Merlow

vibe coding

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

https://t.co/dpc9MAVtEZ

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

Arthur C. Clarke predicted search engines, email, and video calls in 1 interview from 1976. It runs 5 minutes. It has fewer views than a keyboard unboxing.

The setting is an AT&T-MIT conference. Color TV was the frontier. Email barely existed.

He describes a home console with a screen and keyboard where you "talk to the computer and get information from it." Messages friends read whenever they want. Devices where "they're going to see us, and we're going to see them."

That's Google, your inbox, and every video call you took this week, spoken calmly into a 1976 lens by a man in a suit.

He'd done it before. In 1945 he proposed the communications satellite, 12 years before anything orbited. He extrapolated from physics, not from products.

Watch all 5 minutes. Count how many of your daily tools he names before they had names.

A tech lead I know sent it to his whole team with 1 line: this is what conviction sounds like.

You're 50 years late. The interview is still free.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

https://t.co/dpc9MAVtEZ

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@dontstopmirage amazing film about how staff work, thanks for sharing!

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

The operating system inside your phone, your server, and the Mac you're reading this on was built by 2 men who wanted to play a game. A 1982 film shows them explaining it. Almost nobody watches it.

The system is UNIX. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs, late 1960s.

The origin is almost insulting. Thompson wanted to run a game called Space Travel on a spare machine. To do it he wrote a file system, a shell, and the bones of an OS. Ritchie built a language to write it in. That language was C.

Everything descends from this. Linux, macOS, Android, every server that served you this post. All of it is UNIX and C wearing new clothes.

Ritchie on camera, verbatim: "UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."

Watch the middle, where they explain small tools that each do 1 job and pipe into each other. Your entire terminal workflow is that idea, unchanged since 1982.

Everyone's shipping frameworks with 400 dependencies. 2 guys built the world on the opposite bet.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@themrgreenn exactly, this about UNIX

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

The operating system inside your phone, your server, and the Mac you're reading this on was built by 2 men who wanted to play a game. A 1982 film shows them explaining it. Almost nobody watches it.

The system is UNIX. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs, late 1960s.

The origin is almost insulting. Thompson wanted to run a game called Space Travel on a spare machine. To do it he wrote a file system, a shell, and the bones of an OS. Ritchie built a language to write it in. That language was C.

Everything descends from this. Linux, macOS, Android, every server that served you this post. All of it is UNIX and C wearing new clothes.

Ritchie on camera, verbatim: "UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."

Watch the middle, where they explain small tools that each do 1 job and pipe into each other. Your entire terminal workflow is that idea, unchanged since 1982.

Everyone's shipping frameworks with 400 dependencies. 2 guys built the world on the opposite bet.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

https://t.co/dpc9MAVtEZ

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@thelichhh I'm trying my best brother

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

https://t.co/dpc9MAVtEZ

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

The most productive mathematician in history owned nothing. No house, no job, no bank account. Everything he had fit in 1 suitcase. A 1993 documentary filmed the last years of his life.

"N Is a Number." The man is Paul Erdős.

The numbers read like a typo. Around 1,500 published papers, more than anyone in history. Over 500 co-authors. 19-hour working days into his 80s.

His system was brutal and simple. He showed up at a mathematician's door, announced "my brain is open," moved in, and worked until the host collapsed. Then flew to the next door.

He gave money away as fast as it arrived. And he put cash bounties on open problems: $25 to $10,000, depending on difficulty. Some are still unsolved. The prizes are still payable today. You can literally earn money by solving a problem a dead man posted.

Mathematicians measure closeness to him with the Erdős number. Having a low one is a flex in 2026.

Watch him in the film: 1 suitcase, 2 half-empty bags, no keys.

Everyone's optimizing their setup. He deleted his entire life except the work.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@thelichhh I'm very glad

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

The most productive mathematician in history owned nothing. No house, no job, no bank account. Everything he had fit in 1 suitcase. A 1993 documentary filmed the last years of his life.

"N Is a Number." The man is Paul Erdős.

The numbers read like a typo. Around 1,500 published papers, more than anyone in history. Over 500 co-authors. 19-hour working days into his 80s.

His system was brutal and simple. He showed up at a mathematician's door, announced "my brain is open," moved in, and worked until the host collapsed. Then flew to the next door.

He gave money away as fast as it arrived. And he put cash bounties on open problems: $25 to $10,000, depending on difficulty. Some are still unsolved. The prizes are still payable today. You can literally earn money by solving a problem a dead man posted.

Mathematicians measure closeness to him with the Erdős number. Having a low one is a flex in 2026.

Watch him in the film: 1 suitcase, 2 half-empty bags, no keys.

Everyone's optimizing their setup. He deleted his entire life except the work.

[the lich @thelichhh]

https://t.co/aqsY18NvVz

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

Richard Feynman stood at the same Cornell blackboard in 1964 and explained the word every AI lab minimizes in 2026: entropy. The BBC filmed it. Almost nobody watches it.

Lecture 5. "The Distinction of Past and Future."

The question sounds childish: why does time run one way. The answer is the exact quantity inside the cross-entropy loss every training run on Earth minimizes tonight.

He does it with a glass of water and blue ink. Mixing is easy. Unmixing never happens. Order falls into disorder, and that 1-way fall is what "past" means.

Watch the middle section. He explains why you remember yesterday and not tomorrow with counting arguments a 12-year-old can follow.

No equations for the first 20 minutes. 1 piece of chalk.

Shannon borrowed the word from physics in 1948 for the paper every LLM stands on. Feynman shows what it meant before it became a number on a dashboard.

You minimize entropy for a living. He explains it for free.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@xwhynoted Exactly, and that's why I looked this up for you

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

Richard Feynman stood at the same Cornell blackboard in 1964 and explained the word every AI lab minimizes in 2026: entropy. The BBC filmed it. Almost nobody watches it.

Lecture 5. "The Distinction of Past and Future."

The question sounds childish: why does time run one way. The answer is the exact quantity inside the cross-entropy loss every training run on Earth minimizes tonight.

He does it with a glass of water and blue ink. Mixing is easy. Unmixing never happens. Order falls into disorder, and that 1-way fall is what "past" means.

Watch the middle section. He explains why you remember yesterday and not tomorrow with counting arguments a 12-year-old can follow.

No equations for the first 20 minutes. 1 piece of chalk.

Shannon borrowed the word from physics in 1948 for the paper every LLM stands on. Feynman shows what it meant before it became a number on a dashboard.

You minimize entropy for a living. He explains it for free.

[the lich @thelichhh]

https://t.co/aqsY18NvVz

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@0xMoysei That makes me very happy, my friend

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@thelichhh Thank you. I analyzed it specifically and did my best for you.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

Richard Feynman stood at a Cornell blackboard in 1964 and explained the problem every AI lab is fighting in 2026. The BBC filmed it. Almost nobody watches it.

The lecture is about why nature only answers in mathematics. Every team forcing language models to reason is hitting the wall he mapped 62 years ago.

He was 46. The Nobel Prize came 11 months later. The footage survived on film reels and now sits free on YouTube with fewer views than a keyboard unboxing.

Watch the blackboard section near the middle. He takes 1 of Kepler's laws and rebuilds it from nothing, with notation a 12-year-old can follow.

No slides. No jargon. 1 piece of chalk.

An ML engineer I know paused it 4 times and made his whole team watch it before standup.

You're 62 years late. The lecture is still free.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

@0xMoysei Thank you, I tried to find something useful.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

Richard Feynman stood at a Cornell blackboard in 1964 and explained the problem every AI lab is fighting in 2026. The BBC filmed it. Almost nobody watches it.

The lecture is about why nature only answers in mathematics. Every team forcing language models to reason is hitting the wall he mapped 62 years ago.

He was 46. The Nobel Prize came 11 months later. The footage survived on film reels and now sits free on YouTube with fewer views than a keyboard unboxing.

Watch the blackboard section near the middle. He takes 1 of Kepler's laws and rebuilds it from nothing, with notation a 12-year-old can follow.

No slides. No jargon. 1 piece of chalk.

An ML engineer I know paused it 4 times and made his whole team watch it before standup.

You're 62 years late. The lecture is still free.

[the lich @thelichhh]

https://t.co/aqsY18NvVz

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

He didn't believe the Kimi K3 hype. So he ran it against Claude Fable 5 on camera.

Same prompts, both models, 12 minutes, results raw on screen. No cherry-picking, nowhere to hide.

The context makes it spicy: Moonshot itself admits K3 trails Fable 5 overall while posting wins on coding benchmarks. 2.8 trillion parameters against the model everyone pays for.

Benchmarks are marketing until somebody runs them at home. This is somebody running them at home.

Watch the middle section where the outputs go up side by side. The gap is visible before he says a word.

The verdict lands in the last minute. No spoilers.

Leaderboards don't write code. Models do.