Tech

people say that “it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society”. But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys

Humanity did not rise to prominence on Earth by lifting heavier weights than other species

Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle

human beings all have the same cognitive architecture. We all have a prefrontal cortex and limbic system and so on. If you imagine a space of all possible minds, then all human beings are packed into one small dot in mind design space. And then Artificial Intelligence is literally everything else. “AI” just means “a mind that does not work like we do”. So you can’t ask “What will an AI do?” as if all AIs formed a natural kind. There is more than one possible AI.

So that is “transhumanism” – loving life without special exceptions and without upper bound

If you take common sense and rigorously apply it, through multiple inferential steps, to areas outside everyday experience, successfully avoiding many possible distractions and tempting mistakes along the way, then it often ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name

If you offered Gandhi a pill that made him want to kill people, he would refuse to take it, because he knows that then he would kill people, and the current Gandhi doesn’t want to kill people. This, roughly speaking, is an argument that minds sufficiently advanced to precisely modify and improve themselves, will tend to preserve the motivational framework they started in

The future of Earth-originating intelligence may be determined by the goals of the first mind smart enough to self-improve

the company with fewer lines of code is better off. They have fewer lines of code and so they can understand and modify their code more quickly

OAuth was first introduced in 2007. It was created at Twitter because Twitter wanted a way to allow third-party apps to post tweets on users' behalf.

OKLCH is a newer color model that is designed to be perceptually uniform. This means that colors are much more accurate in terms of how humans perceive them and it makes working with them much easier

I quickly cancelled my GPT subscription and put the $20/month towards Anthropic instead.

1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources

If you're from infosec, you might want to stop reading now

they can perform wildly differently based on the same or similar inputs

coding is just conditional logic and looping

passion without boundaries will lead you to burnout.

Why was I responding to tweets on the beach? I hadn't built the system for others to take ownership

You can push the pace without being an asshole. The ideal state is that your team both loves what they're working on and can ship fast

Aggressive deadlines expose hidden complexity

My goal was to build a culture that set aggressive deadlines, but also was okay with sometimes missing dates. If there's no date, it might take 3 months. But if you set a date of 2 weeks and it actually takes 1 month, great, you just shipped a first version 3x faster.

It's one of my favorite parts about roles like DX and Design Engineers. These are folks who can code, design, build, and ship. They have extreme agency and operate more like founders.