Patrick Vlaskovits

🤖 Cofounder & CEO of @SuperpoweredSDK, cross-platform low latency audio SDK 🔊

Acquired by @splice.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@Kapka73 @EV_Trapper okay anon bot

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@Kapka73 @EV_Trapper If you think that the rest of the EU isn't corrupt....

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@Kapka73 @EV_Trapper You're right -- I mean, it has only been >>checks notes<< a major point of contention and ill-will between Hungary and Ukraine for decades.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@BIforPeace @EV_Trapper Best thing about Ukraine is their absolute famous tolerance for ethnic minorities -- which somehow, resembles that of Russia.

Russians: "Ukrainians aren't a real people. They're just Russians."

Ukrainians: "Rusyns aren't a real people. They're just Ukrainians."

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@EV_Trapper Why not?

If Ukraine wants to be an EU member -- should it not converge to EU norms?

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@EV_Trapper In modern Hungary, historical ethnic minorities like Germans, Slovaks, Serbs etc etc enjoy benefits that Ukraine has historically denied its Hungarian minority - so what are you blathering on about?

[Daniel Levine @daniellevine]

People should be asking why Costco is entering this space in the first place.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

I’ve listened to thousands of hours of great music since. What an awesome streaming service.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

California surf spots are subject to water temps from two countervailing factors.

The cold southbound Alaska "California" current generally wins, while the warmer northbound Mexican influence is only strong enough to noticeably soften conditions in Southern California.

Central California ie SB and north are more like NorCal than SoCal in terms of need to wear 4/3 wetsuits.

[Zack Korman @ZackKorman]

Every Anthropic account executive is going to become a VC. They’ll intro themselves by saying they helped scale Anthropic’s GTM motion. They’re going to pass on your startup but they’ll cheer you on from the sidelines.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

I looked into getting an old Nokia candybar phone from the halycon days of the late 90s and early 2000s -- I think I need to actually execute on that plan now.

[Nathan Covey @nathan_covey]

Officially 1 month since I switched to a flip phone.

- Everyone is more severely addicted to their smartphones than I thought. Once you have a dumbphone, you'll frequently find yourself as the only person in the room not on their phone. It's not just teenagers, it's parents and adults of all ages. It's like everyone is stuck in a trance. 75+ year olds might be the only exception.

- All the objections I previously had for getting a dumbphone have turned out to be overblown and/or solvable. My iPhone addiction had fed my brain excuses to not do this earlier. If you really want to make the switch, you can.

- I've felt embarrassed to pull out my flip phone in public at times, for fear of being different or drawing too much attention to myself. But I have learned to just own up to it. Most people end up saying something like "Oh, I probably should do that too."

- I am using my brain more. Even though my flip phone has Waze, I find myself memorizing maps and roads. I'm more bored and get lost in my thoughts. I'm using paper and pen more. Increased desire for tangible things > digital things.

Overall, it has been a great experience and I plan on never going back.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

I guess I speak an S and F tier language.

[Anatoly Karlin 🧲💯 @akarlin]

My tier list of languages by how useful they are.

Yes, there is nothing in A tier. English is just that goated. Chinese would be in A tier if it was less difficult.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@romanhelmetguy Which edition of The Odyssey do you recommend for a first-time reader (high schooler)?

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@bollobas Agreed -- trad Hungarian foods are becoming less and less cool --

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

I just got back from a month in Hungary. A few observations on globalization in Hungary (and Europe).

The most surprising thing?

1. Service at restaurants and shops has gotten shockingly better—even compared to five years ago. It’s not subtle. It’s a full cultural shift.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

cc @bollobas

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

7. Orban’s courting of Chinese investment is starting to reshape Budapest.

My sense is that the III District will become Budapest's Irvine.

Hungarians are very conflicted about this.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

@johnloeber cc @mattwensing

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

Have personally witnessed #5 and found it so shocking, I took me weeks to process.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Notes on 100+ Recent Technical Interviews

I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions

1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers.

2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through.

3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself.

4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing.

5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation.

6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20+ people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into.

8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually.

I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

This is actually a very funny joke if you know anything about Hungarian history.

[Turan Explorer @turan_explorer]

Minionese is actually related to Hungarian but Hapsburg intellectuals repressed this information

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

Remember Uber(cab) prices to get across SF in 2011?

And Uber prices now?

[BURKOV @burkov]

LLMs only work for your business when they are subsidized by venture capital.

With the current prices per token, you cannot build anything AI-based and sell it for a fair price customers would be willing to pay.

Customers will not be willing to pay the fair price because they are accustomed to paying unfair prices for heavily subsidized, subscription-based chatbots.

When the venture capital dries up and the subscription-based chatbots are no longer heavily subsidized, customers will feel the shock of finding out what it really costs to make an LLM "think" for minutes before making a decision or providing an answer.

Until then, your non-heavily-subsidized business with fair prices will have few to no clients.

[Patrick Vlaskovits @Pv]

LLMs moving from the green to the blue (right to left).

[signüll @signulll]

it feels like we are entering a different phase of the ai era.. e.g.

- frontier models are still improving, but improvements are increasingly measured in reliability, latency, memory, cost, tool use, & workflow completion rather than holy shit benchmark jumps.

- the labs are starting to look less like research projects & more like mature platform companies who are now going public which means quarterly earnings.

- distribution is becoming way way more important than raw intelligence.

- product design matters again. taste matters again. trust matters again. always did but now there isn’t that much differentiation at the model layer for the most part.

- the releases are slowing down to a normal pace instead of the frenzy.

- no one in their right minds is questioning the tech at all anymore.

- it feels less like 1995 internet & more like 2004 internet.

kinda like a checkpoint in a video game where your game gets auto saved.