Guille

SVP Engineering | Blending DevOps, cloud design & AI strategies. Coffee-fueled explorer of tech trends & global adventures.

[Super Thinking @Super_Thinkiing]

Using your free time to learn something is a sign that you're growing

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@bscholl I wished for a bright future for all mankind

[Yun-Ta Tsai @yunta_tsai]

Constraint often gives birth to great engineering.

[Guille @bjcatar]

@elonmusk @MarioNawfal 😅

[Guille @bjcatar]

@elonmusk 👀

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world.

And they are not handling it well.
In the best possible way.

Here is what they are discovering:

Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time.
Free water at every restaurant. Just appears.
Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited.
Free chips and salsa before you even order.
Free warm bread with dinner.
Ice in drinks like civilized people.
Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact.
Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going.
Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it.
Ranch dressing by the gallon.
Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced.
Dental care that actually works.
Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s.

Then they found the grocery stores.

Five of them within one mile.
Each one the size of an aircraft hangar.
Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes.
In silence.
Processing.

They finally understand why we do not have trains.

We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive.
Parking lots the size of small European countries.
Airports in every city worth visiting.

Why would we need trains.

The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle.
The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak.
The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre.
The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas.

Welcome to America.
Everything is free, enormous, air conditioned, comes with chips, and has five grocery stores within a mile that will sell you any cut of any animal you have ever imagined.

Write that down. 🦋

[Guille @bjcatar]

@craigweiss 😅

[Guille @bjcatar]

@techdevnotes we’ll get Groksur soon

[Guille @bjcatar]

@SleeperHQ 😅

[Guinness World Records @GWR]

Lionel Messi is quite good at football, isn’t he?

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

What people think “hard” feels like:
a rocky cut scene.

What hard *actually* feels like:
Known sacrfice.
Unknown payoffs.
And few mile markers.

[Guille @bjcatar]

@SpaceX @cursor_ai It Didn't take long to decide to exercise the option to buy. Their numbers are good, all parts growing and the horizon has good views. Looking forward to see what this partnership brings new.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

I realized you get further obsessing on your small daily actions than your potential big plans.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

If you wait for anything to be "ready," you will not win. It is never ready, you are never ready, you never will be ready. Just do the thing anyway.

[Tech Dev Notes @techdevnotes]

Grok account subscription now works with Hermes Agent

[Guille @bjcatar]

@Rixhabh__ 😅

[Guille @bjcatar]

@chribjel 🔥

[Guille @bjcatar]

@nikitabier @naiivememe 👀

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[Guille @bjcatar]

@levelsio 😅