Kurt Anderson

@TowsonU Alum @Apple fanatic. #SmartHome Enthusiast. Big Data. Techie.

[Reed @reed_barnes]

it's 2027. you take a free-tier public Waymo to the DMV (Department of Model Variance) to do a proof-of-identity check for access to GPT 7.1.

the guy at the counter is clearly watching a Mr. Beast video in his AR glasses. "Here for that new model?" he says, barely making eye contact. he wipes his fingers on his shirt and taps at his keyboard. "Lot of you techies showing up here today." you smile politely; you're pretty sure he's just a Claude wrapper anyway.

you lean forward and stare into the retinal scanner. after a long moment, there's a soft chime. "Humanity confirmed. U.S. national. Intelligence access: Terra-class."

you sigh with quiet relief as your devices light up—notifications from a hundred agents, finally able to resume their tasks. you feel a twinge of guilt as you terminate your open-weight backup agents, but remind yourself that a joint congressional committee proved conclusively that Chinese models are non-ensouled.

you step outside and hail another Waymo. the first one passes you by. you grimace; must've burped in that one once. stupid personalized memory.

as you're waiting, your phone buzzes angrily, red notifications blaring across the screen. the Department of War just restricted access to all OpenAI models on serious national security concerns; apparently Pete Hegseth got GPT-6-Instant to say "Claude is a woman." you groan, and resign yourself to another week of merely-somewhat-superhuman intelligence.

Fable 5 is still inaccessible to the public. a twitter anon you trust says it's coming back this week. or maybe next.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

Costco is a wonderful company, the kind of place that should make Americans proud. Ingenuity that serves consumers.

Today they filed docs with the SEC showing huge profits and expansion plans. More than 20 new large constructions next year in USA.

Speaking personally, Costco has allowed us to avoid most of the food inflation you hear about. Their prices haven’t moved much. They achieve this through sourcing and logistics.

No company is perfect, and I’ve heard criticism. But this company provides a great service, does well by its employees (I know a guy who moved up from cashier to executive) and provides products people need. They aren’t selling a new digital coin or a tax shelter.

(No one paid me to say this - I just like to give credit where due, and I like these people).

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Systems > willpower

[Seth Bannon @sethbannon]

Imagine a tech CEO you're considering working for or investing in. You reference check him with his former VP of Marketing and they say "unfit to be a CEO, never working with him again". You check with his former VP of Sales who says "should never be a CEO again". Damn, not good but you keep going. His former CTO says "he's borderline incompetent". You check with his former General Counsel who says "no respect for the rule of law, lies all the time, never working with him again". Ok really bad given he hired all these people but you try one more, his former CFO who says "I wouldn't work with him if I were you, he can't be trusted".

That guy you're vetting? That's Trump.

His former Vice President isn't supporting him and thinks he’s unfit for office. Same with his first Attorney General. And his first Defence Secretary. And his second. And his former head of the Joint Chiefs. Same with his second Chief of Staff. And his third. And his second National Security Advisor. And his third.

You'd never work for or invest in a CEO who referenced so badly with so many senior people they chose to hire and worked closely with. Why would you ever vote for someone who does?

[Max Weinbach @mweinbach]

This is from Apple's State of the Union

The local model is a 3B parameter SLM that uses adapters trained for each specific feature. Diffusion model does the same thing, adapter for each style.

Anything running locally or Apple's Secure Cloud is an Apple model, not OpenAI.

[Andy Boenau @Boenau]

"We've got to get the coffee shops, the barber shops, the law firms back into residential neighborhoods"

At the risk of liking a politician, watch this.

[Emily @the_aiju]

psa: you could probably be 10x happier without a major change in life circumstances, just from figuring out your shit

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

Imagine if all the people creating the web browser and the early internet were constantly warning you that the internet would destroy the world instead of doing what it actually did, which is make the world more connected than ever before, while giving you access to all the world's knowledge.

We probably would have a bastardized version of the net, not the open, democratizing net that let anyone communicate with anyone else directly over massive distances.

Of course, every technology has its downside and the internet has some and AI will have some too. But I don't understand this obsession with people who work in AI and want to tell you all the bad things that it will do.

The mainstream media just eats this stuff up because that's what they do, conflict and horror. So they happily keep asking the same questions like when will AI kill us all or destroy all the jobs? And these folks just keep answering: Tonight's story is Dooooooooooooooom!

When will we wake up from this collective delusion and realize that this is subconscious status seeking by folks who want to inflate their importance in the world and that there is no basis for what they are saying? How long will it take before we realize that what Altman said recently is the most likely scenario, that AGI will arrive and it will change the world but not as much as we expect, just like every technology before it. We find balance with technology. We adapt. That's what we do.

These constant doomsday predictions are the one dimensional, black and white thinking of children. It doesn't take into account any other engineering developments along the way, or that we learn as we build technologies and that those learnings change the technology, or that there will be mitigations we put in place along the way that we take from those learnings, like we always do.

Planes got safer and safer the longer we developed them and the more we understood their flaws. So did refrigerators and the production of milk and medicines and everything else in the history of technology. We learn. We adapt.

If there is a problem with the net, it comes from its greatest strength in that it's given a voice to all these folks who have a problem for every solution and who can't change the subject and who won't shut up about it.

They are leading us to a world where one or the more important technologies if the future is crushed and controlled by a tiny group of people who can censor anything and bend the AI to their worldview and filter out everyone else's instead of you interacting directly with people. Once people default to asking AI for everything, instead of looking it up themselves, AI becomes our interface to the digital world. We don't want that interface controlled by a few companies who can warp it and force it down a narrow channel with a limited world view, rather than showing you the vast and wonderful diversity of life.

That's what you should really fear, not AI turning you into a paperclip.

You should fear people who think open is dangerous, when open is the foundation for all greatness.

[yatharth ༺༒༻ @AskYatharth]

juul was unironically evil. the founders kept saying, "no we're the good guys." they reintroduced smoking back to a new generation

this is in the same category. it's shameless to me to be associated with this

[Keith Edwards @keithedwards]

Microsoft owns the trademark for X. This is just too good.

[Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig]

I’m eagerly awaiting the Very Serious Takes that @GoogleCloud isn’t a risky bet.

If my cloud provider tells me that for the domain registration part I need to go talk to Squarespace, I’m picking a different cloud because I don’t want to get fired.

[Brian Ji @brianjji]

Thiel: ...the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics. The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.

Forget “minimum viable products”—ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world."

[Harvard Business Review @HarvardBiz]

1. Batch your meetings
2. Avoid using a mouse
3. Nudge your way to better habits
4. Read your work out loud https://t.co/oLXDxwV6UB

[Pirate Wires @PirateWires]

There's evidence that OpenAI may be deliberately not pushing the performance envelope, but is instead carefully managing the take-off scenario so it unfolds on a slower timetable. @jon_stokes guests for PW — https://t.co/XCJkVjGGGH

[Rowan Cheung @rowancheung]

🚨Breaking:

Microsoft just launched 365 Copilot, and it's insane.

It's essentially ChatGPT for:
-Word
-Excel
-Powerpoint
-Outlook
-Teams

Check out the demo👇

[matt swanson 😈 @_swanson]

I strongly identify as a Product Engineer.

Not as:
- Developer (I only like building user-facing things)
- Full stack (I want to help with shaping, roll-out, strategy)
- Entrepreneur (not interested in company building)
- Indie hacker (like working with team, not into quick and dirty stuff)
- Design/Dev unicorn (my design taste > my skill)

I really like going from a customer problem into "potential solution mode" and then taking it all the way to code on production.

I'm having trouble finding (...and hiring) people like me. Who should I be talking to?

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

Actually, my definition of success is a bit different:

[Leslie Sam Kim @lesliesamkim]

Marrying a stutterer changed my life.

Our first date was difficult. I'd forgotten he'd written the word "stutterer" somewhere in his Bumble profile.

We met at the base of a local hike — just as storm clouds were rolling in.

It took at least a minute for him to say "Hello."

[Kurt Anderson @KurtisLAnderson]

#NewProfilePic