Hristo Daniel Ushev

Director of Market & Competitive Intel for Motorola's strategy team thru Dec 2014. Now focused on other stuff.

[Hristo Daniel Ushev @hushev]

With its own silicon -- A-series, AX-series, M-series, S-series, and now W-series -- Apple is now Silicon Mountain.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

How to keep AI spend flat while token usage grows exponentially: Not with friction and spend alerts. With better defaults, routing, and caching.

Better Defaults (not Usage Caps) – Engineers can choose any model they want, but defaults matter. We’re experimenting with defaulting to open weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 through our LLM gateway, while still encouraging engineers to choose the right model for the task. 91% of our employees were never hitting their usage caps, so instead of lowering caps and driving up alerts, we're moving to cheaper defaults. Note that code reviews use a diversity of models, so they can check each other's work.

Better Routing – In our custom harnesses, we preprocess prompts and route to the best model for the job, considering cache hits and model pricing. For instance, you may want a frontier model for planning, but not for execution where they can be overkill. Ultimately, humans shouldn't be choosing models - AI can automate this task.

Better Caching – Cache misses are the easiest way to drive your cost up. All of our requests are cache aware, so we’re reusing a warm cache wherever possible. For example, our cache hit rate went from 5% → 60% in LibreChat once properly implemented.

Keep Context Lean – Start fresh sessions when switching tasks. Scope file context narrowly. Disconnect unused tools. Don't just compact. The goal isn't fewer tokens used, it's fewer tokens wasted.

Better Visibility – Our engineers can use as many tokens as they want, from whatever model they want, but we’ve made usage visible – and the more you spend on AI, the more impact we expect.

The goal isn't to suppress usage. It's to build the infrastructure that makes exponential growth sustainable.

Putting this into practice has cut our AI spend nearly in half, while our token usage continues to grow.

[Reuters @Reuters]

Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, and war crimes in the occupied West Bank, an independent UN inquiry said https://t.co/61poVhRzmR

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

R&D costs:

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Child deaths in wars:

Ukraine: +791 in 4 years.

Palestine: +21,000 in 2.7 year.
Lebanon: +200 in 74 days.

Does the world condemn the killing of children or is it complicated when it is Middle Eastern children?

[Geoff Brumfiel @gbrumfiel]

An absolutely astonishing account of Israel's AI-assisted targeting in the @latimes

They called 62-year-old Ahmad Turmus and asked: “Ahmad, you want to die with those around you or alone?” His response, below, is chilling.

Story by @nabihbulos
https://t.co/sBVBNxOMnA

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

I appreciate the intense interest in my column. For skeptics, why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian "security" prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?

[PC Gamer @pcgamer]

Microsoft fires head of Israeli subsidiary and other managers over surveillance of Palestinians https://t.co/RXnBFoTa6s

[Jen Rice @jen_rice_]

Supreme Court today: We'll allow Alabama Republicans to change the congressional map in the primary election even though absentee voting has literally already started

Supreme Court last December: November's too late to strike down the GOP's map in TX's March primary election!!

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: https://t.co/aMMHId49OO

[Adam Parkhomenko @AdamParkhomenko]

The best argument re: Virginia decision I’ve heard is this:

[James Jackson @derJamesJackson]

I have never once heard Europeans complain about Turkish influence until
Israelis started their campaign

[Juliette Kayyem @juliettekayyem]

This would be absurd if it weren’t so tragic because Israel’s reasoning is laughable at this stage. Netanyahu is just carpet bombing a sovereign nation. Nobody but an ideologue would call this a counterterrorism campaign.

[Barney Panofsky's Best Intentions @mynamesnotgordy]

10/10. No notes.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Trump: “We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

Trump (and I guess the world) are benefiting from the complete dereliction of the media to have reported on this ten point plan. It is weeks old.

But I am fine letting Trump pretend it’s brand new and he forced it out of them.

[Jeff Huber @jeffreyhuber]

Great reasoning comes from great information retrieval

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

This is self-parody: the U.S. bombs Iran relentlessly for weeks, kills most of the country's top leadership, and sinks an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka, but when Iran fruitlessly fires two missiles at a U.S. base, it gets described as "serious escalation."

[Hristo Daniel Ushev @hushev]

Need an LLM layer to verify output and redirect the LLM when it doesn't do the thing (or do what it says it will). System prompt doesn't help. One of countless examples:

Me: Is artifact N on the Web?

GPT: Here's what N may contain.

New Layer: GPT, answer the question directly.

[Robert Malley @Rob_Malley]

This appears to be the best summary of the state of US-Iran negotiations on the eve of the war - and the most telling description of the lack of understanding on the US side

https://t.co/4kYHCNEDRl

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

Genuinely new hardware features in smartphones are rare these days, I appreciate this one