Mathew Spolin

Tech @AppDirect, 3x founder. Previously Sproutling (aq by @mattel), Doubledutch (aq by @cvent), @onemedical. Father of two.

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

I wrote about The Dark Software Factory https://t.co/DvIuMDbpHR via @LinkedIn

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

You can’t build software at scale and ignore the tokenomics

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Eddie Haskell is such a strongly remembered, flawed character; What was his story? Missed opportunity for a spinoff, part of the Cleaver extended universe

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

The @cursor_ai bugbot is great, can I run this on my whole codebase?

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Waymo wants to take the freeway everywhere. How do I make it NOT do that?

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Specialized roles that mirror the way people work may not be needed with your electronic super intelligence

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Stop Prompting. Fix the Missing Layer in Your AI Coding Stack https://t.co/nEm6azHrj1 via @LinkedIn

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

@melvynx Good ideas here. Any thoughts on Render?

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Frontier models can now implement entire features. Most engineers still ask them to write functions.
Engineering in the Age of Agent Orchestration https://t.co/mytsNMvVpi via @LinkedIn

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

@obsdmd Does it sync images yet?

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

We are living at the intersection of two extremes always

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

In a real “this is so amazing, we are so over,” kind of mood continuously

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Dispatching 5 parallel agents for independent work

[kache @yacineMTB]

remember when covid started happening and you were on 4chan like holy shit and then you told your friends about it IRL and they didn't take you seriously at all and had no idea? and then two months later the entire world shut down

that's where we're at with AI rn

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

If DRAM gets too expensive we could send our data back and forth to the moon to store it

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

256 Tb/s data rates over 200 km distance have been demonstrated on single mode fiber optic, which works out to 32 GB of data in flight, “stored” in the fiber, with 32 TB/s bandwidth. Neural network inference and training can have deterministic weight reference patterns, so it is amusing to consider a system with no DRAM, and weights continuously streamed into an L2 cache by a recycling fiber loop. The modern equivalent of the ancient mercury echo tube memories. You would need to pipeline a bunch of them to implement modern trillion parameter models, but fiber transmission may have a better growth trajectory than DRAM does today, so it might someday become viable.

Much more practically, you should be able to gang cheap flash memory together to provide almost any read bandwidth you require, as long as it is done a page at a time and pipelined well ahead. That should be viable for inference serving today if flash and accelerator vendors could agree on a high speed interface.

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

Fascinated today by things whose identity is framed by what they don't have: mirrorless camera, wireless phone, cordless drill, serverless compute, keyless entry

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

AI Is the Default Way We Build Software
One Year of AI-Assisted Development at Scale https://t.co/C9ghi3BbrU via @LinkedIn

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

@kepano @obsdmd Make the iOS apps launch quickly

[Mathew Spolin @automatt]

“It’s time we stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention that will save lives.”

[Dr. Jon Slotkin @slotkinjr]

I have a guest essay in @nytimes today about autonomous vehicle safety. I wrote it because I’m tired of seeing children die. Done right, we can eliminate car crashes as a leading cause of death in the United States

@Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles. I spent weeks analyzing it because the results seemed too good to be true. 91% fewer serious-injury crashes. 92% less pedestrians hit. 96% fewer injury crashes at intersections. The list goes on.

39,000 Americans died in crashes last year. More than homicide, plane crashes, and natural disasters combined. The #2 killer of children and young adults. The #1 cause of spinal cord injury. We’ve accepted this as the price of mobility.

We don’t have to.

In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.

In driving, we’re all the control group.

Cities like DC and Boston are blocking deployment. And cities are not the only forces mobilizing to slow this progress.

It’s time we stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention that will save lives.

Link to article below.

👀 this video of Waymo cars evading crashes with people and vehicles. I especially note the ones that require it having a 360° view.

My sincere thanks to Alex Ellerbeck and @acsifferlin for their wisdom and sure hand in editing this piece.