Ajay

Sport, tech, aviation. Engineering at Waymo, Google.

[sgb @sadgirlyboss]

love how we say "slept like a baby" when babies are, objectively speaking, the worst demographic of sleepers

[Ajay @aj_]

🎯 “we’re relearning what many teams knew – engineering has always resisted measurement, and the most measurable parts may not be the only important ones.”

[sarah guo @saranormous]

https://t.co/Hw02laH9yp

[Ajay @aj_]

While the bar is high, gestation crates are among the more unconscionable things humans have done.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[New town every hour (ret.) @TownsUsa]

missing an important "the" here

[Ryan Petersen @typesfast]

I will believe AI is driving productivity gains in the old economy when a front desk person checks me into a hotel with less than fifteen hundred keystrokes and mouse clicks.

[Ajay @aj_]

“The mountains are calling and I must go. But first, lemme check if I slept well on my whoop”

[Goldie @dezgoldie]

Bro would've felt completely fine if his whoop didn't tell him how under optimized he was lol. Our ancestors would be clowning our generation so hard right now.

[Ajay @aj_]

Wonder if constant exposure to pictures and videos would keep stuff from younger years retrievable.

We’ve only had access to this for 15 years, will need to wait a couple decades to find out.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Ages 5 to 10 is the only window in human development where the brain's recording system is fully online but the filtering system hasn't been installed yet.

The hippocampus, the brain structure responsible for encoding episodic memories, reaches functional maturity around age 5. Before that, you're in what neuroscientists call childhood amnesia. The average human can't retrieve a single episodic memory from before age 4.7. Your brain was recording, but in a format it would later overwrite.

Around 5, the dentate gyrus finishes pruning to adult-level synaptic density and the trisynaptic circuit that links hippocampal subfields goes fully operational. You can now encode a scene, bind it to a time and place, and store it for decades.

But here's what makes 5 to 10 different from every age that follows. The prefrontal cortex, which handles habituation and novelty filtering, won't reach maturity until your early twenties. So for roughly five years, you have an adult-grade memory encoder paired with zero ability to tune anything out. Every hotel lobby, every ocean wave, every airport terminal is arriving at full sensory bandwidth with no compression algorithm.

Vacations stack every variable that strengthens memory encoding. Novel environment. Emotional arousal. Multi-sensory input. Spatial navigation through unfamiliar terrain. A 7-year-old on a beach trip is running all five at maximum intensity simultaneously, writing to a hard drive that just came online.

After 10, prefrontal maturation starts filtering. By adulthood, you need increasingly extreme novelty to generate the same encoding strength. That's why your twentieth vacation blurs but the one trip your parents took you on at age 8 plays back in full resolution forty years later.

The brain wasn't designed to remember vacations. It was designed to map novel environments during a critical learning window. Family trips just happen to be the most concentrated dose of novelty most children in developed countries will ever receive.

[Henrick Johansson @compliantvc]

A trolley is about to hit 5 people laying on the track

You can redirect the car, but the other track has not yet reached regulatory approval or completed its 1 year environmental testing period, so operating a train car on it is a violation of transit regulations

What do you do?

[sophie @netcapgirl]

this is KD joining the warriors for people who know linear algebra

[Ajay @aj_]

Insanely impressive. The athleticism needed to pull this off is off the charts!

[Siim Land @siimland]

Peak performance at 90!

Dr William Bell, at the age of 90, broke the pole vault world record for his age group in 2012

He cleared a height of 7 feet 2 inches (218 cm)

[Mo Bavarian @mobav0]

Stochastic gradient descent

[Ajay @aj_]

Acquired in 2010 and I can’t tell if it performs the same, worse, or better 16 years on

[Ajay @aj_]

We talk about great acquisitions all the time, but Siri must be up there among the worst in history

[Robby Kalland @RKalland]

2026 Kentucky Derby results:
1. 🐎
2. 🐎
3. 🐎
4. 🐎
5. 🐎
6. 🐎
7. 🐎
8. 🐎
9. 🐎
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12. 🐎
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18. 🐎

[Ajay @aj_]

A hugely popular top podcast discussing core technical stuff on a blackboard. Can get behind this media!

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Did a very different format with @reinerpope – a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served.

It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk.

It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there - it’s really worth it.

There are less than a handful of people who understand the full stack of AI, from chip design to model architecture, as well as Reiner. It was a real delight to learn from him.

Recommend watching this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard.

0:00:00 – How batch size affects token cost and speed
0:31:59 – How MoE models are laid out across GPU racks
0:47:02 – How pipeline parallelism spreads model layers across racks
1:03:27 – Why Ilya said, “As we now know, pipelining is not wise.”
1:18:49 – Because of RL, models may be 100x over-trained beyond Chinchilla-optimal
1:32:52 – Deducing long context memory costs from API pricing
2:03:52 – Convergent evolution between neural nets and cryptography

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Did a very different format with @reinerpope – a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served.

It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk.

It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there - it’s really worth it.

There are less than a handful of people who understand the full stack of AI, from chip design to model architecture, as well as Reiner. It was a real delight to learn from him.

Recommend watching this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard.

0:00:00 – How batch size affects token cost and speed
0:31:59 – How MoE models are laid out across GPU racks
0:47:02 – How pipeline parallelism spreads model layers across racks
1:03:27 – Why Ilya said, “As we now know, pipelining is not wise.”
1:18:49 – Because of RL, models may be 100x over-trained beyond Chinchilla-optimal
1:32:52 – Deducing long context memory costs from API pricing
2:03:52 – Convergent evolution between neural nets and cryptography

[Ajay @aj_]

What do we think the VCs (we know who) would do with startup revenue decks that do this?

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

RFK Jr: "A Democratic senator claimed it's mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600%. I said, 'Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.'"

Trump: "Right"

[Dimitri @thedimitri]

Apple Watch be like "holy shit bro you did it! You stood up."

[John Bistline @JEBistline]

With the Boston Marathon today, a good time to re-up one of the greatest figures in sports data: the distribution of marathon finish times (n=9,789,093). The spike at 4:00 is not a coincidence.