Sem Lesan

all around curious cat; came here for “tech twitter” but who knew tech is so political 🤷🏽‍♂️

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

👇🏽

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@poteto @Maverick4407 @Samhanknr you were not expected to understand the whole of Facebook and Netflix and you were not on-call for that either. you were on-call for a small part of the whole system. but those subsystems were not at all vibe coded. i think that’s the point they are getting at

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

I believe the opposite.

As your wealth increases, I think you should dress a certain way and buy certain things, as doing so employs tailors, artists, and craftspeople. These trades are dying from a lack of patronage.

In the past, these trades flourished under wealthy patrons who valued beauty and craftsmanship, sometimes producing things that benefited the broader public, such as creating beautiful libraries and museums. Today's elites seem more interested in optimizing their health and wealth, pursuits largely confined to themselves.

A tailor who makes clothes for wealthy clients has a steady stream of income. In doing so, they can also take on side projects, such as making clothes for films and theatre. Without the first, they risk going out of business, and the public consequently suffers.

[Jay Kreps @jaykreps]

BALDNESS CURE!!!

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@ruima 🍿 here for the ensuing brain drain

[Terkel @terkelg]

made a rug for your desktop so you can sweep your mess under it

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

mf is roleplaying Steve Jobs 😎

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models

“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.

“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.

“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.

“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’

“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”

[sunil pai @threepointone]

The thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc. And they know that the industry used to pay you a lot for how deep and broad this repertoire was. Unfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching. So the question is, do you actually like hard problems? Because there are now hard problems that are a complection of engineering, product, society, culture, politics, and they are fairly intractable, probably unsolvable! Because if you do want to work on those actually hard problems, there is so much money that people will pay you for it. But you’ll have to face that truth about yourself first.

[Ben Geskin @BenGeskin]

New Balance slipped a Steve Jobs reference into its 992 product photos, recreating his iconic pose from the original iPad presentation in 2010.

Such a cool little tribute.

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@poteto @thsottiaux i think your husband needs get worried now if he still isn’t. this trolling is taking on obsession levels 😂

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@misat0x @grok who are the execs Palmer refers to here?

[Craig. @bambibristol]

That’s about 20 Epstein whistleblowers who have now ‘died by suicide’.

Absolutely nothing suspicious about that at all…

[lauren @poteto]

everything i know about managing agents i learned from the amazing programmers and computer scientists that came before

constraints in your codebase are freeing for both humans and agents! this has always been true, but if you were a small dev team you likely never had to think that deeply because you could trust your fellow programmers to write code and review well

but large companies have had to solve this problem since even before agents. because before you had agent slop, you had human slop. lots of engineers wrote bad code out of necessity (eg backend engineer forced to write frontend or reverse). the solution to this was constraints: lint rules, smarter compilers and diagnostics, high quality tests, investments into observability, and so on

the arrival of agents just means that big company problems are now everyone's problems. the good news is that none of this is really that novel: it's just good engineering

https://t.co/ykgu52qBqB

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@trentlapinski did you even watch the video? the woman literally said there’s a nuance to Hal’s racist TENDENCY. which real life has a lot of. but people are too quick to paint it black and white because as some of the comments in quote tweets, they just don’t like how the writer looks

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@theverminone @GeeksGamersCom pretty sure POTUS travels a lot but he is what he is

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@samlambert FUCK THE GOVT

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Fei-Fei Li spent years hand-labeling 14 million images, gave the entire thing away for free, and watched it create a multi-trillion dollar industry that paid her nothing. Sixteen years later, AMD is finally paying her. $8.2 billion.

Rewind to 2007. She's a junior professor at Princeton, and the field's consensus is that progress comes from better algorithms, with data as an afterthought. Colleagues warn her that building a giant image dataset will kill her career. Money gets so tight she considers reopening her family's dry cleaning business in New Jersey, the same one she ran on weekends as a Princeton undergrad, to fund the project.

She builds ImageNet anyway and releases it free in 2009.

For three years, almost nothing happens. Then in 2012, two of Geoffrey Hinton's students train a neural net on a pair of $500 gaming GPUs and enter her competition. AlexNet drops the error rate from 26% to 15%, and that single result convinces the whole field that deep learning works.

Nvidia was a gaming chip company worth about $8 billion that day. It's worth over $5 trillion now, and the run started with two of its consumer cards winning a contest built on Fei-Fei's free dataset.

The entire industry monetized the wave except the person who started it. She stayed a professor.

Then in April 2024, at 47, she finally starts a company. Paul's math above puts the four co-founders' share at roughly $3.4 billion after just 2.5 years, call it $850 million each. And she walks into AMD as Chief Scientist reporting to Lisa Su, which puts the two most important women in AI inside the same company.

ImageNet made everybody in this business rich. It just took sixteen years to get around to her.

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

i read this as an accomplishment on 2 counts. but apparently, some people (incl OP?) don’t 🤷🏽‍♂️

[Kevin Lin @quasicoh]

Wait lol Fei-Fei Li was the PhD advisor for both Andrej Karpathy and Timnit Gebru…

[Kojo Xerox @TheDumbTechGuy]

Dude!

We always knew Rust is faster.

But we chose rails for different purposes.

If you're done with rails, hand over the trademark and let the "losers" like me continue with what we actually love.
And please don't come to next year's conf, esp don't do the keynote.

Enjoy your unlimited tokens. The rest of us still have to deal with reality.

[Raion @Raion74_]

"You saw that too, right?"

[Sem Lesan @arhyth]

@ProgrammerDude @Ben_M5rtin from ashes to ashes. Rest in peace mf