svapnil

previously @whatsapp, and @instagram. interested in the changing world and trying to do things that are hard

[Finn Hulse @finn_hulse]

in undergrad i had this fantastic advisor (feng fu 🐐) who i sorely disappointed by never actually following through on my thesis

that thesis unironically would've been: a game theory analysis of the optimal price action for rugging memecoins, based on simple assumptions. hear me out though

it was not to rug them myself (i hate extraction), but just for the sake of the math

but i changed my mind after interning at SIG because we were beaten over the head nonstop about how past price action has zero predictive power. "the price is a martingale whose future time/dividend-adjusted mean is squarely equal to the fair value at this very instant and nothing else"

so i walked away from the memecoin idea

why do i bring this up though? because years later i found out that "painting the charts" ABSOLUTELY is, or at least was, a thing in memecoins. it doesn't take very stretched assumptions about human behavior to cross a threshold where the extractable value is high

hilariously though, the market has gotten much more efficient. it's harder to extract from pure price action. even a team of master market makers would have trouble dropping a no-name coin and pulling around the bid/ask in a way that would absorb substantial $ from emotional trenchers

however, next to none of these learnings have penetrated the VC space.

these guys are basically the gods of getting rugged. they will latch onto the most contrived, frauded growth numbers or needlessly assume exponential growth when it's practically sublinear. (i'll never forget founders fund "doubling down" on icon a month after its $9m seed and subsequent marketing frenzy, and they're one of the firms i respect the most...)

now historical revenue is obviously different than historical asset price, because it's often reasonable to expect that factors driving previous growth will continue (thus allowing you to stare at past revenue and project that it will go "up," which is not always the case with a rising asset price). but my point is that without deep diligence, it's also very, very hard to disprove the null hypothesis that the "growth" is vacuous/high-churn/unsustainable

at the end of the day, only two categories of factors really justify the "exponential" assumption of growth: the product is so good that users spread the word (which is a genuinely exponential process) or some other stabilizing forces besides k-factor keep LTV/CAC at a sustainably favorable level (very hard to prove until scale is achieved, even 5M ARR is too low imo)

in most cases, a VC at that stage should be investigating whether customers are pulling in other customers

instead they salivate over imaginary hockeysticks

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@rememberlenny When I was playing startup founder around gpt 4 i remember finding a dev based in Iraq that was reselling highly subsidized tokens via API and it turned out he was skimming off stolen API keys

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@catboosted This whole thread is a stupid conspiracy. There is no way Anthropic is training on company slack data. They are simply creating new UIs for people to spend tokens

[Blake Robbins @blakeir]

"...if it is your life's work, why would you be in a hurry?"

Amen.

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@adithya_balaji What’s the message here? That Nike is by far the popular brand and if you’re not wearing one you’re missing out?

[Sam Denty @samdenty]

I got haptic sliders working on the web 🎊

✅ works on iOS 26.5 & (27 dev beta) even after Apple shipped a patch removing this feature

.. drumroll 🥁... IT ALSO works on macOS's force-touch trackpad

📳➡️ Try it (safari): https://t.co/uKyGF52oOl

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The problem with the "if it works who cares what the code looks like" mindset for agentic work is that it assumes the agent has a perfect understanding of "works." Realistically, things are underspecified, agents make bad assumptions, etc.

To be fair, agents are pretty good at unit test coverage. They're pretty bad at designing human experiences (API, CLI flags, etc.), especially cohesive ones for future roadmap plans they may not have visibility into (unless your backlog is perfect and vision fully laid out, which I doubt). They're bad at knowing where performance matters and what type (CPU vs memory tradeoffs). They're bad at where compatibility matters and where it doesn't (and tend to err on the side of preserving it without further guidance). Etc.

Unless you have this ALL specified, you can't possibly claim "it works" without taking a look and thinking about it.

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@samdenty So cool! Nice work?

Do you think apple will move to disable this aswell?

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

I miss talking to Fable

[Dylan Field @zoink]

It's Sunday June 12th, 2016 and the world is mourning the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Trump, who recently clinched the Republican Party nomination, posts on Twitter that Obama should leave office over the shooting.

You walk to a nearby cafe thinking about the possible implications of Move 37 (played a few months prior) and how neat the SpaceX reusable rockets are.

On the way, a mysterious gentleman pulls a newspaper out of his cloak and hands it to you. It's dated June 12th, 2026.

Top Headlines:
- Elon Musk Becomes World's First Trillionaire as SpaceX IPO's
- Department of War Publishes Third Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files
- Citing Safety Concerns, Trump Administration Places Anthropic's New 10T Parameter AI Models Under Export Control

Huh? Still holding the newspaper, you look up... but the mysterious gentleman has already vanished. You look down... the headlines are also gone. Sipping your coffee, you think to yourself "Wow, these art students sure are are getting stranger and strfr!"

Before heading home, you find yourself checking the price of BTC... honestly, $600 per BTC seems pretty high. Maybe it's time to sell??

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

Socks: On ✅
Birkenstocks: Also On ✅

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@threepointone What is the new Newcastle and what is the old bengal?

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@antirez Will you be paying for the api pricing?

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@adithya_balaji @eliebakouch No way it is

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@brianonhere In the meanwhile, the increases to rent for those living without rent control will cause people to get displaced, move out, or otherwise.

With better policy it would be possible to keep rents stable AND lower then, so shame the hikes have to happen first.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@chowtato Thank you Cato 🙏🏾

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@adithya_balaji @tenobrus Gas fees are like $20 per transaction and finality is insanely slow

I need a reason to be bullish ETH but it’s been cursed atm @0xUltraviolence

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@adithya_balaji @tenobrus ethereum is literally in the dumps bro RIP

[svapnil @hellosvapnil]

@utsavgoswami @bcantrill @T100_MBA Even if it's not illegal, it's immoral and puts a company at risk when something like this happens. I totally disagree with your perspective that it's somehow moral. good luck raising money with that perspective