Steven

22 | shitty autodidact

[Steven @ascendingfn]

Great work is happiness.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

@poojabnf I read the code

[Steven @ascendingfn]

@RuiCarrilho5 i know a person who has read CLRS cover to cover, so i think it's very likely

[a16z @a16z]

Airbnb, 2008.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

You think you're good at thinking until you write

[Steven @ascendingfn]

@Nsukka_okpa @grok produce a better image that includes the traits of of haaland

[vivek @itsreallyvivek]

Do you want to be liked, or do you want to win?

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I haven't read this for about 10 years, but I just looked at it after someone linked to it and I was surprised how many of these things are starting to happen. Still no next Steve Jobs yet though.

https://t.co/YQU7ZxOTwN

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Probably the realest thing I have heard Chamath say

"Possessions are BS. They are worthless. They are a sign of insecurity, a rampant ego, and an unsettled mind. And that is okay if you are going to be a mid."

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

it’s makers vs takers

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

David Sacks just delivered an economics masterclass on Elon becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

@davidsacks: “People see the headline and imagine Elon suddenly has a trillion dollars in the bank. That’s not how it works. His balance sheet didn’t change overnight.”

Why?

The real point is deeper. Wealth isn’t in the “stuff” we consume. Food, shelter, clothes. Things that depreciate and disappear. It’s in the machines that create stuff for decades: tools, workflows, and corporations.
These are the true engines of human progress.

“If you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there’s a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that machine might create. That’s where the wealth comes from.”

Elon started with nothing. An immigrant who slept on the floor building Zip2. He created these machines from vision and relentless effort. Thousands joined him, including a SpaceX welder who turned his labor into a million dollars in stock.

That’s the magic of tech and free markets: labor can become capital. It’s fluid.

The outrage misses this entirely. The people building machines that deliver medicines, energy, and abundance are creating lasting prosperity for everyone.

What do you think? Does viewing wealth as future productivity change how you see stories like this?

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor.
The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers.

Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward.

Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos.

As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.”

Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress.

Time to choose your side.

[Marc Lou @marclou]

.@mntruell launched Cursor 8 times, and nobody cared.

Don't give up.

[Naval @naval]

It's the Age of Builders.

(sorry financiers and talkers)

[Steven @ascendingfn]

@chamath the doom propaganda has done irreversible damage. the good builders are burnt out and the bad ones have AI psychosis, so no one is building the principled platform agents need

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

My heuristic is that any diff an agent generates over ~1500 lines is too big and is indicative that the problem needs to be decomposed. This is my general pattern now for feature work:

1. Try to implement the whole feature, loosely guided. I call this the "draw the owl" prompt in reference to the meme. Expect garbage, you're going to get garbage.

2. If the diff is less than 1500 lines, review it and iterate normally. If the diff is more than 1500 lines, prompt the agent to decompose the problem into atomic, incremental, reviewable tasks. Simultaneously, do this yourself.

3. Agents will very often make these tasks way too specific to the shape they solved. You need to massage it into the right general shape. Do that.

4. Kick off new agents to work on those incremental things (as parallelized as possible). Apply the same rules.

5. At a certain, point, repeat the "draw the owl" prompt. At some point, you will get beneath your review-ability threshold.

This has been producing consistently high quality, maintainable, reviewable chunks of code that have a good handoff to either merge as-is or human refinement.

And with the latest frontier models at xhigh thinking, these are all slow enough that you can usually have multiple going concurrently while you are actively reviewing others or working on your own tasks.

HITL (human-in-the-loop) agents are still super important, especially for feature work. Features touch the human boundary in terms of UI, API, etc. And net new stuff can introduce pathologies in the architecture that violate desired invariants (these should be represented in specs or tests but we aren't perfect!).

I know a lot of the leading edge agentic discourse is about "loops" and agents driving agents continuously. I do some of that (will report on that later). But, in terms of raw daily get-shit-done type of work, this is my most rewarding pattern at the moment.

[Naval @naval]

The only truly wasted time is time spent wishing you were somewhere else.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

How to Earn a Billion Dollars: https://t.co/WeWBUkKym6

[Steven @ascendingfn]

@friedberg @RoKhanna @elonmusk @JoeBiden why do you always cook

[david friedberg @friedberg]

they’re not jobs if they’re not valued. they’re not valued if there aren’t customers out there willing to pay them for their great work. needing the government to “create” a job is tantamount to welfare and that level of welfare resolves these individuals to a dependency on the government and lack of economic mobility. and chains our people, collectively, to a more indentured future.

you may be well intentioned but you have, and always will, fail to see the destitute folly of government as a job creation engine.

i have tried to engage you on this topic, in good faith, with empiricism and reasoning, but you have only dodged my points and pivoted to some populist refrain about the importance of taxation and the evils of productivity-driven success.

i can only assume you’re dodging these truths because you and the rest of the politburo leadership have deemed the conversation unsafe speech and put your oligopoly at risk.

let’s leave it at that then.

perhaps if your ways get their day, we can all bask in the glories of the dark ages ahead.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3