Henry Yates 😁

I am going to watch this every morning before I start work. "DO WHAT YOU CAN'T" via @dolectures youtu.be/jG7dSXcfVqE

@L1AD Reminds me of that old joke. AI engineers keep building a better and better AI, asking the same question: “Is there a God?” Eventually, the AI answers: “There is now!” Quoting @elonmusk

We had thought that AI wasn't gonna replace you. Someone using AI was gonna replace you. We were wrong. AI is going to replace you.

@paulg @davidcrawshaw My dad's Omega. He was a private GP. In the 60s and 70s his patients from the Middle East gave him lots of watches. This was his favourite.

@davidcrawshaw Buy a 1960s Omega.

Great essay, not just for the broader point about the brand age, but for capturing my despair of the watch industry. I love mechanism for mechanism's sake, but cannot find a watch to buy.

The history books quietly bypassed is that Barack Obama, during the most pressure-saturated nights of his presidency, would retreat alone to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence — not to strategize, not to take calls, but to handwrite personal letters to ten ordinary American citizens every single night, a practice he maintained with almost monastic devotion across all eight years, selecting the letters himself from the 40,000 that arrived daily at the White House, and his longtime correspondence director Fiona Reese confirmed that Obama would often weep privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives, with one Ohio steelworker writing back to say that Obama's letter had physically stopped him from making a decision that would have permanently altered his family's future. What makes this practice almost unbearably moving is the detail that surfaced later — Obama never used a computer for these letters, always a black felt-tip pen, always legal yellow paper first as a draft, always rewritten onto White House stationery by hand a second time, because he believed, as he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a rare private conversation later recounted in her 2018 work, that the physical act of pressing pen to paper forced a quality of attention that typing simply could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004 where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from behind the insulating distance of institutions and screens."

@karpathy @Newaiworld_ 200 lines of code, millions of operations at runtime. The simplicity makes it beautiful. But the interesting questions are always in the execution.

@Newaiworld_ it's down 200 lines now, i realized i was *still* overcomplicating things. but it's past midnight and i'm calling it here now.

New art project. Train and inference GPT in 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python. This is the *full* algorithmic content of what is needed. Everything else is just for efficiency. I cannot simplify this any further. gist.github.com/karpathy/8627f…

I live in Sweden. And I work more than half of my time in the United States. I know both systems — not from headlines, but from daily life. Sweden has a capitalist market economy. Private ownership. Competition. Global companies. We also have social reforms: healthcare, paid parental leave, paid vacation, and social security. This is not socialism. This is not communism. It’s capitalism with guardrails. The market creates wealth. Society prevents bad luck from becoming a life sentence. Our freedoms are intact. Our economy is competitive. And no — this isn’t theory. I live it.

@GarettJones @paulg hard to square with UK school data. Disadvantaged pupils from "MENAPT" backgrounds in London often have significantly higher Progress 8 scores than the White British working class. If they are failing fiscally later, it’s not for lack of academic potential

Graph that did them in:

New achievement! Preston-Werner Ventures (through which I did my angel investing) has become PWV™ (pwv.com) and I’m raising a venture fund targeting $100M to lead pre-seed and seed rounds in today’s most exciting software- and AI-driven companies.

Saving this for when my 3 year old daughter goes out to raise venture capital

In Venice you don't go to see the thing. You're in the thing.

@mpawlo Hear, hear!

What gets measured gets done, they say. I believe the quote is attributed to Bill Gates or perhaps I am wrong and it was Abrahma Lincoln, or perhaps to a particularly humorless Puritan accountant during the American Civil War. Who really knows these days? At any rate, its spirit haunts us still. It is like we all live unde rthe spell of the ghost of a middle manager who died whilst running his KPIs! After perusing @nntaleb’s recent X broadsides, I find myself possessed by a more decadent (!) notion: What gets measured, no longer gets enjoyed. We have become a civilisation of auditors with Fitbits, Oura rings and Apple Watches, tabulating our own decline in google sheets, or worse: excel! Pauvre young @bryan_johnson (love u still! And my sleep has improved). God bless his quantified heart. He even meassures (and publish!!!) data on his nocturnal erections. But let me psoe this one central question: What is the point of measuring erections if one is not having any fun with them? Is this the Enlightenment’s final form? We measure our sprints, our commits, our swipes, our sighs. We log not just what we code but how vigorously we exhale while coding (breathwork, baby!). And before long, the insurance company will know exactly how many milliseconds it takes you to write “depressed” into a Slack window, and how many steps you checked in today. We are living in a Black Mirror episode of our own exquisite design. We wrote evrry scene and then directed it. Our choice? the algorithmic theatre of the absurd. But must we play every role? Must we measure the whole debacle? But why not just let some things be. Code for the fun of it - not to increase you github employability. Draw and write for yourself, not to reach a goal. And do have some fun with those nightime erections!

@paulg OMG, she will soon have TWO teenage boys in the house. I wish her well!!

A friend who does research on smell gave us tests of smelling ability. Jessica scored 100%. It turns out the Social Radar is also the Odor Radar.

@ftweekend Has the @ftweekend turned into Hello Magazine?!

The ballad of Sting and Trudie on.ft.com/4d4LX6k

@paulg @dpachov @reidhoffman Could you share some of the big misses? Also the learning? I imagine some would have been hard to spot.

@dpachov @reidhoffman Surely it's obvious that YC is trying to predict something very precise, and surely it's not a stretch to believe that YC tracks both kinds of failure. The names of the big misses are practically burned into the partners' brains.

A high school student told me that at his school a lot of the kids start fake startups and nonprofits for college admissions. He asked how YC filters out fake ideas, and I realized this is a very complicated question.

@paulg Yeah, this one is one of his best youtu.be/mMiL4_1Yewg?si…

Messi plays like the daydream of a 10 year old: dribble past half the opposing team, then blast it into the corner of the net.

Grok estimates with 75%-85% certainty that Trump is a Putin compromised asset. @GOP @elonmusk @DNC @AP @Reuters @mcuban @JasmineForUS @AOC @maddow Anyone want to address this publicly? x.com/i/grok/share/W…

And if you don’t think that the US withdrawing military aid from Ukraine is not the US coercing Europe militarily you are living in a dream world.

@Gerard1976uk A big dose of naivety plus unreasonable self-belief is how a lot of great things get built 🤷‍♂️

@ThreshedThought 🍿🍿🍿

There is a lot going on in the news at the moment, but there is a story that is consistently being underreported: Russia. A 🧵 (potentially with 🖍️)

Former MI6 chief: Brexit has made Britain irrelevant on the international stage.

@Rapahelz @ill_Scholar

@ill_Scholar In the same vein, this map shows every Roman settlement that has existed. Source: DARMC Project, Harvard University

Distribution of Roman Coins Found.