@andrewchen Maximise human health, wealth and happiness. These will lead to goals that will enable Zero person Billion dollar companies for freeing up humanity to explore beyond galaxy.
Ian M Banks' culture series will play out verbatim right in front of our eyes.
Meet Sadiq ali, the pakistani canadian, living in toronto, he's the head of TF-2990, and runs dozens of similar accs, his soul purpose is to spread misinfo and hatred against indians on a massive scale by manipulating twitter algorithm.
EXPOSING HIS ENTIRE SYNDICATE. 🧵
John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe
“We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.”
John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later:
“When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.”
But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues:
“If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.”
Yet slow growth has a silver lining:
“I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.”
The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown.
They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them.
In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes.
“What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.”
At YC tonight Garry interviewed Jessica and me about the early history of YC. I'd forgotten how hard it used to be for startups to raise money after YC. Now they have the opposite problem: now there's so much money out there that they have to be careful not to raise too much.
You can have a CEO, a designer, and an engineer look at your plan in plan mode before you and Claude or Codex write a single line... and that's powerful
In The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil said that by 2030, exponential breakthroughs in genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology will allow humanity to halt and reverse aging.
He refers to this journey as crossing "Three Bridges" to achieve eternal life:
1. Bridge One: Optimising your current health through diet, exercise, and aggressive supplementation to stay alive long enough to reach the next wave of tech.
2. Bridge Two (2020s-2030s) (This is where we currently are): The biotechnology revolution, where therapies will begin reshaping our biology and turning off disease genes.
3. Bridge Three (2030+): The nanotechnology revolution, where millions of microscopic bots inside our bodies will automate life extension, making death entirely optional.
We are at bridge two with bridge three yet out of news but hopefully soon be.
We will need these technologies to survive long inter galactic voyages. Hopefully that day is not far away to experience for normal people like me.
@stevechang64@DrSamuelBHume@ASCO Patients in the control taking standard chemotherapy had a median survival of 6.7 months. The Daraxonrasib group had a median survival of 13.2 months. So, essentially doubling the survival. It is the first dent that has been made in what has been an automatic death sentence.
RAS was really the king of the undruggable -- it took some serious creativity to inhibit it (Daraxonrasib is a 'molecular glue' that locks RAS into a trimer with a third molecule)
Other classically 'undruggable' targets -- HIF, menin, BCL2 -- all now have approved drugs
Even MYC and p53 (two of the most commonly-altered proteins in cancer) have targeted therapies gradually moving through trials
Beyond this, with new techniques (like PROTACs) it is admittedly optimistic -- but not completely unrealistic -- to say that nothing is undruggable anymore
Then that means we will need a specialized memory and a curious AI that will allow AI to learn company knowledge on its own initiative. Akin to offshoring in 1990s and 2000s where we do have a precedent. Paradoxically, I believe that AI will help reshoring when countries inevitably fall for it.
@t_blom It would be interesting, and a good opportunity for startups, if this requires new tools to be made. But no one will be able to figure out faster what these tools should look like than the startups that need them.
In the agentic world, it's tempting to automate everything, but we should resist the urge and first think hard about whether the process should exist at all.
Delete, then automate.
Introducing the newest Coral board, for efficient, on-device AI!
Check out the demos in the video:
- On-board speech translation
- Natural language controlling hardware
- Vision & sound generating music
I don’t think local models will ever be the default but every device will need one as an emergency generator to stop people freaking out when they lose connectivity and have to make a decision.
I treat my agents with some love, respect and trust as I do my fellow human team members. Agents make similar mistakes as humans do.
Humans are imperfect NI (Natural Intelligence) Agents and similarly AI produces imperfect AI agents.
Similar to AI agents, NI agents have deleted and corrupted production databases too.
In case of NI agents, it is the processs and process rules that prevent such mishaps. The same rules, processes and systems that works for NI Agents also work for AI agents, albeit with some adaptations to better suit the NI agents comfort level.
Earlier this year I was getting frustrated with Claude's charts, fed this book to claude and had it generate a Tufte skill. Instantly got simpler/more beautiful visualizations.
https://t.co/lfXwyQfmQG
CloudFlare CEO on AI - "AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers."
Excerpts from his article "How I Choose Which Cloudflare Employees to Replace With AI".
"The company has less need for middle managers, operations jobs and other ‘measuring’ positions.
Builders create products. Sellers sell those products. Measurers do everything else: internal audit, revenue recognition, finance, legal, compliance, middle management, operations and on and on.
AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees."
https://t.co/bFWA09LYyb