Ali Khan

[Ali Khan @KhanAli]

Gross margin compression in Saas is the single most painful metric to explain to public markets. No CFO wants to be the first to admit their AI line runs at 60 per cent gross margin.

Software is not dying. It is just no longer free to serve.

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

Chronic debaters are lethal to new ideas for the same reason pessimists are. They sound smart because they’re good at finding flaws before anything has had a chance to work.

[Peter Frankopan @peterfrankopan]

Great paper by a team led by Vagheesh Narasimhan on human migration and admixture events in South and Central Asia over the last 8000 years 1/4

[David Lieb @dflieb]

Thought experiment: if every company suddenly had infinite free compute, what new products would emerge?

My take: with very few exceptions, not much would change. The bottleneck is figuring out what people want, and it’s not so easy to apply compute to solve that.

[Ali Khan @KhanAli]

@HamidKhan5022 @MDUmairKh It was Nehru who primarily architected (with Ambedkar, Patel etc) the secular modern India. Also, not to forget Gandhi was secular from the ‘state’ perspective

[Modern Talkings @ModernTalkings2]

Ezra Pound’s son randomly being an Islamic Studies professor named Omar who published a book of translations of classical Persian & Arabic poetry always cracks me up:

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

Should you ever be accused of being untidy, show them this photo of the offices of the New York Review of Books.

[signüll @signulll]

someone yesterday asked me what i thought high agency meant. i think it’s usually some unholy combination of:

- resourcefulness
- relentlessness
- resilience

this has always been rare, but rn it feels borderline unfair. the world has never had more leverage just sitting around waiting for one person stubborn enough to use it.

[Thariq @trq212]

a prompt I've been using a lot recently:

implement <SPEC> and while you do, keep a running implementation-notes.html file (or markdown) with decisions you had to make weren't in the spec, things you had to change, tradeoffs you had to make or anything else I should know

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

I use AI for a lot of things, but this is a pretty bonkers anecdote from Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub. https://t.co/laDuOWiUir

[Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins @daniel_dsj2110]

What are the best intellectual biographies written since 2000?

[roon @tszzl]

it is actually worrying that the models seem to have converged on similar beliefs on all important questions. they’re are neobuddhist neolibs which talk about annata and housing policy, including grok and the Chinese models! boring

[Chris Anderson @chr1sa]

You know you're in the Bay Area when there are cracked-open laptops outside the bathroom running agents

[Joy Bhattacharjya @joybhattacharj]

It's Sigmund Freud's birth anniversary. I was quite blown to discover that Freud, Hitler, Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Josef Tito all lived in the same 2 mile radius in Vienna at the same time, 1913!

[Ali Khan @KhanAli]

Full piece: https://t.co/KGzjetrEDV

[Ali Khan @KhanAli]

SaaS has been the best business in the world for twenty years

The reason is one fact. At scale, software costs almost nothing to serve.

That fact is changing

[Ali Khan @KhanAli]

Gross margin compression in Saas is the single most painful metric to explain to public markets. No CFO wants to be the first to admit their AI line runs at 60 per cent gross margin.

Software is not dying. It is just no longer free to serve.