Dan Grover

Product + technical generalist. Figuring out what's next.
Ex @standardbots, @meta, @tencent.

[Tom Goodwin @tomfgoodwin]

The best way to explain this is if you were early to the internet you’d imagine by now that email would have made us crazy efficient.
Cloud based documents would reduce meeting numbers
Online shopping would destroy 90% of retailers
Middle men everywhere would evaporate, agents for real estate , first to go
Every office would be entirely different

You could walk around the world and be gobsmacked by the huge immediate wave of change.

And here 20 years later. Planes have literal paperwork and dot matrix printers. Healthcare runs on fax and cds, taxes are artificially controlled by limited compute , companies have terrible stock management systems

Change is extremely slow and pretty illogical

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

@JoshuaOgundu When the tide was coming in during 2010s, tech was a meritocracy. Diversity! Coding boot camps! Now that it’s coming out, credentials matter.

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

Currently printing parts for an Aloha Mini 2. Excited to experiment with it!

[Li Yiteng @liyitengx]

We got OpenWAM running on AlohaMini! 🤖

Fine-tuned with just 90 demonstration episodes, our low-cost, open-source dual-arm robot achieved ~60% success rate on a real-world tangram puzzle task.

Full execution at 1× speed. No fast-forwarding.

#OpenWAM #EmbodiedAI #Robotics

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

One thing I've noticed for myself and friends is when in a dysfunctional/incompetent environment, one might know what the actually-right thing to do in a given situation is and self-censor by imagining a chorus of the most mediocre halfwit criticisms of that action that would inevitably come from your colleagues. 75% of the time, this is a trick: the lower the standards are, the more you are rewarded for still doing the right thing.

[mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 @mattparlmer]

In order to actually revive American electronics manufacturing you must have a specific, actionable plan to take on Shenzhen in direct untariffed global economic competition at scale by the end of the decade

Any lesser aim will be either niche-limited or doomed to failure

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

I had to try it...

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

@ruima Universal

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

@ultimape I ended up switching to using Codex, where they don't kick you off for using 3p clients. I do have Qwen3.8 running on same machine, though, and it's shockingly capable, just slow.

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

I'm between using my bespoke Claude Code environment for personal stuff and Hermes and stuck due to model costs on OpenRouter due to how heavily Claude is subsidized. What are people doing to manage this? Just suck it up?

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

Some months ago, I felt purposelessness in face of all of the things that took me so long to learn that AI can do. This was epiphany that got me past it. Only way forward is to be as “out of distribution” and unapologetically unique in ways that might have seemed scary and risky in the old world.

[kepano @kepano]

your edge is whatever you know that the models don't know

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

@jloganolson That's so cool!!!

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

@geoburke I get that -- and worked at US robotics company -- but the robot saturation statistics in the US still dramatically lag Korea, China, etc, even with all this enthusiasm. If robots were the answer, wouldn't it have happened ages ago?

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

I read stuff like this (from today’s WSJ editorial board column) and have trouble reconciling all of the rah-rah-reindustrialize stuff on my feed.

Is there a coherent thesis on what, structurally, is meaningfully different now to change this?

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

@woodtechwill Right! Simultaneously (also in today’s paper) there are headlines about tech companies being careful about working with ICE fearing potential consequences if democrats are back in power. Many factories starting construction now won’t even be online until Trump is out of office.

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

Felt this way my entire career. Maybe I’m a member of the technical staff!

[signüll @signulll]

almost a decade+ ago while working in big tech i changed my visible title to "applied generalist" because this is basically how i thought about myself from the moment i was on the internet as a kid. i didn't jive with product management cuz i wasn't supposed to write code (ppl would look at you weirdly if you did this), & i hated the idea of being just an engineer because ppl would just treat you like a code monkey, & i hated being in design because ppl often just treated you as a pixel pusher.

legacy companies (which i now include big tech as part of) are still organized around highly specific roles like these + levels, & career ladders. i.e. your position in the hierarchy determines not only what you actually do but also how ppl interact with you.

i remember walking into meetings with VPs who didn't know how to treat me cuz they couldn't place me in a ladder due to my lack of an officially sanctioned title. & i absolutely hated this existence with a passion. being pigeonholed into a narrowly defined function felt like wearing a kind of straitjacket.

this is why the member of technical staff movement with ai companies is so damn necessary. if you as a company do not move towards a more general model like this, you will absolutely get left behind & alienate ppl who can perform across the spectrum.

[Ryan Singer @rjs]

An example of using a pattern language. When we speak the language, our "sentences" are implementable compositions.

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

Someone complained the Gunshy game on the Mac didn't have a good "you win" screen so I had to add one:

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

So I re-did my personal site and got a little creative with it...front page is an homage to 90's shareware games, complete with detailed pixel-art Oakland. You can even use an alternate-universe System 7-era Mac (inspired by @ryolu_'s site) to manipulate time and space!

[Dan Grover @DanGrover]

Link is: https://t.co/o3EuC47jZs

[Jason Shuman @JasonrShuman]

Robotics founders need to burn thoughtfully.

Venture funding in Robotics has grown by over 400% over the last 2 years.

Actual installations of robotics is up <25% YoY.

Robotics is not AI. The diffusion will be slower for a while and your underlying metrics will need to catch up to the valuation at some point.