george

engineer, certified hypnotherapist
building
✍ all opinions are mine.

[george @_thinking_reed]

Rick Rubin is @jack’s dad
you can’t tell me otherwise

or better said, Rick Rubin embodies Jack’s final boss state

great interview!

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with @RickRubin

0:00 Less Is More But Harder
2:00 Def Jam From The Dorm Room
4:00 Capturing Club Energy On Record
6:00 Going Deep On Influences
12:30 Why Reduced By Rick Rubin
14:00 Beatles Structure Meets Rap
16:00 The Ruthless Edit
19:30 Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist
22:00 Lazy Workaholic
25:30 Protecting The Moment Of Magic
29:00 Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster
32:30 Professional Listener
44:00 Fishing And Showing Up
47:00 Johnny Cash And Constraints
55:30 Church Business vs. Banking Business
58:50 Run On Intuition Alone
1:01:00 Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process
1:04:30 In Service Of The Artist
1:09:00 Work As Diary Entries
1:13:30 Four Ways Success Destroys You
1:16:00 How To Sustain Success
1:21:00 The House On The Mountain

Includes paid partnerships.

[george @_thinking_reed]

@signulll a prophet is never acknowledged in his home
I’m pretty sure a lot of people called Shakespeare dumb in his days lol

dumb is the new ai

[george @_thinking_reed]

@atmoio @chamath has been saying this
ask the frontline workers… they are the best measure of impact, not the frontier labs making bank off the hype

[george @_thinking_reed]

it requires a complete shift in thinking patterns

especially when you realize the system can now now break in much more ways than ever before

[signüll @signulll]

the shift from deterministic to nondeterministic computing demands a new kind of builder.

[george @_thinking_reed]

@sama keep cooking 🧑‍🍳

[george @_thinking_reed]

@sama what did you do again sama 🤔

[george @_thinking_reed]

the world doesn't need another vibe coding app
what it needs are purpose-built products that solve real problems

if we've learnt anything the past year it's that these apps don't generate any inherent value, just another token consumption engine for frontier labs disguised as a product

no, thank you

[george @_thinking_reed]

the world doesn't need another vibe coding app
what it needs are purpose-built products that solve real problems

if we've learnt anything the past year it's that these apps don't generate any inherent value, just another token consumption engine for frontier labs disguised as a product

no, thank you

[george @_thinking_reed]

the more i read this, the more it feels like a response to the pressure of having an AI strategy than a concrete plan for achieving one

lots of vision
less clarity on execution, incentives and measurable outcomes

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

We just launched Canada’s new AI Strategy: AI For All. 

We’re taking control of our future — with AI that’s governed by Canadian values, AI that’s accountable to Canadians, and AI that serves all Canadians.

[george @_thinking_reed]

@HunterBiden @nikitabier @Kenn321705 Goated

[signüll @signulll]

once public, anthropic & openai will have to take far more calculated risks in both models & products. & everything will take a lot longer to do.

talent shifts too. pre ipo you’re selling optionality on a moonshot but post ipo you’re selling liquid rsus with a perhaps capped multiple. that filters out the risk seeking slice, even if the median a player still shows up.

[george @_thinking_reed]

doesn't openrouter already handle this?
it feels like an inevitable feature for openai or anthropic to build in natively

automatically routing requests to smaller models the moment you hit rate limits on the frontier ones

i'm particularly interested in seeing what latency impacts this will have on requests in general

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Model routing is an important thing

Controversial idea: the frontier labs will want their AI harness to be the moat, but ultimately the best case for consumers is that model capabilities flatten and commodify

Preview of the AI Harness Wars of 2027

[george @_thinking_reed]

@TheRohanVarma think of all the internal tools that won't take six months to get approved now. Huge win.

[george @_thinking_reed]

@paulg if I remember correctly this trend started with Gemini 3, and then other models just slopped it on

that was the first model that introduced the “it’s NOT X… it’s Y” conversation style

[george @_thinking_reed]

@BarackObama shocker: that correspondence unit jobs no longer exist

guess what replaced it

[george @_thinking_reed]

one thing about GPT-5.5

it may completely ignore parts of your design spec
it may decide your architecture isn’t the right architecture
it may build features you never asked for

but somehow you’ll end up with a working product anyway

it’s the first model i’ve used where “following instructions” and “getting the job done” feel like two separate objectives.

[george @_thinking_reed]

@vfarcic hi Viktor, what’s the latency implication of using open router? - I assume there’ll be some you’ve noticed.

[george @_thinking_reed]

@_catwu how about adding a qualifier before the word “workflow” rather than assuming every appearance of the word workflow in my prompt means I want to initiate a clause workflow

I build GitHub actions workflows

[george @_thinking_reed]

I think it mostly comes down to “taste”
most engineers are design illiterates

if you’re an engineer building a product or even a personal website, the best advice I can give you is to hire a designer unless you’re design literate

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

If you want to know what giveaway LLM design is, this is it: thin colored borders, gradients, glow effects, too many different font sizes, small fonts too small, inconsistent padding and alignment (especially vertical).

Not a dunk on @zeeg he’s being transparent about it. And he’s a good AI driver and good developer in general. But using this moment to show people how obvious this is.

[george @_thinking_reed]

at this point it’s not your app anymore
cognitive debt + cognitive surrender

creativity=0

[Max Blade @_MaxBlade]

your one job today is to open opus 4.8

set /effort to ultracode

ask it to make your app 100x better in everyway

[george @_thinking_reed]

@naval perspectives… if your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough and you should change it