Douglas Vaz

Economics/Music/Software Engineering. Not lazy, just unmotivated sometimes. Building/breaking things.

[Gavriel Cohen @Gavriel_Cohen]

Singapore's Foreign Minister published the architecture for his "second brain for a diplomat" yesterday. Architecture diagrams, design rationale, the works. A developer-style writeup of his own system.

It runs on a Raspberry Pi. It connects to his WhatsApp and Gmail, transcribes voice notes locally, ingests speeches and articles, and builds up a knowledge graph over time. It answers questions, drafts speeches, condenses information. He says he doesn't dare switch it off.

What @VivianBala built is one-of-one. There's no other setup like it. But what he built it from isn't.

He composed four open-source pieces:
- @NanoClaw_AI , the agent framework: https://t.co/JlIJqOVBFG
- Mnemon, the persistent memory layer: https://t.co/ugrB7uF6XL
- OneCLI, the credential proxy that keeps API keys out of the containers: https://t.co/sTGn59abpF
- The LLM Wiki pattern by Andrej Karpathy, the synthesis approach: https://t.co/wqvlVzcnyk

None of them are his. The composition is his. And then he published the composition: https://t.co/azzfijyzPs

He didn't keep it internal as Singapore's edge. He didn't spin it into a product. He didn't gatekeep. He wrote it up and put it on GitHub.

There are tens of thousands of doctors, lawyers, researchers, investors, and operators building one-of-one setups for themselves right now. Some simpler than Vivian's, some more elaborate. The impulse will be to sit on it. Treat it as your edge. Think about what product or company you could spin out of it. Resist that impulse.

Vivian put it directly: "The diplomat who learns to work with AI will have a meaningful edge. I think that edge is now."

The specific thing Vivian composed will be obsolete in months. His real edge isn't the system. It's his ability to build it. Being plugged in, up to speed, able to cut through the noise and connect the right pieces into something that brings real value.

Sharing the blueprint doesn't give that away. It amplifies it.

You become a beacon. Other people working on the same things find you. They share what they're building, suggest improvements, point at things you didn't know existed. You learn faster. You stay in the center of where things are happening. Publishing isn't giving away your edge. It's doubling down on it.

[Intern @gamingskew]

Nobody’s talking about what just happened to Anthropic:

Anthropic built the AI that half the US government quietly depends on daily

They were deep in a $200M Pentagon deal — one of the biggest AI contracts ever

Anthropic drew two hard lines: Claude won’t surveil American citizens, Claude won’t pull a trigger without a human deciding

The Pentagon said those lines needed to go. Anthropic said they weren’t moving (respect 🫡)

Trump signed an order cutting Claude from every federal agency overnight

The Pentagon then slapped them with a “national security risk” designation — the same one they gave Huawei

Every classified system running Claude has 6 months to rip it out completely

Sam Altman — Anthropic’s biggest competitor — publicly said OpenAI has the same rules and wouldn’t have budged either

The US government just punished a company for refusing to let AI kill or spy unsupervised.

[Boochao @Boochao]

@claudeai All those years of refusing to learn excel is about to pay off

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

Made it to the place that supposedly inspired scenes in Spirited Away. I say supposedly cause the movie still eludes me

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

Thanks for the smooth check in @yashikapandiyan @airindia

[Vikas Bardia @vikasbardia]

In light of recent events in our industry, we've been flooded with messages and comments around how it's our time to fill the gap and quickly scale 😅 Firstly, thank you for your continued support, love, and belief in @shoffr_in - we'd not be here without it! ❤️

When we started out, I knew we had the 2nd mover's advantage - which is to learn from the mistakes of the first movers. One of the key points therein was unit economics - making the math work. Which then meant choosing the right EV, not going in the charging business, and figuring out the right GTM. It wasn't a grand story, but it allowed us to build a solid core business or "dhanda".

And after 2.5 years of running Shoffr, I can say that maintaining quality and balancing supply with demand as we scale matters. For example, it's far more difficult to find quality drivers who will maintain our standards because they are vested in us - and not merely because we're throwing unsustainable money at them. Or if we suddenly add cars and demand doesn't catch-up, we're stressing our cashflows - then it's a downward spiral to offering discounts, slashing fares, and all things that hurt the brand and revenue.

Today also we continue to have the 2nd mover's advantage - and in some ways our initial thesis has only solidified. This is a tough, operations heavy space. As we expand, we need to set the right processes in place, balance supply and demand, and maintain healthy financials. If we do this well, empathise with our guests and drivers, and treat all stakeholders fairly - scale is inevitable.

We're building Shoffr to be the gold standard of rides. Not the biggest. Not the one in most cities. Not one which raised this much or is valued at X dollars. But as the most loved ride experience there is in India. If you have mobility / fleet experience and resonate with our vision, do reach out - we're hiring in Bangalore across Tech and Operations, including drivers.

And to the first movers - thank you for showing us what to do and what to avoid! We wish you well 💙

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

@chinmay185 @navinpai We've noticed a dip in DEI at in-person events post the pandemic. Agree that there's a conscious effort needed to reverse it, or else I see a huge regression in tech culture

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

Hi @OpenAI , you might want to turn off server tokens

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

@chinmay185 I find the similar issue with programmers who have only worked with relational databases. (But personally I dislike Mongo)

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

Hi @Deliveroo , your app has had a high error rate all weekend. Perhaps a bad deployment on Friday? My sympathies

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

JUST IN: Boeing offers condolences after a passenger was killed on a Boeing 777 plane, says their “thoughts” are with the passengers and crew.

In total 30 people were injured and a 73-year-old British man was killed.

The incident happened after the plane fell a whopping 6000 feet.

“Suddenly the aircraft starts tilting up and there was shaking so I started bracing for what was happening, and very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing seatbelt was launched immediately into the ceiling,” a passenger said.

“Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead and dented it, they hit the places where lights and masks are and broke straight through it.”

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

BREAKING: Passenger has died and over 30 injured due to severe turbulence on Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 flight from London to Singapore

[cole murray @colemurray]

@QuinnyPig Looking forward to autocompleting everyone’s api keys

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

Happy Friday - especially to all the on-call devs who had to deal with the GCP outage https://t.co/BTiSQpMMkv

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

Jetstar has the nicest flight status page, especially for delays and cancellations, which happens a lot

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

JUST IN: The ongoing geomagnetic storm has been upgraded to level 5 out of 5, or "extreme," making it the first G5-level storm since 2003.

Scientists are warning of potential disruptions to communications over the weekend.

GPS, spacecraft and satellite navigation may also be impacted. U.S. utility companies are monitoring the potential threat to the power grid as well according to CNN.

The video below was posted by BBC Meteorologist @MetMattTaylor.

"This is the astounding view as far south as Switzerland a short while ago… on top of Jungfraujoch," he posted.

[Joel Runyon @joelrunyon]

Fixed it for you @Apple

[Sukhada @appadappajappa]

Whenever you think you know what the rest of India thinks, remember this.

[Douglas Vaz @Mistcrafter]

outline: 1px solid red;

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