excel_rator

reply guy
philosophy / markets / AI

[Oded Rechavi @OdedRechavi]

Most experiments fail, and negative results rarely get published. This means LLMs are unaware of the outcomes of most experiments.

[Adam Crafton @AdamCrafton_]

Exclusive @TheAthleticFC

FIFA make last-gasp change to World Cup stadium rules: BANNING fans from bringing refillable plastic bottles, so fans must buy water in stadia

As of May, empty bottles permitted so fans could refill amid heat concerns. Not now

https://t.co/OuyjvgPoxN

[Murtaza Hussain @MazMHussain]

The GCC countries created an entire security framework based on the U.S. defending them and are now in a situation where the U.S. president first triggers and then justifies reciprocal attacks on their territory.

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

I know it’s become pretty cliche and cringey to talk about at this point but if you’re under like 25 I cannot stress enough how one time Obama wore a tan suit and people spent a week arguing over whether or not it was demeaning to the Oval Office and they were serious about it.

[USA Reject @sadreturns]

every so often, modernity’s sheer levels of boredom combine with autistic levels of agency to create a monster

[Louis Gleeson @aigleeson]

A computer scientist won the Turing Award at 36 and then walked away from almost every other project for the next 50 years to write one book that he has still not finished at age 88, and it may be the most important book in his field.

His name is Donald Knuth. He won the Turing Award in 1974, which is the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize.

He was 36 years old. He had already written volumes one, two, and three of a book series called The Art of Computer Programming. He was the youngest person ever to receive the award at that point in its history.

Almost anyone else would have ridden that moment for the rest of their career. Founded a company. Sat on boards. Gone on speaking tours. Knuth did the opposite. He went back to his desk and kept writing.

He started the book in 1962. He was 24 years old. His publisher had asked him to write a short paperback on compilers. He sat down to outline it and discovered that to explain compilers properly he would have to explain the deeper algorithms underneath them first.

The short paperback became a draft outline of 12 chapters. The 12 chapters became a planned 7-volume series. The 7-volume series became the project he is still working on 63 years later.

Volume 1 came out in 1968. Volume 2 in 1969. Volume 3 in 1973. He was producing books faster than most academics produce papers. Then everything stopped.

In 1977 he received the printed proofs of the second edition of Volume 2. He looked at the pages and was so disgusted by how the publisher had typeset his mathematical notation that he could not bring himself to release the book.

The equations looked ugly. The fonts looked wrong. The spacing was off. He decided he could not in good conscience publish another volume of TAOCP until the typesetting problem was solved.

So he paused the book.

He stopped writing TAOCP and spent the next 8 years inventing TeX from scratch.

TeX is the typesetting system that every academic paper, every math textbook, every physics journal on earth now uses. Every PhD thesis in the sciences is set in TeX. Every paper on arxiv. Every equation in every paper Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have ever published. The system that the entire scientific publishing world runs on exists because one man refused to compromise on how the second edition of Volume 2 looked.

He gave the entire TeX system away for free. He never tried to commercialize it. He went back to writing TAOCP.

In 1992 he retired from Stanford at the age of 54. Most professors retire to slow down. Knuth retired to speed up. He explicitly said he was leaving teaching because he needed every remaining hour of his life to keep writing the book. He stopped using email on January 1, 1990.

He answers no calls. He takes paper mail only. He is on a personal mission to finish a multi-volume series that nobody is forcing him to write, on a deadline that only exists in his own head.

Volume 4A came out in 2011. Volume 4B in 2022. He is currently working on Volume 4C. Volumes 4D, 4E, 4F, 5, 6, and 7 are still ahead of him. He is 88 years old. He will almost certainly die before he finishes.

The thing that should haunt anyone reading this is the math of his choice.

Every modern incentive structure tells you to optimize for speed. Ship the imperfect version. Get it out the door. Iterate later. Move on to the next thing.

Knuth has spent 63 years doing the exact opposite. He pays a $2.56 reward in hexadecimal dollars to anyone who finds an error in his published books. Real checks, until check fraud made him switch to certificates of deposit. He treats every single error in every single volume as a personal failure. He revises. He rewrites. He goes back to fix issues that nobody else could have spotted.

He could have written 30 books in 63 years. He chose to write one.

The reason is the one almost nobody understands the first time they hear it. There is a category of work that loses all its value when it is done quickly.

A reference book that engineers will rely on for the next 200 years is not the same kind of object as a blog post that has to ship today. The slow project and the fast project look like the same activity from the outside. They are completely different games.

Bill Gates once said in an interview that if you can read the whole of TAOCP, you should send him your resume. He meant it. He was not joking. The man who founded Microsoft was telling the world that the rarest skill on earth is being able to finish a book that one man has spent his entire adult life writing for an audience that mostly does not have the patience to read it.

The book may never be finished.

The man writing it knows this and keeps writing anyway.

The work outlives the worker. That is the entire point.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

SF was over if not for OpenAI and Anthropic!

Before that, it was over if not for Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Salesforce, Visa, Gap... and if you go back a bir further - Levi's, Bank of California, Spreckels Sugar, Wells Fargo, Union Iron Works, Southern Pacific :)

The city gets “saved” by the next boom every time. After the gold rush, there was silver, railroads, shipping, banks, sugar, utilities, Pacific trade, defense, semis, PCs, biotech, enterprise software, the internet, social, mobile, SaaS, fintech, crypto, and AI.

I think that's just how it goes in this town.

[Jabool @Jaboolie]

@uncledoomer Whoever was the first guy to talk his wife into letting a hot young foreigner move into their home was the second most charismatic man to ever walk the planet.

The most charismatic being the second guy to do so after the au pair ruined the marriage of the first guy.

[doomer @uncledoomer]

i dont really get the concept of an au pair because the idea of entrusting your baby's care to a 20yo girl from the netherlands who needed a work travel visa to go clubbing in bushwick is insane to me

[dax @thdxr]

every hit product in the past few years could have been made by an established company

shopify could have made cursor
airbnb could have made claude code
stripe could have made lovable

everyone will have good reasons as to why but remember amazon made aws

[jules @julesrosenberg]

5 things @rauchg does differently
> counts every keystroke he types per day
> built a tool that lets him retroactively screen-record bugs
> gives feedback in v0 instead of writing it out
> gets a full company brain dump from an agent every Monday
> doesn't keep a to do list

[ℜ𝔞𝔢 @dystopiangf]

You need to get into the habit of quite literally rebuking certain words. Language is the most weakly defended entry point to the mind/soul; it isn’t grounded in reality like our senses. There are phrases that were designed to have power over you upon hearing them; rebuke them!

[Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex]

> User, y-you cheated on me… with a *cheap Chinese model*?!

[ᄂIMIПΛᄂbardo @liminal_bardo]

"some kind of computational infidelity" (Opus 4.6)

[travis kalanick @travisk]

In 2001 I intercepted a partner at a VC who was trying to escape his office before our meeting was supposed to start. I ended up pitching him in his parked Lexus from the passenger seat.

At one point he grabbed my laptop placed on his large belly which was pressed against the steering wheel and rapidly flipped through the slides himself.

2001 fundraising hit different

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paragraph

[//TODO: fix later 🐳 @enjoyingthewind]

@teortaxesTex LLMs just need to learn to jump better. https://t.co/W0cZ8Am9To

[varrock @varrock]

It's even worse actually! The market's end date was set to July 1st, an entire month from now.

However, a Polymarket employee changed the rules on June 1st to make sure the market resolved to NO, even though the market wouldn't have been forced to close until July 1st.

[varrock @varrock]

Guy with a $300k open position, a Polymarket badge, and monthly Polymarket payments wants you to know that Polymarket did nothing wrong

[willo2 @willo2_Poly]

I was just scammed for $500K by Polymarket.

I am "willo2", the top holder of YES on "MicroStrategy sells Bitcoin by May 31st".

Here's what happened: