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April 2009

[Warren Pies @WarrenPies]

Over the past week, we are seeing some early cracks in our GPU availability data...not going to overreact but have to call balls and strikes...On net, bad combo w/ the Anthropic ARR miss.

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Yeah. Don't get it. Why not have 8 Hermes-harnessed bots all via Discord (desktop/mobile) AND have your choice of any model (Gem, Sol 5.6, Grok etc.), then create custom slash commands for tasks. Setcrons for each. We don't need an opine'ing Grok. How do these 8 bots work together? Uh, dunno.. maybe point them via API to a Notion page? Yeah.

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This interview right here via @Scriptshadow and the brothers who wrote that massive epic The Ballad of the Ember Knight should be the wakeup call at the Blacklist @theblcklst. See BOLD text below. Frankly, the bell curve and "same slotting" has been going on for years over there. Can't opine on Austin FF, but they got other issues. @theblcklst (yes, we know you couldn't stand Elon and X and had to move to Bluesky etc. in early '26, but the game is here).

**********

What was your lowest moment as a screenwriter before this breakthrough?

B: Austin.

K: Yeah, Austin.  When we went to the Austin Film Festival.

B: We had another script, The Man Who Came From the River.

K: We were finalists with that.

B: We didn’t win.

K: Right from the start, the people we thought were there to help us said, “We’re not reading scripts.”  “Nobody’s signing anybody right now.”  “Good luck out there.”  Beyond that, we got one or two leads from the competition that didn’t go anywhere.  And that was when it hit us: we’re kinda screwed here.

B: Even if we get a finalist position in one of the most prestigious contests, nothing happens.

K: Yeah, so that was a really low point.  Not that the script was amazing or anything but just sort of the message we were getting and the fact that we had placed so high and that nothing at all came from it was discouraging.

B: And then we started sending various iterations of that finalist script over to the Black List.  But we kept getting the same scores back. There was an early version of the script we sent them before Austin that was garbage.  Yet no matter how much we improved it, we kept getting the same scores back.

[Gregory Blotnick @gregoryblotnick]

thanks man

its
1. "go direct"...just recognizing that this has worked for everyone I've ever seen pull it off, hand picking a mentor, and making it happen

2. pushing back that a sell side role is worse in any way, when thats a bunch of horseshit...u only hear that from some dude in a basement. the lead analyst at any bank, knows his sector better than 99% of the buyside. and I think 99% of sell side vs buyside are identical regardless, from talent and aptitude perspective.

zero reason why anyone should feel inferior for what in many ways is a better seat...DCF the two, no brainer

but no L/S guys talk like that, its only twtr idiots, most L/S guys are begging the SS "please help me get up to speed on this shit ASAP." because they have knowledge, info, and relationships that u dont.

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

From March…

Bottom line: No matter how easy or how hard it is, most people just don't want to make stuff for themselves, no matter what it is. The economy goes round because people buy stuff from other people who are good at making those things. I know software makers have a hard time believing other people just don't want to spend all day making software for themselves, but they don't.

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Founders — Jeff Zalaznick: Building Carbone & a Restaurant Empire

**Carbone Miami went from signed lease to open doors in 100 days.**

The location math: sit between two of America’s highest-grossing restaurants.

Full episode: https://t.co/M3XKuQfXaL

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Founders — Jeff Zalaznick: Building Carbone & a Restaurant Empire

**“Your mediocrity is my opportunity.”**

The thesis: take what people already love—and build the best version of it.

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Founders — Jeff Zalaznick: Building Carbone & a Restaurant Empire

**The only restaurant metric that matters: do they come back?**

Opening draws a crowd. Repeat visits build a durable institution.

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The Knowledge Project — No.1 Performance Psychologist: The Secret to High Performance and Excellence

**If you care too much what people think, that becomes your ceiling.**

Failure, discomfort, comparison, and approval-seeking all cap performance unless you build a playbook for them.

Full video: https://t.co/2rRpw1hAyC

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The Knowledge Project — No.1 Performance Psychologist: The Secret to High Performance and Excellence

**If you want to be somebody else, change your environment.**

Your brain is constantly taking instructions from the people, information, and systems around you.

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His book Fearless Golf is applicable to investing too. Pg 152... recovery factor. @GioValiante

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The Knowledge Project — No.1 Performance Psychologist: The Secret to High Performance and Excellence

**Changing your mind starts with changing what you do.**

Find the comfortable habit holding you back, change one thing, and repeat it until excellence becomes everyday.

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The Knowledge Project — No.1 Performance Psychologist: The Secret to High Performance and Excellence

**Changing your mind starts with changing what you do.**

Find the comfortable habit holding you back, change one thing, and repeat it until excellence becomes everyday.

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Rick Beato — Mike Elizondo: The Unknown Writer Behind Eminem's Biggest Hits

**Old studios accidentally protected creativity by forcing breaks.**

Mike Elizondo on why tape rewinds, loading sounds, and stepping away from screens changed the ideas in the room.

Full video: https://t.co/OKVaWJ33IT

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Rick Beato — Mike Elizondo: The Unknown Writer Behind Eminem's Biggest Hits

**He played everything on a number one record, got no writer credit, then learned how to make Dre see his value.**

The quiet career move that changed Mike Elizondo's credits on Eminem's biggest hits.

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Rick Beato — Mike Elizondo: The Unknown Writer Behind Eminem's Biggest Hits

**Dr. Dre made the basslines on Chronic 2001 feel human by forcing them to be played like loops.**

Mike Elizondo explains the tiny timing decisions behind the weight of those records.

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All-In Podcast — Ep. 278: Orbital AI Compute

**AI data centers may move to space sooner than people think.**

If Starship makes launch cheap enough, racks in orbit linked by lasers could beat Earth-based data-center economics.

Full episode: https://t.co/fYfpzX0hWE

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All-In Podcast — Ep. 278: AI Memory Crunch

**The real AI bottleneck isn't GPUs. It's memory.**

Gavin Baker says DRAM and HBM are the constraint that matters because model performance now depends on memory capacity and bandwidth.

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All-In Podcast — Ep. 278: China Catches Up in Coding

**The AI race has a cheat code: distillation.**

Chinese device farms can query frontier models, harvest reasoning traces, and train open models to catch up for a fraction of the cost.

[Brett Caughran @FundamentEdge]

I know I have the right Twitter friend group when all my true buddies here (mostly successful former Wall Street people looking for a more authentic life) start roasting this take.

But I will point out one glaringly obvious error with his framework: Scott Galloway is going to die.

We all are.

But he is 61. Per Claude, the average 61 year old American male has about 21 years left to live, and, on average, about 15 of those years are expected to be "active" / largely unimpaired. And for how many men does this jet-setting, Aspen & St Barths lifestyle stay compelling past ~70? For only the truly mentally ill, I would argue. The 4%/25x FIRE rule doesn't apply to him, and he doesn't even know it (worse, he's attempting to poison the rest of us with this mimetic crap of feeling like we don't have enough to feel secure).

And the fact that we are going to die is great news.

Life is precious precisely because it ends.

A few years back, I did a deep dive on near death experiences (NDE). What was most remarkable was the consistency of the aftereffects: reordered priorities, markedly reduced fear of death, increased sense of meaning & connection to source, and durable improvements to mental health. Buddhist "die before you die" meditations and the dissociative reframing activated in psychedelic journeys activate the same fundamental experience. What is learned through these experiences is that you don't need $125m to feel secure...you are secure precisely because your journey is deeply supported by a benevolent universe.

Though this study, I developed a reflection question that has been one of my most reliable mirrors, for myself and when people ask advice: how would you live your life if you knew you were going to die in five years?

As a professor teaching (mostly) young men and by being present on Twitter over the years, I have had many occasions where high-performing but burnt out men have reached out to me for advice. It sort of feels uncomfortable, as life advice is a really hard, and also really dangerous thing, to give - because what worked for me likely won't work for you. "Buy rental real estate" was great advice in 2012 and probably leads to bankruptcy in 2026. "Quit your Wall Street job making $650k" may be great advice for some people, and awful advice leading to financial distress & divorce for others. Each of our skillsets and situations are so deeply unique that advice is hard.

But I do know one thing: we are all going to die. Don't live like you aren't. Life isn't a game of making more and more money to chase this elusive feeling of security (which is almost certainly a moving goal post). True security is an internal feeling, a feeling of "I can handle anything thrown my way because the benevolent universe has my back".

When I was in my mimetic, competitive, "I have to get back in the game" mode after being let go by Citadel in 2018, my coach Justin Doyle looked at me and said "Brett, you are so stressed out, I'm more worried about you having a heart attack in front of your Bloomberg screen than finding your next PM job". It was kind of a throwaway comment, but with an amazing wife and three beautiful young sons at home, it was the right comment at the right time, and it hit me hard and led to a sharp course correct. I literally booked a 10 day trip to India the next day leaving in 2 weeks, on which I was flooded with insight on what to do next (i.e. leave NYC and build a new life in Arizona). The hedge fund headhunters who saw fresh meat and an easy placement were apoplectic. "Build a vocation that doesn't feel like work, that you could do for the next 20+ years" was his next advice, and he helped me do precisely that.

These days, when people ask for my advice, I offer them the "5 year test". What would you do if you knew you were going to die in 5 years? Figure that out, then do it.

For me, it's simple. My sons are 12, 10 and 8. I want to give them the things my father couldn't give me: most critically, deep & joyful presence & unconditional acceptance. I want to spend a lot of time with them, having crazy adventures & building a deep level of love & trust.

But it's also complicated. I could never be JUST a "retired, stay at home dad", as my intellectual muscle would atrophy (which has happened at moments in my life, and is a terrifying and motivating thing for me). I love working hard to solve complicated problems with motivated, intelligent people. I deeply love my job, and this moment of time where AI is fundamentally transforming knowledge work is just incredibly exciting and invigorating to me. The process of creating things is deeply spiritual for me and it's such a delightful experience to be working on a problem and get that magical "ping" of insight that unlocks it. Reading "When Breath Becomes Air" which is the beautiful account of a brain surgeon facing death, but in his dying days loving the craft of conducting surgery was deeply resonant to me around the power of vocation & purpose. It's fine to love your work, in fact it's ideal for a life fully lived, which is anathema to the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) crowd that all seem to view their jobs as prison time.

And it's also complicated in the sense that I have a deep duty to provide & protect, and a man or woman who holds the critical mantle of head of household has a sacred responsibility to be economically viable in a world where a nice life is expensive. I've had some well-timed luck in this regard, but I always want to be anti-fragile to all scenarios, and AI certainly expands the fan of outcomes in this regard.

In sum, it's a complicated balance.

But I have learned one other thing. The courage to embrace living by this "5 year test" has a way of unlocking the support of the universe. "Jump and the net will appear" is super woo woo, but it's a real thing. I can't explain it, but it's real. It's the Neville Goddard Law of Assumption as depicted in the Indiana Jones Leap of Faith, and it's shown up in my life in so many ways (I could write for hours about spirit guides & pre-life planning & karmic balancing via reincarnation...but that's a little woo woo for the moment).

TLDR: You're going to die. You don't need $125m to feel secure. The universe has your back.

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The Magnificent Others — John Carpenter: Filmmaker and Composer

**AI is going to wreak havoc on Hollywood.**

Carpenter's blunt read on prompts, production studios, and why actors and creatives are fighting back.

Full episode: https://t.co/UchpLIkosr