Ken Kao

Product-minded engineering leader. Martial Artist. Culture & Team builder.

[Ken Kao @kenk616]

My article got published on @TechCrunch! I’ve always been impressed by how inclusive a fighting gym could be, and hope we can do better in tech. Let me know what you think :)

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

How a martial arts gym trained me to build an inclusive culture https://t.co/Kgpru5BGVn

[Sick @sickdotdev]

My company’s claude account got exhausted.

Now my legendary manager is asking if we can build our own LLM like Claude to reduce costs😭

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

We just decided to stop teaching everyone math, in the hopes that this would make society equal because everyone would be equally incompetent

[i/o @avidseries]

The data: "At UC San Diego, the number of freshmen failing to meet high-school math standards grew nearly 30-fold between 2020 and 2025. By fall 2025, 1 of 12 entering students was placed into remedial math to learn material taught in elementary and middle school.”

[derek barry miller @omniderek]

This looks like a festival lineup 😭😭

[Liz4SF @incitafusio]

algebra is racist, banned. mugshots are racist, banned. SATs are racist, banned. scotus strikes down race based admissions bc it’s racist, UCs & colleges ignore it. teachers union & sf boe force racist power wheel of oppression on all sfusd 9th graders as graduation requirement, while kids cant do middle school math. vote smarter SF & CA!

[Ethan Agarwal @ethanagarwal]

The hard truth about race based admissions is it hurts the unprepared students at least as much as the unaccepted students.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Anti-Asian discrimination is alive and well in UC admissions offices

[Liz4SF @incitafusio]

🚨30% of Berkeley Calculus students are severely underprepared (half flunked), yet a whopping 321 Lowell students were rejected by Berkeley. Only 42 students (12%) were accepted from Lowell hs, while Mission hs had 45% acceptance rate (34 out of 76 applicants) @HarmeetKDhillon https://t.co/Gd0CZfb2ie

[Ken Kao @kenk616]

@drterrysimpson @AaronCSmith1 There’s no way I’ll doctors chosen have equivalent intelligence.

No two human have equivalent intelligence.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The progressive idea of "Let's make everyone equal at math by just not making anyone learn math" is going just about as well as you'd expect

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students:

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics”

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

[Ken Kao @kenk616]

@real_dreamr @Anarseldain @unforgivnbastrd He doubled down

[Jay 🌊 @JayCSpain]

Of course I know 2.6% of physicians are Black men… I’ve joined that 🤣. Thank you to the comments and quotes that prove literacy is still in critical condition

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

saikat chakrabarti
> be first 10 at stripe
> clear 9 figures
> ladder-pull: don't want people to start startups
> donate $500K to Prop D, the 800% increase in gross receipts tax that blocks startups from staying in SF

^^ don't be this guy. don't be the ladder puller.

[Savanah Hernandez @Savsays]

The fact that comically stupid people were able to defraud the U.S. out of BILLIONS just goes to show how horrifically ineffective our government is.

[Owen @owenology]

Just found out that Berkeley course staff are writing hooks inside course repos so if a student opens an assignment in Claude Code or Cursor the agent will automatically ping the staff 😵‍💫 well played

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Jeff Bezos: "If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, the packages would take 6 weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it anyway."

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

The BBC somehow frames this story of Afghan fathers selling their young daughters into sex slavery as a hardship for them.

[Ken Kao @kenk616]

You clearly don’t understand anything.

Also, why are Asians automatically assumed to be privileged? In NYC for example Asian Americans have the same poverty rates as black (and in some years higher), but are still held to higher standards due to the color of their skin.

[Dr Terry Simpson @drterrysimpson]

I understand why many Asian families feel frustrated in elite admissions systems. In intensely competitive environments, there is a real perception — and sometimes evidence — that exceptional academic performance still does not guarantee admission.

That feeling should not be dismissed.

But admissions committees also confront another reality: if you have 100 applicants from privileged, high-performing educational pipelines with nearly identical scores, resumes, research access, tutoring, and opportunities, it is not irrational to also value the applicant who achieved similar academic success despite poverty, instability, underfunded schools, family hardship, or lack of institutional advantages.

That is not abandoning merit. It is recognizing that achievement exists in context.

And medicine especially is not merely selecting expert test takers. It is selecting future physicians who will care for human beings across every class, culture, language, and circumstance in society.

The irony is that many people who defend “objective merit” often become deeply uncomfortable the moment merit is evaluated in anything broader than a percentile ranking.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Karen Bass is the worst leader I’ve ever seen. Nobody knew she was out of the country during the Palisades Fire. Nobody could order air tankers because her deputy mayor was under house arrest. Her LADWP chief didn’t know our reservoir was empty. Karen Bass is running an absolute CLOWN SHOW. Vote like your life depends on it! Cuz it does!

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Last year I asked Connie Chan to resign for her role in making San Francisco unsafe for Asian Americans

This year she somehow got the endorsement from Pelosi

Make it make sense. You can’t.