John Ter

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@dwarkesh_sp https://t.co/401QfyWYME super interesting.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@dwarkesh_sp Collar, A. C. F. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: the Spread of New Ideas. Cambridge University Press FINALIST in the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Best First Book in the History of Religions.

= anna collar. No one is doing this work. network theory+religion

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@amorriscode @CodeAkram @AnthropicAI @claudeai @bcherny @trq212 @noahzweben I want to know why Theo isn't publicly talking about how much he is paid by OpenAi?

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@pzakin dude. please watch someone with no skill at all build an app that is fully functioning. then just think: okay maybe THEY arent going to make software go to zero bc they wont do maintenance, but any code bro and their friends who need a little $ will make it go to zero.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@tobiasdeml tell me more!

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@scaling01 where is the polymarket on this that its the 100% most important issue of the midterms, and will be directly on party lines?

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock

my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive

when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost

what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise

I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily

the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…

China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally

so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine

the gap is ARCHITECTURAL

it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks

it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…

and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now

BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee

I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one

Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name

it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

[Lisan al Gaib @scaling01]

@OpenAI The contract does not prevent mass surveillance or autonomous killings. The contract only prohibits cartoonishly bad scenarios that were already illegal.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@MartinShkreli id be here for it

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@scaling01 weasel mode:activated. he unfortunately was uniquely made for this. Itll be a lesson in wordsmithing and diplomacy for all of us to see how he does it and we will weirdly be convinced..

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@teortaxesTex @DeanHu11 dude your account is just fire. thats all i have to say. who else should i follow that has some high quality insights on some of the chinese ai developments?

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@adamwathan claude is uniquely good at contextual understanding. really the only one you can easily say 'hey do this and that' and he really gets the essence. other models overfit or underfit way too easily

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@MatthewBerman Why pay openclaw boi 30m when you can just make it?

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@robustus a million. just reported the bug

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@TheZvi This is a classic 'rationalist' challenge. The point of an article like this is to help people understand and make change, not to have perfect legibility of every facet of possible truth. The point is to help convince, and so it needs to be a purposeful simplification.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@inductionheads they dialed down the usage like crazy. made some adjustment and it dropped off a cliff. i was sucking up tokens last week and this week i ran it nonstop and am barely going to reach my max this week.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@teej_m Lol this is related to another one i do. "Codex said to do this and he couldnt find the bug. But maybe you can.." and Claude gets real sassy and effective.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@TheAhmadOsman This is shocking. So many things are just hype, so our natural heuristic when there is hype is “ehh almost definitely hype”. AI coding is not hype. You just have to use it prove it. Anyone can make software now. This has never been the case in the history of the world.

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@garrytan It’s shocking. Also, ive loved some of your tips so far too re the prompts etc you’ve been using.. any other ideas and strategies on how to level up?

[John Ter @buidlstuff]

@bayeslord yah this is quite bad. two close friends, hyper smart, sensible people = oneshotted into feeling like they made it alive and its their savior now. Nuts and actually a bit scary. They didnt fall for 4o, but 4.6 got them badly.