ibad ur rehman

building at orbital labs

[ibad ur rehman @ibaurr]

the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
- einstein

[tobi lutke @tobi]

I’m thinking about banning Claude code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc.

Insisting on only reading CLAUDE.md sometimes leads to split brain problems when different team members use different tools. Just unnecessary.

[Brad Flora @bradflora]

You are not the main character. Your user is the main character.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Yes

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Harvey is a great example of how American companies are building world-class specialized models: they took an open-source base (Kimi K3), post-trained it on legal data, and delivered state-of-the-art performance on legal benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of frontier models. Restrictions that kneecap open models would do nothing to stop Chinese labs from shipping the next Kimi. They would, however, cripple the ability of startups like Harvey to create high-performance, low-cost vertical models. Of course some of the closed labs would love this — it eliminates their competition.

[ibad ur rehman @ibaurr]

doing something different is what’s truly good for society, and it’s also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The greatest privilege of my life is being able to work with incredible people to create amazing products

[Naval @naval]

The people who want to censor (code, speech, money) are the bad guys.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The most important skills in Building and Deploying AI Applications. https://t.co/IyWIKLIzeM

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If you want to get into YC, don't focus on getting into YC. Focus on building stuff and understanding your users. That's what gets you into YC.

[Big Brain Business @BigBrainBizness]

Mark Zuckerberg thinks wanting to run a company is the worst possible reason to start one:

[sarah guo @saranormous]

A super smart scientist asked me last week: what's so hard about reshoring general advanced manufacturing (short of TSMC frontier precision chemistry)? Isn't the issue just labor cost? Nope.

A toy example to illustrate: We're trying to build a lot of drone motors in America right now, and falling short. It's not a labor cost issue.

The work instruction says: this magnet, this adhesive, cure at this temperature, wipe the rotor first. Any competent team can build the station and follow it.

But in week 3, motors start failing vibration testing. Some of them, mostly night shift. Also, weirdly, whenever the careful new hire is on station.

The adhesive cures differently with humidity, and the dehumidifier cycles differently at night. The new hire wipes the rotor generously, and that leaves a solvent film the adhesive doesn't like very much. Someone who has run a motor line before can figure this out in 10m. Everyone else -- struggle city.

The "fix" is two lines in the work instructions: run the dehumidifier continuously, one solvent wipe per rotor. But those lines aren't in the work instruction, and they're not in anyone's! At best the fix becomes a corrective-action report in one line's files, linked to nothing and never read.

A motor line rapidly may go from 5 to 40 stations, each with a dozen of these painful stories on the weekly as it grows. "What Shenzhen knows" is not written down in a book whose covers can be sliced off and ingested into a model, it's a few million humidity stories stored in people, and a pace of knowledge-rich adjustment that keeps cost down and yield high. The only way to get it back is work with people who have brought up lines, to reshore and grow the ecosystem of people who have this knowledge, and to capture that knowledge as we build.

Lots of people have clever ideas about the data capture/API piece, but we think the business of manufacturing may need equal portions pain tolerance, customer commitment, and cleverness on talent.

America needs to solve the other half of reshoring.

[Mark Zuckerberg @finkd]

I believe everyone should have access to superintelligence, and I wrote a long piece about Meta's philosophy and values for building a positive future for everyone. https://t.co/2ZoNZXZ39T

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

the bottleneck is increasingly knowing what you want

[a16z @a16z]

"Go west, young man"

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

In most of life, if you are courageous enough to state the difficult truth, the most important reputation you will preserve is your own.

[signüll @signulll]

wait a minute, elon musk:

- basically rebuilt america’s space ambitions after the shuttle program got retired. i mean the only way america could send astronauts to space was through the fucking russians! could you imagine if that dependency was still there with the conflict that exists today?

- turned electric cars that no one even remotely touched into a desirable mass market product… this also resulted in vast amounts of competition & other infra development (like the super charger network). he also effectively inspired the chinese electric car industry after they basically stole all of tesla’s secrets.

- acquired twitter & reopened parts of public debate that a ton of gatekeepers preferred closed & off limits. ppl got banned for simply asking questions during humanity’s most critical event (covid).

- & is now saving the sheer incompetence of the american govt by building out an american semiconductor complex.

you can dislike his politics, personality, or methods. but any honest macro accounting has to admit that few individuals ever have done more to rebuild strategic american capacity across space, transportation, communication, & now semiconductors.

the american media judges him tweet by tweet while barely acknowledging the rockets, factories, & infrastructure being built that should’ve actually been the responsibility of the collective. this is shameful af.

[a16z @a16z]

just start