Ross Webster

Software guy (founder at INTJ.

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

Perhaps my deepest drive is that I am against closure, against the end of the conversation.

A very prominent early EA/futurist privately pitched me his ideal vision of the future, one of total abundance but zero real power for individuals, watched over by an omnipotent AI demigod, and I recoiled. I asked what he would do if I tried to cobble together my own competing ASI and his response was to (literally) slam his hand down on the table: crush it. I asked if I could be sent on a generation ship elsewhere to have my freedom outside their borg, and he said the risk that I would one day come back and attack them was too great.

I reject even an optimal prison.

For the same reason, I oppose any version of rationalism more specific than “trying to know the truth” which is the motte they always retreat to, because they foreclose on possible fundamentally new methods of knowing truth.

I am, above all else, a proponent of openness, of continuing the grand conversation. I am a proponent of the great blooming, and against anything that tries to shackle it.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

What’s terrifying about this clip isn’t their ideals…these sweet gals’ hearts are certainly in the right place. What’s terrifying is they have the civic, political, and economic literacy of a 9 year old. When a charlatan like Abdul comes along with the Jr High class president schtick of “no more homework and the vending machines are all free!”, they fall for it.

I don’t know how you get to that age with ZERO understanding of supply chains, manufacturing, labor costs…but a lot of folks think that medicine and MRIs and hospitals just materialize out of thin air like unicorn farts. They’ve never built anything in their lives, so they have no concept of how things function…things are just…there. They think milk comes from the store. They think rich people don’t pay taxes, even though the top 1% fund 40% of government with their taxes already, and yet 40% of all Americans contribute ZERO federal income tax at all. These people don’t understand that you could tax the wealthy at 100% and it would only fund the government for 120 days. Then you’re screwed.

Too many Americans simply have zero understanding of how anything works, and even though they’re living in the easiest times in human history, they think things are “terrible out there”. These commie scammers roll through and promise them things that sound great, but aren’t possible in reality, and have devastating consequences if tried…but because they don’t know anything, they fall for it. Sadly, so many of our politicians and their advisors are such atrocious communicators, there’s like zero countervailing narrative to push back on the commie gobbledygook, so we are gonna have to learn the hard way. Guys…we just had a sample of socialism: Covid. We all got universal basic income, and it ended up tripling our costs and they’ll never go down. Ever. That one brief little experiment in command and control government will haunt us the rest of our lives. Bleak stuff, man.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

There is no liberal democratic solution to the fact that a majority of the voting public demands things which are mathematically impossible to provide.

People in France want nigh unlimited funding for everything ranging from Boomer communism to the world’s most lavish welfare state, and no one in electoral politics dares to tell them that all of their demands are physically impossible to meet because courageous politicians are also stupid politicians.

There is no escape. No one can do what must be done because the rewards are too great for those who counter-signal against doing the right thing.

So long as political legitimacy rests upon democratic consent, political reality will tend towards insolvency.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Humans are status seeking monkeys. We can't help ourselves. We are wired neurologically, biochemically and culturally to sacrifice whatever necessary to achieve relative rank. This is why societal role models are so important: they create the status games society plays.

[Naval @naval]

When you look back, you’ll wish you’d just done the long-term version of everything.

[Ross Webster @enbrightened]

Agree.

[rygo6 @_rygo6]

I still believe a correct framing on LLM usage is that they can get you 80% of the way upfront, but that last 20% starts to become impossible to overcome. The proper way to use an LLM is to do the difficult manual 20% upfront. Once you have some decent structure, decent API surface area, decent data structures laid out, decent base libraries. Then you can largely prompt your way through the last 80%. While the first 20% which you did manually, intentionally and fully comprehend. That 20% essentially becomes part of your development harness, almost a prompt itself. Where you can steer its overall architecture, or data design, or other critical pieces by keeping a grip on that first manually done 20%.

Something real concerning with this. Knowing what to do in that first 20% requires advanced knowledge of the problem domain you are going to deal with. It is a staff or principal level engineer domain. Which most simply can't do.

Which means most people are going to run the gauntlet heavily relying on prompts, and are going to cover some incredibly impressive ground very quickly. Because 80% of the way is quite a long ways there. It looks like it could almost be done. But then they will get stuck in that last 20% and will never be able to make it perfectly polished. Nor perfectly sable. Nor remove all the odd quirks. Nor overcome the last pieces of performance or memory issues. It will basically hit a plateau where they lose control of it. Or it becomes unwieldy to take it in a new complex direction, or add some novel complex functionality to it. It will be very hard to tell from the outside if any given company or project is aimed at getting stuck in that last 20%. As they could appear to be kicking some major butt in that first 80%. But then it will reach a plateau where they can no longer do anything substantial without breaking something else, or seem unable to fix every little quirk or issue. A lot of companies will probably get stuck here. With dozens of very impressive things 80% of the way, but seem unable to get over the last final 20% to really perfect it and polish it.

[Andrew Torba @BasedTorba]

I am a nationalist, not a dogmatic capitalist. I support economic liberty only to the extent that it fosters the flourishing of our people. The market exists for the nation, not the nation for the market. If commerce degenerates into an oligarchy that plunders the commonwealth then the civil magistrate must bear the sword, defend the people, and restore order.

[Naval @naval]

Don’t send me the report, just send me the prompt.

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

Those of us bitterly opposed to communism fall into two different groups.

A) Those who argue that it must be abandoned because it has show us that it doesn’t work.

B) Those of us that are so bitterly opposed to collectivism applied to dissenting individuals that we are relieved that it *cannot* work. A happy accident. Those who don’t care if it *could* be made to work: we’d continue to fight it. Working or not working is irrelevant. It’s just bad. Period. The end.

If Communism could actually be shown to deliver stable high levels of growth and innovation, broadly distributed, with low inequality,
I believe I would still fight it to my dying breath.

My opposition to communism has little to nothing to do with the fact that it doesn’t work as an economic system. So, it’s merely a relief that it doesn’t work. A convenience for its opposition.

Communism and collectivism are intrinsically soul killing for people who are hyper-individualistic . So let’s stop hiding behind the fact that they don’t work as economic or governance systems.

Some of us who aren’t the biggest fans of naked capitalism red of tooth and claw, hate communism not because we think capitalism is intrinsically fair. It isn’t. We oppose it because communism hunts the individual.

For us, It’s not communism vs capitalism. That is a businessman’s argument. Instead, it’s communism vs individualism for me. Show me a system that fights harder to let a dissenting individual thrive more than brutal market capitalism (which also barely works), and I am all ears.

Not everything is a market after all.

[Ross Webster @enbrightened]

This is one of the reasons startups win against corporations. Founders + small teams are forced to be multi-disciplinary whole-system experts.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

Every major engineering failure of the last 50 years had one common cause:

Nobody was responsible for the whole system.

The structural team knew their part. The software team knew theirs. Nobody owned the interface.

We train engineers to go deep in one discipline.
We don't train them to see across all of them.

Is that an education problem or a management problem?

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

If my neighbour increases the productivity of their vegetable garden and doubles their tomato crop, this does not subtract from the number of tomatoes I was able to produce in *my* vegetable garden. You are now more economically literate than all of leftist Twitter.

[Naval Podcast @navalpodcast]

“A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.”

— @naval

[Ross Webster @enbrightened]

@dwazagul @grieben0 @Devon_Eriksen_ I didn't finish Infinite Jest when I gave it a go last decade, but 100% agree, that particular chapter stood out to me, and the hope for more like it was the one thing that tempted me to keep slogging.

I recommend the opening chapter of Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson.

[Naval @naval]

Truth, love, and beauty are all pursued for their own sake, even if they make us worse off.

[Ross Webster @enbrightened]

@foundmyfitness After years of kidney stones (I'm high risk due to congenital anatomy issues), it was eventually diagnosed that vitamin D supplementation played a big part in my urine chemistry issues. Also low magnesium/potassium, which in supplement form caused similar issues. So be careful.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Upon receiving the award, he quit and spent the rest of his life writing devastating critiques of the educational system he had mastered.

Gatto argued that regardless of the official curriculum, schools actually teach seven hidden lessons. The first is confusion. Students learn disconnected facts across dozens of subjects with no integration or meaning. The second is class position. Students learn their place in the social hierarchy. The third is indifference. Students learn that nothing is worth finishing because the bell always rings. The fourth is emotional dependency. Students learn to surrender their will to a chain of command. The fifth is intellectual dependency. Students learn to wait for experts to tell them what to think. The sixth is provisional self-esteem. Students learn that their worth depends on expert evaluation. The seventh is that they are always being watched and have no privacy.

These lessons, Gatto argued, are the actual function of schooling. The explicit curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost incidental. The real purpose is to produce passive, dependent, compliant citizens who wait for authorities to tell them what to do and think.

Trad schooling amounts to thirteen years of training in being passive and dependent.

I have seen this play out with hundreds of students. When I created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, about half the students came up through Montessori elementary and about half came from public schools. When we opened, the Montessori kids immediately began doing their work, taking initiative, choosing what to tackle first. The public school students were lost. They would stare at their desks until we walked over and helped them plan their morning. It took at least a semester, sometimes a full year, before they could function in an environment that asked them to direct their own learning.

These were not less intelligent children. They had simply been trained differently. For years, someone else had made all the decisions about what they would do, when they would do it, and how they would do it. When that structure was removed, they did not know how to operate.

Agency is natural to children unless we train it out of them.

When I coach parents on evaluating their children's education, I tell them to ignore grades entirely. The question is whether their children are taking initiative, being responsible, and becoming empowered moral beings. If a child is getting straight A's but has no initiative and no sense of personal responsibility, that child is being damaged by their education regardless of how it looks on paper.

[Ross Webster @enbrightened]

So @Cloudflare is "required by ICANN" to send me junk on behalf of a spammer, with no way for me to unsubscribe or block? Hmm.

[Handre @Handre]

In 1959, Fidel Castro promised to redistribute Cuba's wealth and create equality for all. Within a decade, the island that once exported sugar and cigars to the world couldn't even keep its own lights on. The wealthy fled, but instead of their riches trickling down to the poor, everyone just became equally poor together.

The revolucionarios had calculated that seizing the means of production would mean seizing prosperity itself. What they discovered instead was that prosperity isn't sitting in some vault waiting to be redistributed—it's created daily by millions of voluntary exchanges, investments, and entrepreneurial risks. When you abolish those mechanisms, you don't redistribute wealth; you redistribute poverty.

Today's politicians make the same mathematical error Castro did: they see inequality and assume it represents a fixed pie that just needs better slicing. They never ask why some pies grow while others shrink, or why the countries promising equality most loudly seem to deliver scarcity most efficiently.

The cruel irony is that the only truly "equal" outcome socialism reliably produces is making everyone equally worse off than they started.

[Ross Webster @enbrightened]

@naval Vibe coded software will be un-investable as well, for the same reasons.

A popular YouTuber with a simple success formula has always been easily reproducible. Yet they stay on top.

Yes, software is now cheap. But users, channels, trust, and brand are still expensive.

[Rich 🐺 @heywildrich]

I knew this guy who ran a pretty large pizza chain. Worth tens of millions of dollars.

One day I saw him walk into one of his pizza stores, they were short staffed, he literally went in the back, in his suit, and started making dough and pizzas to help out until other employees got there.

He knew every detail of the business. He could repair any of the equipment. He could do any job in the whole place.

At a certain point in society people like you came to accept that management was just about spreadsheets and useless meetings and email chains. And I think that's part of why it's all so abysmal and low quality now.

"Car guys" used to run car companies, now it's accountants. This is true of all industries. Accountants suck at everything, sometimes even accounting.

Every justification people have for this unqualified clown is another example of why the quality of everything has fallen off a cliff.

My pizza guy knew when the pizza was made right. Would this CEO even know a good game if it smashed her over the head? Doubtful. Would the manager who doesn't know about cooking temps make for a good boss to the chefs, servers, and line cooks? No. Would somebody who has no idea how cars work be able to explain anything to a customer or supplier or really anybody they worked with daily? Of course not. The idea that you don't need to understand the business to run the business is plainly absurd. Would you hire a family law attorney to negotiate a multi-million dollar business deal in an industry they don't understand at all? I hope not. I've seen it happen, didn't go well for the client.

You people have no common sense or business experience and frankly need placed into some sort of work camps to make you useful to society.