FASTFORWARDIST

connecting dots

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@APompliano the true effective altruist

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

It is a really good time to store up a few of your hardest, most valuable, and most unusual ideas - whether for work, hobbies, or a new venture.

Thanks to AI, really good & unique ideas are getting extremely cheap to implement, but not necessarily easier to find. Big opportunity

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

Of all human qualities, intelligence is relatively common. Much rarer are the character traits that make intelligence useful: curiosity, humility, and agency.

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@danrobinson ai cannot break out of the frame

true discoveries break the 4th wall

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@tszzl another bitter lesson

[Sven @SvenSchnieders]

In the age of AI, the reader struggles because the writer doesn't have to.

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@AaronBergman18 us system creates higher variance hence more outliers

[Klaas @forgebitz]

everybody wants to build

nobody wants to maintain

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@signulll with llms the leverage you get from 5-min preparations has never been higher.

you can be anything within 5 mins

llms are the cure to impostor syndrome

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

AI accelerates the first mover’s disadvantage.

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@his_eminence_j but how do u prove

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@kylegawley caring more is the last competitive advantage

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@gerstenzang this is the opportunity for @figma

macro delegate, micro steer

make it happen @zoink

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@ben_j_todd @DKThomp token costs too high to justify

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

The highest-value human work in the AI era will be in domains with sparse reward signals. Internalize this, or watch your value erode over the next decade.

Math, programming, rote memorization, data science, all fucked. The classic “smart nerd” jobs are exactly where AI is strongest, because the feedback loops are dense. You can check the answer. You can run the test. That means AI can improve quickly, and humans will rapidly fall behind.

Your advantage as a human is in messy domains.

Taste. Judgment. Negotiation. Risk-taking. Politics. Sales. Science at the frontier. Anything you can only really learn by doing. Cross-disciplinary stuff.

The valuable domains will be the ones guarded by secrets, tacit knowledge, weak labels, long feedback cycles, and ambiguous outcomes. Places where the training data is scarce, the ground truth is disputed, and it's impossible to explain why something is good.

AI will still enter these domains. But we will be slower to trust it unsupervised there, because it will be harder to tell when it is right, harder to prove when it is wrong, and difficult to construct secure sandboxes. The stakes will be too high to YOLO it.

I find myself saying this over and over again to young people today: the future does not belong to people who are able to get good grades on tests. It belongs to people who can operate under uncertainty, in domains where correctness is hard to define.

Those domains will become the thin waist of the economy: as productivity everywhere else accelerates, the humans who excel there will become our economic Strait of Hormuz. The best humans in these domains will demand an enormous cut of the growing economic pie.

Your imperative going forward is to make sure you're one of these people.

(Or become an electrician. That probably works too.)

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@atmoio macro delegate, micro steer

the only way to work w ai

[Mo @atmoio]

As the need for precision goes up, the utility of AI goes down.

[signüll @signulll]

the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.

like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.

the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.

that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.

you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.

this all leads to some interesting questions:

- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.

the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.

we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.

the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.

[signüll @signulll]

it genuinely feels like modern life has become a bandwidth trap.

the amount available to perceive, read, respond to, maintain, understand, optimize, archive, remember, compare, desire, fear, & keep up with is just grotesquely higher than what a human day can metabolize.

even worse the world now presents itself as if it is all equally adjacent to you. every article, every take, every message, every possibility, every person, every catastrophe, & every opportunity. your brain interprets this as “maybe i should be engaging with all of it.”

but you can’t. nobody can. not even the freaks. the good news is that ai is the best mechanic to parse signal from the noise, & that’s what we are building.

[FASTFORWARDIST @fastforwardist]

@andrewchen its both. raising the floor and the ceiling, compressing the middle