AlexanderFridriksson

Adventurer, knower of random facts, persistently curious.
Database guy and storyteller

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake: deeply unconventional lives.

We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: odd hobbies, early signs of exceptionalism, extreme life choices, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal was deviation from the mean.

Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors.

Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on aren’t just noisy, they’re blinding. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, they don’t think like everyone else, and they certainly don’t build like everyone else.

If you want to spot breakout talent before the rest of the market, stop screening for conformity. Back the founders the system was built to filter out.

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

My first interview with @lulumeservey, Founder of Rostra.

0:07 How to Destroy a Terrorist Group
3:01 What Makes a Great Cult Leader
4:42 Unleashing Palmer Luckey
7:34 Why Elon Is Unpredictable
10:41 Demanding a Hardcore Culture After the X Acquisition
13:41 How Napoleon Rallied Troops to Volunteer for a Suicide Mission
18:24 Choosing Who to Alienate
20:59 Picking Someone to Fight For
22:59 Deterrence and Shaping Incentives
25:19 Why Google Had an Activist Problem
29:12 Tyrant Mode: Stopping a Leaky Culture
32:11 Building Loyalty
35:58 Why Visuals Are So Powerful
37:40 Time to Train AlexNet: Jensen Huang and Inventing Metrics
39:36 Why People Root for You
42:15 Recruit Based on the Spirit Not the Letter
43:20 The Three Levels of Story
51:01 Secret Truths and Trusting Yourself
55:25 Cicero’s Impossible Trial
58:11 Offense vs Defense
1:03:44 The Roman Concept of Auctoritas

[Chris Laub @ChrisLaubAI]

A Rust dev just killed Headless Chrome.

It's called Obscura. The open-source headless browser purpose-built for AI agents and scrapers at scale.

Chrome vs Obscura:

- Memory: 200MB+ → 30MB
- Binary: 300MB+ → 70MB
- Page load: 500ms → 85ms
- Startup: 2s → Instant
- Anti-detect: None → Built-in

Single binary. No Node, no Chrome, no dependencies.

Stealth mode is brutal:

→ Per-session fingerprint randomization (GPU, canvas, audio, battery)
→ 3,520 tracker domains blocked by default
→ navigator.webdriver masked to match real Chrome
→ Native function masking so detectors can't sniff it out

Drop-in replacement for Puppeteer and Playwright over CDP. Zero code changes.

If you run agents or serious scraping at scale, this repo prints money.

100% Opensource.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Stop telling kids to “make eye contact” or “stand up straight.”

Vanessa Van Edwards has three much smarter body language hacks that actually work:

1. Ask them to notice the other person’s eye color — it gives a real reason to look up and connect.

2. Hands first — always approach with your hand out so you clearly signal how you want to be greeted (handshake, high-five, fist bump, or wave).

3. Superhero cape — roll your shoulders back and maximize the space between your ear and shoulder. It instantly makes kids look more confident and credible.

She uses these herself on Zoom, in photos, and in real life.

Small changes. Big difference.

What’s one tiny body language trick you wish someone had taught you earlier?

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately*

Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code.

GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH

https://t.co/vcSkhM5yLV

[Sam Seely @samseely]

This is about to be the new hardest working diagram in tech

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

... or sacrifice quality. Or performance. Or maintainability. Or anything that us devs would call "non-functional requirements." The stuff that is invisible on first glance... until it's not, and makes the difference between a product users love, and one they hate

[dax @thdxr]

you're probably underestimating how crazy things are

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Sage observation from @karrisaarinen (CEO of Linear)

It now makes SO MUCH sense why I see a bunch of eng teams rebuilt a SaaS vendor in-house with AI, brag about and feel good

They are doing side quests... and they don't even know it. And they are not helping their co win!!

[Alex Banks @thealexbanks]

incredibly bullish on the future of tech + AI in London.

just to name a few:

• OpenAI just announced (last week) that London will become its largest research hub outside San Francisco
• Anthropic kicked off a 100+ person hiring spree across London and Dublin in 2025
• xAI set up shop in London in early 2025, based in X's former Piccadilly office, led by former DeepMind researcher Toby Pohlen
• Microsoft hired 24+ researchers from Google DeepMind for its London AI hub
• Google DeepMind announced its first automated research lab in the UK (opening 2026), focused on discovering new materials using AI and robotics
• Perplexity committed £80M to expand London offices
• Groq is opening its first UK data centre in London
• Cursor chose London as its European HQ

[Glauber Costa @glcst]

This is a monumental release: Concurrent Writes are finally here.

When we started Turso more than a year ago, we asked a large number of people what is the thing that SQLite lacked but they wanted to see the most. The result was overwhelming: Concurrent Writes.

It is not an easy feature to build: the whole database needs to be able to support MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control). But it possible and doable because we have a full rewrite from a blank slate, and a great and reliable foundation of deterministic testing with both @AntithesisHQ and our own simulator.

MVCC is now no longer experimental and will enter a short beta period (which we do for all features) before we call it GA.

But that's not the only AMAZING thing in this release: SQLite is known to be a very permissive database. Types are suggestions. Turso now not only support STRICT tables, but comes with a type system including the ability to create your own types with the CREATE TYPE statement.

Turso is SQLite reimagined for the age of AI. And it is hard to think of something more important and more overwhelmingly victorious than types.

For the full changelog and goodies, see the post below!

[AlexanderFridriksson @Datastorydesign]

As someone who has lived in 8 countries and multiple cities, I can confirm this advice absolutely works!

[Allie ✞ @allie__voss]

Social circles are quickly disintegrating because no one wants to do the hosting and organizing anymore

Taking on that role is the secret hack to having tons of friends, all it requires is for you to be more stubborn than other people are flaky

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

no one’s gonna believe me but becoming a good speaker is really easy

just record yourself for 10 minutes every day, first thing in the morning. don’t send it to anyone, just force yourself to watch it later.

you’ll notice every possible flaw you can imagine.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

this is a really good

[AlexanderFridriksson @Datastorydesign]

@evanlapointe This is quite accurate😅

[Grant @Grantblocmates]

Anthropic have just buried OpenAI and ChatGPT with this ad lmfao

There’s no coming back from that

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

I'm reminded of this:

[AnimeSelect @TheAnimeSelect]

Frieren Season 2 is currently ranked as the #1 anime on MyAnimeList with a score of 9.32! 😱

The 2nd position is also held by Frieren Season 1!