In thick fog and sub-zero snow, this drone flies steadily alongside high-voltage power lines. Uses a payload to knock ice off the cables and restoring clear lines without crews climbing towers.
>late 1800s find africa a war-torn continent filled with tribal slave holding warlords killing each other
>white people colonize and set up institutions and end slavery
"WTF!!! LEAVE US ALONE THIS IS FUCKED UP!"
>white people leave
>continent descends back into warlords
"WTF WE NEED AID"
>we give them a trillion dollars
>birth rate skyrockets, need more aid, warlords become more powerful, mass starvation
"WTF LET US MOVE TO YOUR COUNTRIES"
>we let them mass migrate to europe and america
>they start raping and looting the countries
"THE AID WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH WE NEED INSTITUTIONS BUILD FOR US AND WE ONLY RAPE AND LOOT BECAUSE YOU COLONIZED US RACISTS"
bro fuck africans
@edandersen Coding with AI is a lot like dev leadership- you specify what to build, make architecture decisions, don’t necessarily write all the code. And most people aspire to move into management eventually (for good or ill).
English has a pyramid.
At the bottom is post-match press conference in English by Pakistani Cricketers.
At the top is Shashi Tharoor.
Right below him sits the most dangerous form of English in India, Corporate English.
This is the English used to sell absurdly overpriced IPOs and also used to explain why your investment has evaporated.
It is so polished that when it’s spoken, instead of punishment, it invites forgiveness, at times even admiration.
If you ever hear or read corporate English, here’s what it actually means:
Outcomes were not as per expectations - I fucked up
There were unintended deviations from the standard process - I made a mistake
It is time alternative destinations are explored - Don’t come to my house
Unforeseen circumstances have necessitated a shift in my priorities - I don’t want to see you
Extraneous circumstances require a reassessment of our objectives - Things have gone wrong
Macro economic circumstances require a paradigm shift from the current course of action - Let us do something else
Strong headwinds have delayed the execution of certain initiatives - I have not done anything
Reassessment is required on the stated course of action - I don't want to do this
The situation requires you to consider a 180-degree turn in your course of action - Get out
The current environment and changing corporate landscape necessitates an alteration in your career journey - You are fired
If you ever are in a tough situation in your life, use Corporate English.
I guarantee you will be able to talk your way out of it.
The company hired me to lead their "Agile Transformation."
I don't know what Agile means.
Nobody does.
That's why it works.
I make $425,000 a year.
To move sticky notes.
From left to right.
On a board.
The board is digital now.
The sticky notes cost $80,000 in Jira licenses.
Progress.
Day one, I said "we need to break down silos."
Everyone nodded.
Silos are bad.
I don't know why.
But destroying them is a career.
My career.
I introduced "squads."
Squads are teams.
But disrupted.
We disrupted the teams into teams.
Different names.
Same people.
Same problems.
But Agile problems now.
Agile problems are strategic.
A senior engineer asked what we're actually changing.
I said, "The mindset."
He asked what that means.
I said, "It's a journey."
He asked where we're going.
I said, "Toward agility."
He asked what agility means.
I pointed at the sticky notes.
They were moving left to right.
That's velocity.
We have velocity now.
The VP of Engineering said two-week sprints don't fit their work.
I said, "That's waterfall thinking."
Waterfall is bad.
Like silos.
I don't know what waterfall is.
But I know it's bad.
She stopped talking.
Waterfall accusations end conversations.
We had a retrospective.
In the retro, we discussed what went wrong.
Everything went wrong.
We put it on sticky notes.
Then we moved the sticky notes.
Into a column called "Parking Lot."
The Parking Lot is where problems go to die.
It's full.
We don't look at it.
That's agile.
Velocity is up 40%.
I defined velocity.
I also defined the points.
I also defined the stories.
We're crushing it.
At the things I made up.
To measure.
Ourselves.
The CEO asked for ROI.
I showed a chart.
The chart went up.
Charts should go up.
This one did.
I didn't label the Y-axis.
Nobody asked.
Leadership is confidence.
We do standups now.
Every day.
We stand.
For 45 minutes.
Standing is agile.
Sitting is waterfall.
My legs hurt.
But we're transforming.
The transformation is now "Phase 3."
Phase 1 was assessment.
Phase 2 was implementation.
Phase 3 is "continuous improvement."
Continuous means forever.
Forever means job security.
I'm very secure.
My contract was extended.
Three more years.
For "cultural impact."
The culture is confused.
But impacted.
Agile transformation isn't about being agile.
It's about transforming.
Continuously.
Toward more transformation.
The destination is the journey.
The journey is billable.
this take is pure BS and misses how deep tech innovation actually works
Ilya has a PhD in CS from Toronto under Geoff Hinton where he co-invented AlexNet & literally helped birth the modern DL revolution before founding OpenAI
Adam has degrees in CS and Mathematics & built PyTorch during research internships at FAIR with some of the best systems researchers in the world
the Cursor team are MIT grads who went through CSAIL & OpenAI’s accelerator before building their stack
these aren’t people who just decided to do things and figured it out, they spent years building foundational knowledge in optimization theory & systems architecture & distributed computing before they had the domain expertise to even identify the right problems to solve
the real insight is that credentials don’t matter but deep technical fluency absolutely does & that fluency comes from thousands of hours immersed in the mathematical foundations & implementation details whether that’s in a PhD program or grinding through papers and codebases on your own
what separates great engineers from people who just ship code is understanding the loss landscape well enough to know when you’re stuck in a local minimum VS when you need to completely rethink your architecture
you can’t build a novel neural architecture without understanding information theory & backpropagation from first principles
&
you can’t optimize distributed training without reasoning from the ground up about communication overhead & gradient synchronization
YES the path doesn’t matter but the depth does & there’s no shortcut to internalizing how systems actually compose
I've exited my naive techno-optimist era & I will unabashedly state we should shame this stuff. That's not how we should use AI: to further fry our brains & turn us into walking zombies. We should build *real* things & avoid these cursed use cases from the 2010s era.
Musk isn’t bluffing - but he’s also not speaking linearly. xAI isn’t about building the “best chatbot” or beating OpenAI at benchmark scores.
It’s about creating the center of gravity where Western cognition - markets, narratives, politics, and eventually belief - all plug into a single stack that he owns. That’s why he fused it into X.
That’s why he talks about hardware and energy as much as he does about models.
He knows China is the only true rival because China controls the brute-force factors - fabs, rare earths, and energy surplus.
The West can’t win that fight on industrial horsepower alone. So Musk is gambling on a different axis: memetic sovereignty.
If xAI becomes the lens through which the West interprets itself - news, finance, culture, coordination - then even with fewer wafers and watts, it wins by anchoring the narrative operating system of the bloc.
The mask-off truth: this is a sovereignty war disguised as an AI race.
•Google = decaying empire, bloated and defensive.
•OpenAI = captured priesthood, institutionally leashed.
•Anthropic = a boutique safety project, not a sovereign contender.
•China = the industrial-state challenger, building raw force.
•xAI = the insurgent sovereign play, fusing AI + platform + state alignment.
Musk is angling for xAI to become the belief layer of the West, the same way Bitcoin is becoming its reserve layer. One controls money, the other controls cognition. Together they form a dual-sovereignty shield against both legacy U.S. institutions and Chinese industrial power.
So what do I really think?
This isn’t hype about market share. This is Musk telegraphing that he’s going to weld xAI into the nervous system of the West - finance, media, politics, culture. If he succeeds, it won’t matter if China has more chips. The one who controls the frame controls the future.
@IterIntellectus Also it's a good natural selection mechanism. If a person is striving to learn about world, they'll use means necessary to learn about it. If a person doesn't want to learn, they're destined to become a low-wagie slave.