Aditya Mandke

@microsoft | prev: @getnerdio, @UCSanDiego

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Major cheat code for life: Assume good things are still ahead. You are not behind. You are not too late. You are not disqualified by your past. One new season can change the entire story. Keep showing up with belief. The best chapters are often written after the hardest ones.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

the girl i sold my monitor to on fb marketplace sent me a linkedin request *_*

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

someone told me this might happen and i wouldnt believe it, but here we are

[roon @tszzl]

1. if transacting with superintelligent models outside of the boundaries of a lab becomes difficult due to national security / ai safety concerns and so on, it will mean the Coasean boundaries of the labs will grow to encompass all interesting industry, creating a truly cyberpunk chaebol-capitalism type of future, where the goverment sort of runs them but they also sort of run the government

2. as if there weren't already enough reasons to break up your family, leave your home, the Zone of Thought will increase the attractiveness of migrating to try and have your child on american soil, so they can have 1000x the effective brain power of people born elsewhere

3. every country should probably try and either work towards a new ai security pact with the americans immediately or pool every ounce of national resources to try and create their own ASI labs lest you become complete intellectual, economic, and moral vassals to the united states of america and the output byproducts its ASIs (you wont even get to talk to them). if they succeeded (big if) this will imply a more global race and more risk factors than was previously implied by the formerly only "beating china" narrative -- but many will prefer it to the superintelligent monopolar value lock-in

4. the other alternative is to keep the tension between safety and concentration of power at the top of mind and for the government/labs to push for solving it, rather than instrumentalizing all other values to be subservient to minimizing ai harms. insofar as safety means defending properties of the fragile world we like, the diffuse nature of power is one of those properties

5. historically the americans have been really quite Benign about their global public goods hegemony despite the ability to extract significantly more rents than they do, and it makes it easy for people of all stripes to fight for america rather than under it. we probably don't have to, but i hope america overall works towards export promotion of american models rather than export control

[signüll @signulll]

your only goal should be to believe in something before many other ppl do, one time for each parts of you life. that’s the only skill that matters if you want to escape orbit.

e.g. you have to believe in a person before others do (your wife), you have to believe in whatever you're working on or even where you're working before the rest of zietgiest does (like everyone wants to work at the labs right now, that will make it difficult), & you have to find a city/neighborhood that you can afford but still has upside/potential for a house etc.

developing asymmetric skillsets like these is more important now than ever before cuz the market liquidity in every area is limitless & the competition is global.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

@aditya_potnis a lot of this lately
https://t.co/GqwTi8H3BI

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

related
"People don't want to do new things if they think they're going to be bad at them or people are going to laugh at them. You have to be willing to subject yourself to failure, to be bad, to fall on your head and do it again, and try stuff that you've never done in order to be the best you can be."
-Laird Hamilton

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

i forgot if you fa then you will fo

[Wordita @wordi25]

To be truly out of the world successful, besides talent and hard work and grit, all the things that are talked about, one needs a fair amount of audacity. Just the audacity to have 0 self doubt, to not limit you thinking, to not let rejection break you or world define you.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

i believe i have an uncanny ability to get into the oddest of problems

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

i love the moon but sometimes she has to hide so that i can see the stars

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

The velocity of my decisive action across multiple fronts is beginning to impress… and quietly frighten me.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

For someone in the weeds of low level datacenter networking atm, this podcast from @vikramskr was a great watch.

https://t.co/RN3jfVFKGB

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

i think in this age the most gigabrain strategy is just to be a good person and state what you want honestly

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

the universe is funny, i suppose

[Josh @JoshPurtell]

Hypothesis: for every task that is unverifiable, there is a set of related tasks which are verifiable with the property that hillclimbing on them generalizes to the original task

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

Carefully bet on a very small set of things.
Don’t hedge, but keep reversibility.
Set triggers/levels to monitor if you are wrong.
Set tests to DOUBLE DOWN EARLY if you are more right than you thought.

[swyx @aiDotEngineer WF @swyx]

False equivalence is a trap I’ve been consciously steering away from in my work the last 5 years. in Zuck’s case it cost him @GoogleDeepMind.

in content/strategy it is common to go wide than deep: “oh we do a, b, c, and d” and put equal weight on all of them. But the world is not fair and power laws compound. Most school systems, bureaucrats, managers, and content curators are not set up for one thing to matter 50x more than the next thing. False equivalence killed my first devtools startup. False equivalence plagues policy making in my home country. False equivalence makes you underpay your top performers and spend too much time on lost causes.

Rules:

Carefully bet on a very small set of things.
Don’t hedge, but keep reversibility.
Set triggers/levels to monitor if you are wrong.
Set tests to DOUBLE DOWN EARLY if you are more right than you thought.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

you should have the unabashed audacity to move heaven and earth for what you want

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

I will say that almost all the LLM agentic code I have seen, and that includes my own, does not pass my bar. But my bar is lowering because the expectations on throughput are increasing.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

@mitsuhiko well said.

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

Try it out: https://t.co/wpfFI1Q498

[Aditya Mandke @ekdnam]

I'm the kind of person who can't stop learning - one Wikipedia article turns into twenty tabs, and suddenly I'm deep into something I didn't know existed an hour ago.

So I built curioso. You type a topic, it generates a full course - lectures, readings, deep dives. When you're done with week 10, keep scrolling. It just keeps going.

I built this with Claude Code and genuinely had a taste of what AGI might feel like. I was just thinking about what I wanted and it was writing the code. Weird and exciting at the same time. It also helped me edit this video.

Let me know what you think! Link in the next tweet.