiatrowski @getdelve You started yesterday and you’re SOC2 compliant?

We're about to close our first $1M ARR enterprise contract. Fastest company to close enterprise pipeline with zero sales team, zero outbound, and a 48h old product. SOC 2 compliant thanks to @getdelve

@guychristensen_ It's not a coordinated effort, they all just have Terms of Service that say "don't be an asshole."

This week TikTok demonetized me and Instagram banned my account. There’s a coordinated effort to silence my voice on every social media platform they control. Please stand with me.

.@TeamYouTube just deleted my entire channel over my free speech standing against the genocide of Palestinians Can I call on this community to rally to restore my voice? Meanwhile, I urge everyone to make sure they have me on SubStack: yourfavoriteguy.com

At some point, the pace of AI accelerates beyond anyone's ability to keep up. Soon after, it accelerates beyond anyone's ability to catch up. Ever. Happy Saturday! 😁

@nikitabier @Poemetax Permaban him then. The platform doesn't need engagement spam. It needs real engagement.

@Poemetax Your account is 99% engagement spam. It is so egregious that I would like you to pay me for the last 30 seconds I just lost. x.com/Poemetax/statu…

We are rolling out more detection for automation & spam (and a lot more to come). If a human is not tapping on the screen, the account and all associated accounts will likely be suspended—even if you’re just experimenting. While we aim to support legitimate use-cases of agents, this will take some time to do properly. For now, we recommend holding off on plugging in your bots. If it’s critical, you can use the official API.

@signulll Marshall Brain figured it out 'round 20 years ago. marshallbrain.com/manna

your gentle reminder… there are like zero economists or ppl in general who know how to reason about what happens when near zero cost >human level intelligence gets woven into the fabric of the economy at scale this fast. this scenario has never remotely been in the possibility space of econ textbooks or any theory. when cognition starts behaving like a commodity & the environment turns structurally deflationary no one actually knows what happens. kinda like no “expert” really understood a novel virus like covid.

@Austen Whatever you do, don't turn it off.

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@signulll Also... lol hallucination. Human error rates are what, again? Anything the same or better is a clear improvement, period, and it only improves from there.

- “no one will make money in ai” → we’re watching the fastest b2b revenue ramp in history & a new rent extraction layer getting stapled onto every workflow on earth. - “stochastic parrots” → turns out the parrot can write code, do math, negotiate contracts, generate design comps, tutor you, run support, diagnose your health, & replace half or more of the internet’s labor surface area. oops. - “it’ll never stop hallucinating” → it didn’t need to stop. it just needed to get good enough, + tools, + retrieval, + evals, + guardrails, + thinking. now it’s “hallucination” the way gps is “sometimes wrong.”

@bryanrbeal Swapped to Shure IEMs a few years back and hard agree. 👍

@Kazanjy Peter, I saw you live on Earth and wanted to reach out

Jesus christ.