Kevin Patrick Murphy
"The role of raw power in intelligence", Hans Moravec, 1976 (!).
"The first section discusses natural intelligence, and notes two major branches of the animal kingdom in which it evolved independently, and several offshoots. The suggestion is that intelligence need not be so difficult to construct as is sometimes assumed.
The second part compares the information processing ability of present computers with intelligent nervous systems, and finds a factor of one million difference. This abyss is interpreted as a major distorting influence in current work, and a reason for disappointing progress.
Section three examines the development of electronics, and concludes the state of the art can provide more power than is now available, and that the gap could be closed in a decade."
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:ws563sd6050/ws563sd6050.pdf
Daniel Friedman
Stuy is New York’s most prestigious high school because it admits the highest-performing students as determined entirely by scores on an objective, unbiased test.
Seats at Stuy are not allocated by race. They are not given out through a subjective process that can be influenced by politics or favoritism or money.
The kids who got in did the best, and the kids who did not do the best cannot get in, no matter how much rich parents or woke politicians want to corrupt the fair and objective admissions competition.
People like Lincoln Restler think Stuy is prestigious for reasons other than the fact that it has a rigorous objective admissions standard. He thinks the prestige these kids earned through their excellence can be redistributed to the students who are not the best that he would prefer to pretend are the best.
But these students are not prestigious because they go to Stuy; Stuy is prestigious because these students go there. And if different students — inferior students— went there, then Stuy would no longer be the school that is a magnet for the smartest kids in New York and its prestige and reputation would dissipate rapidly, just like the University of California system’s has.
Or maybe Restler knows this, and he just wants to destroy Stuy, because he wants to prevent these students’ talent from being measured and identified, so they can be scattered into low-performing schools where they will languish instead of having their talent cultivated.
Regardless, his ideology of racial grievance and destruction is a monstrous evil masquerading as “social justice,” and it will not be tolerated.
Lincoln Restler: 1 in 5 NYC public school students are Black, but at Stuy - our most prestigious high school - 3 of ~800 incoming Freshmen are Black.
We urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process. A single test should never be only factor deciding who gets in & who doesn’t.
Go Argentina!! 🇦🇷
These English announcers are so boring wish I understood Spanish
conor brennan-burke
someone made up a story about a yc partner selling batch spots. it was quickly debunked, but it got me thinking about what this place has meant to us, and why it upsets me to see people tear it down
@maebert and i went through the batch last fall. they bet on us before there was much evidence to go on, then taught us the unglamorous stuff, like how to talk to customers and how to sell. yc has always worked this way. take unproven people, often without the right schools or resumes, and make them legible to investors
worth remembering what seed investing looked like before yc existed. convertible notes sitting as debt on your balance sheet. heavy dilution. technical founders getting swapped out for professional ceos. yc invented the SAFE and dragged the whole ecosystem toward founders, including the founders who never got in. standard capital is doing the same thing to the series a now, and that lineage runs straight back to yc
from the outside it looks like an institution. once you’re inside you find it’s just a group of former founders who work absurdly hard on something they could have retired from years ago. they remember what the other side of the table feels like, and it shows
we wouldn’t be where we are without them. grateful they exist
They’re playing so badly even up one man
The score is 3 vs 1 but imo this was a very mixed performance from Argentina.
Not sure how they’ll do against England.
Easy money (Swiss francs)
if you only learned about jevons paradox primarily wrt software demand in the age of agentic engineering, you may not have fully internalized jevons parodox’s impact under the conditions of:
- humans who can wield coding agents well*
- coding agents breaking containment to all other knowledge work
as the efficiency of labor goes up/unit cost of knowledge work goes broadly down, the demand for total work and better knowledge goes up, not down.
what happened to coding isnt the exception; it’s the herald.
*aka AI Engineers
Sam Altman: so far at least, i'm pretty sure AI has been net job-creating.
this was not what i expected--although i was much less pessimistic than others, i thought by this level of capability we'd have seen some impact.
it is possible this direction keeps going!
Vibe Research
Fine-tuning a Qwen-8b model to play chess on Replit. Running 3 parallel branches with different experiments and making real progress.
It's amazing how far models have come in their ability to do ML (they used to be really bad at it). So now someone with good intuition to guide the process could do interesting ML work, even if they have never done it before.
Peter Yang
"If you want to build great agents, you have to let the model cook."
Here’s my new episode with @imjaredz (Builder in Residence at @cognition), where he shared what he learned from watching the best engineers build with AI agents, including:
→ Why fewer rules make agents work better
→ How to get agents to check their own work
→ Live demo: Build one agent to manage an agent team
Some quotes from Jared:
“Our goal is not for you to token max. Our goal is for you to ROI max.”
“The trick is to break up the work to keep the context window small for each sub-agent.”
“More Devin sessions now start from other Devins than directly from humans.”
📌 Watch now: https://youtu.be/0YeeJHYy-Vc
Thanks to our sponsors:
@RiversidedotFM: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang
@WisprFlow: 4x faster than typing with your voice https://ref.wisprflow.ai/peteryang
btw the difference is introspection/backpropagation
as einstein famously said, the definition of insanity is doing multiple rollouts with no expectation of advantage
blue: does anyone have any useful sentences that will change my life immediately upon being read?
I keep seeing this in Claude Design and while I get it shouldn't the product just become better at managing context automatically?
I'm not a designer but design is a very iterative and explorative process.
Seeing messages like this makes me not want to explore variations, etc.
Thank you Claude :) Just extend it permanently yeah?
Claude: We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code’s weekly rate limits 50% higher, through July 19.
Fun to see Replit's computer use model play against my new chess engine
Amjad Masad: Vibe Research
Fine-tuning a Qwen-8b model to play chess on Replit. Running 3 parallel branches with different experiments and making real progress.
It's amazing how far models have come in their ability to do ML (they used to be really bad at it). So now someone with good
Make the model a cog in a machine you own.
◾ AI SDK → open model API
◾ http://Eve.dev → open Agent API
◾ AI Gateway → open ZDR inference
Startups and enterprises must own their data, evals, model choices, software layer. Don't outsource your brain.
Satya Nadella: http://x.com/i/article/2076319195718090753
What is an example of a popular piece of writing (maybe an X article or long twee?) that upon a closer look was written with AI and full of slop?
"The mouse and keyboard are antiquated."
@imjaredz (Builder in Residence at Cognition) on his most radical prediction:
"I think we're going to return to a world where we just have a wooden desk without a keyboard or mouse.
I just want a button and a Wispr Flow [for voice dictation]. I think that's all we need."
📌 Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/0YeeJHYy-Vc
Peter Yang: "If you want to build great agents, you have to let the model cook."
Here’s my new episode with @imjaredz (Builder in Residence at @cognition), where he shared what he learned from watching the best engineers build with AI agents, including:
→ Why fewer rules make agents work
Peter Yang
"The mouse and keyboard are antiquated."
@imjaredz (Builder in Residence at Cognition) on his most radical prediction:
"I think we're going to return to a world where we just have a wooden desk without a keyboard or mouse.
I just want a button and a Wispr Flow [for voice dictation]. I think that's all we need."
📌 Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/0YeeJHYy-Vc
Peter Yang: "If you want to build great agents, you have to let the model cook."
Here’s my new episode with @imjaredz (Builder in Residence at @cognition), where he shared what he learned from watching the best engineers build with AI agents, including:
→ Why fewer rules make agents work
conor brennan-burke
if you raised on a SAFE, didn’t give up a board seat at seed, launched on hacker news, or took advice from a pg essay, you benefited from yc
people forget what venture looked like before them. convertible debt, heavy dilution, founders swapped out for professional ceos. yc dragged the whole ecosystem toward founders, and standard capital is now doing the same to the series a. that lineage runs straight back to yc
yc rejected us multiple times. i still raised on a SAFE and learned from their videos the whole time
people dunk on yc for clout but every single seed founder is raising on rails they built, yc founder or not
i'd love to see interesting things people have built with 5.6 sol.
i will send the person who made the coolest thing a special gift from the openai archives.
Rohan Paul
Jevons Paradox is about to hit AI harder than almost any industry we have seen before.
People once thought faster internet would simply let us load the same websites more quickly.
That was not even close to what happened.
Faster connections created video streaming, cloud software, online gaming, video calls, social media, and entire businesses that could not exist on slow internet.
Every increase in speed created new reasons to use more bandwidth.
AI will work the same way. Today, we mostly use models for chat, coding, search, writing, and a few business workflows.
But once intelligence becomes cheap enough, fast enough, and reliable enough, it will be built into every process that involves a decision.
The biggest AI workloads probably do not exist yet.
They are waiting for the cost of intelligence to fall.
It will create millions of new tasks that are currently too slow, too expensive, or simply impossible.
Gavin Baker: The mega bull case for AI infrastructure would be *if* market share shifted away from certain frontier labs with 90%+ inference margins toward cheaper models, whether open-source or closed.
It would increase the ROI on AI spend for end customers by increasing intelligence per
Samantha Trimble
for people using codex to draft emails and slacks, try this simple 1x setup. it’s been a biggie for me:
“read my sent emails and slacks from the last 3 weeks, read-only. learn only from substantive messages i wrote, keeping audiences and channels separate. build a my-voice skill from patterns you can support with examples. show me before saving it. use it whenever you draft for me, but never send anything. when i show you what i actually sent, compare it with your draft and propose durable updates to the skill.”
after that “use $my-voice to reply to this. draft only”
Fund treatment and recovery in San Francisco
Stop sponsoring and paying for do-drugs-until-you-die policy
💥Susan Dyer Reynolds🗞️: San Francisco moves toward drug-free permanent supportive housing:
Supervisor Matt Dorsey’s proposal to ban illicit drug use in new city-funded housing clears committee and heads to full Board of Supervisors. https://thevoicesf.org/san-francisco-moves-toward-drug-free-permanent-supportive-housing/
Jay Donde
“Man of the people” and centimillionaire Congressman Ro Khana filed his financial disclosures on paper instead of electronically to make it harder for Americans to search them. So this absolute madlad legend @kane OCR’d them. Now you can search for things like how much “Average Joe” Khanna spends on country club memberships ($2 million).
Kane 謝凱堯: All of Congressman’s @RoKhanna’s financial disclosures are finally OCR’d and searchable online
He hand-filed papers instead of using the electronic system to obfuscate the data, but I indexed them all here:
https://rokhanna.money
They’re going to blame tech
But the real cause: extreme restriction of housing supply and subsidized demand
Senator Scott Wiener: San Francisco now has the lowest apartment vacancy rate among major cities. It’s 2.2%, which is unhealthy & driving up rents. We need more housing of all kinds. We need to continue our work to get it built. And we need to stabilize renters in their homes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/sf-apartments-vacant-22336259.php
Rob Henderson
"the French Revolution had begun with high progressive hopes but descended into a vicious bloodbath...the Russian Revolution had begun with high progressive hopes but quickly produced a genocidal police state." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/democrats-fight-left-dsa/687839/
