This is a photograph of Albert Einstein with an unassuming Indian man you probably haven’t heard enough about. He spent his life working on one idea: women should be able to live with dignity and make their own choices. Thread.
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@simonw@lhotari Not at all. I built the large scale systems over decades that I make LLMs and agents improve much faster than I would today. Break others’ laurels publicly, break your own laurels privately (using LLMs nowadays).
Evals are the new PRD.
The companies building AI products that actually work are running 12.8 eval experiments per day. Here is the playbook with @ankrgyl, Founder and CEO of @braintrust ($800M valuation, behind Vercel, Replit, Ramp, Zapier, Notion, Airtable):
⏱ 1:43 Why vibe checks stop scaling
⏱ 6:35 Evals are the new PRD
⏱ 8:45 The Claude Code evals controversy
⏱ 18:48 Building an eval live from zero
⏱ 29:51 Connecting Linear MCP and iterating
⏱ 39:12 Why you need evals that fail
⏱ 43:36 Offline vs online evals
⏱ 47:40 Three mistakes killing eval culture
The core framework: every eval is exactly three things. A set of inputs your product needs to handle. A task that takes those inputs and generates outputs. A scoring function that produces a number between 0 and 1.
We built one from scratch on camera. Score went from 0 to 0.75 in under 20 minutes.
I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock
my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive
when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost
what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise
I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily
the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…
China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally
so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine
the gap is ARCHITECTURAL
it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks
it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…
and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now
BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee
I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one
Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name
it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster
@DavidDeutschOxf@yudapearl@bnielson01 That just says: the reality premise of the question is not established. Can’t answer *because* we don’t know whether “they” do (have the same “rest” mass). It’s an information-free response in the sense that it says nothing about the question or its validity.
Europe and India are making history today.
We have concluded the mother of all deals.
We have created a free trade zone of two billion people, with both sides set to benefit.
This is only the beginning.
We will grow our strategic relationship to be even stronger.
@Alice_Weidel We have a poem in Hindi with a verse:
क्षमा शोभती उस भुजंग को, जिसके पास गरल हो।
उसको क्या जो दंतहीन, विषरहित, विनीत, सरल हो।।
This fits Europe today.
In software as in life, we often need to deal with people who will happily waste our time. Maybe it is insurance salesman who insists on taking your time. Maybe it is a colleague who must show its 50-slide PowerPoint presentation.
One important step you must take to succeed is to take these people out of your life as much as possible. Try to neutralize them.
The following statement by Torvalds is relevant to this effect...
« Some security people have scoffed at me when I say that security problems are primarily "just bugs." Those security people are f*cking morons. Because honestly, the kind of security person who doesn't accept that security problems are primarily just bugs, I don't want to work with. »
It matters because software has bugs. All non-trivial software has bugs. In fact, hardware systems have bugs too, sometimes caused by hardware failures.
And some bugs can be exploited to cause problems such as denial-of-service attacks or even allow attackers to take control of your machine.
So we should hunt down bugs.
However, there is a whole class of people who find an off-by-one error or some other bug, and then immediately declare that they have found a **security vulnerability**.
Whatever they are doing is the *most important thing there is*. We should all stop what we are doing to concentrate on what this person is saying because it is obviously the most important discovery it is.
You see. It is not a bug. It is a security vulnerability.
This is just like the insurance salesman that wants to tell you that without his insurance, your family could go hungry.
You see, it is not insurance. It is the future of your children.
Stay away from these people.
My hot take is that people without religion or those who are agnostic have better morals.
They don't diss other people's food.
They don't have separate utensils and dishes for the marginalised
They don't call their food pure.
They marry based on mutual values and respect.
They don't call random people terrorists.
They don't force their women to dress in a certain way.
They don't mob lynch
@krassenstein lol you mean Indian numerals? That’s the only system anyone learns anyway. Script differences aside who cares about the squiggly shapes anyway