Manjunath

[BOSS @thebeautyofsaas]

I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. and they really almost got me. they came close to really beating any curiosity out of me - Steve Jobs

[BOSS @thebeautyofsaas]

https://t.co/9rOTItoSUu

[Arun Rao @sudoraohacker]

Fantastic essay about Chinese AI labs:

“If there is one thing I’d want to delete from the American discourse, it’s the phrase “China’s AI strategy.”
Every single meeting, be it labs, investors, media, all independently, without my prompting, described domestic competition as more brutal than competing with American labs. When I described the US framing of Chinese AI as a coordinated bloc moving at the direction of the state, people laughed. Not defensively. They found it funny. I was called a stupid ABC (American-born Chinese) more than once because of this.

These labs are actually far less coordinated than US labs are, which should have been obvious to anyone who watched the previous cycles of Chinese tech. I said no analogies, but I’ll allow one because it’s theirs. The last cycle had a name: 百团大战, the War of a Hundred Groupons (it was actually 5000). Hundreds of group-buying companies raised money, undercut each other into oblivion, and Meituan emerged as the victor. This cycle already has one too: 百模大战, the War of a Hundred Models.

What actually exists is an ecosystem of labs relentlessly undercutting each other on price, stealing each other’s researchers, raising against each other, and trying to win a local arms race. Hundreds of labs and neolabs have raised, died, and been replaced, continuously.

The things we experience in the US as hostile acts are mostly the exhaust of that domestic fight. The distillation attacks and the collapsing token prices are not a strategy aimed at American incumbents. They are what a hundred companies do to each other when none of them can win and none of them can stop.”

[Flower Show @TheFlowerShow]

Exceptionally heavy El Niño rains have triggered millions of dormant seeds beneath the soil, transforming vast stretches of one of the world’s driest regions into a spectacular carpet of flowers. 🌸🌸🌸
The Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, has been dramatically transformed following heavy rainfall in northern Chile. Areas that are typically barren and parched are now covered in vibrant violet and white blossoms, a rare natural phenomenon known as the “flowering desert.”🏵️🏵️🏵️

[Melodies & Masterpieces @SVG__Collection]

67 years ago today, ‘Take Five’ by Dave Brubeck Quartet was released as a single.

It went on to become the best-selling jazz single of the 20th century.

[Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ @0x0SojalSec]

OpenAI researcher "Alisa Liu" had 57 interviews before joining OpenAI, and then She open-sourced her entire study notes job/learning process.

- her LLM study notes
- her math interview notes
- a full honest write-up of the job process

If you are preparing for research scientist / MTS roles, this is the highest-signal material available right now.

You can use her notes or her topic list to study on your own. That’s rare. Don’t waste it.

[The Spectator @spectator]

It turns out that this summer's cinematic hero is not Spiderman or even Odysseus, but the French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle who has knocked both Marvel and Homer into a kepi (the French military hat he favoured).

De Gaulle, a two-part, six-hour epic directed by Antonin Baudry has been a surprising hit in France and is in demand from all the major international markets, including those of Latin America, India and China.

The buzz is remarkable for a foreign-language film starring a person who, although a national hero in his homeland, is not a global household name.

✍️ Rosie Millard

Article | https://t.co/rEUaoEQqjR

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

#mustread.
1/20

[elektra @elektraslaw]

how can you be bored when there's a career to build, a body to transform, a mind to sharpen, and a future to chase.

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

This is what Ayurveda colleges teach young minds. They are reduced to doing this as a profession and the customers they treat become victims of (in)voluntary manslaughter. The Government wants the public to consider them clinical doctors. I really feel bad for these students. They have no future in healthcare, but only medical business (cheat patients on promises and claims) or as Instagram influencers who will make money by endorsing various products. I think this is a life not worth living because you are not helping build yourself, community or nation. Government is so cruel in promoting and teaching this. Initially I used to be annoyed and angry at them for barking (abusive trolling) at me, but now I empathize with them, because I see them as "make in India" rabid who missed the vaccine. We need to stop sending young adults to these courses which destroys their life.

[Mads @europemaxxed]

The only networking that matters

[Mihail Eric @mihail_eric]

I’m excited to finally announce the newest edition my Stanford course 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿. It has been 9 months in the making.

Last November, with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, coding agents experienced a step function improvement in capability. We all felt it. The LLMs were more powerful, could reason for longer, solve harder tasks.

This year’s iteration of my course reflects the 2026 metamorphosis of software engineering.

My core belief is simple: AI-native developers of the LLM era are going to become the most important members of any software organization. I have designed my course to train this next generation of engineers.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱

First, 85% of my Fall 2025 class material is being thrown out. The Fall 2026 syllabus reflects the core capabilities AI-native engineers must have: agent skills, advanced context engineering, MCP portals, agent-ready codebase principles, agentic code review, security, parallelizing background agents, software factories, and more.

Second, I am going to teach my students how to have software taste. Every student will be required to ship pull requests to production-grade, real-world codebases. The course is collaborating with the top open-source AI repos who will offer support and mentorship to students on how to meaningfully contribute to their projects.

This has never been done before in any university course so I am incredibly grateful to our OSS Partners: @browserbase, @HeyGen, @CopilotKit, @semgrep, @OpenHandsDev, @milvusio, @marimo_io, Pi, @crewAIInc, @warpdotdev, @vercel, @cmux, @arizeai, @UnslothAI, and @anyscalecompute.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲

I’m fortunate to again have AI software engineering leaders and founders as guest speakers to share their learnings from building top coding agent products. Thank you to @leerob from @cursor_ai, @bcherny of @claudeai code, @EnoReyes of @FactoryAI, @silasalberti of @cognition, @0xine of @semgrep, Rajesh Bhatia of @Cloudflare , @amasad of @Replit, and @eladgil.

All resources will be available online. All classes will be available to the public.

9/22 on Stanford campus. See you in class. 

https://t.co/wTokHyUMsz

[Rui Ueyama @rui314]

We are rewriting the mold linker in Rust and adding linker script support so that mold can link essentially anything GNU ld can, including kernels and embedded programs. This will be mold 3.0. We started this effort to get Linux distros to replace their default linker with mold.

[Incentivising @incentivising]

Game theory explains why working harder inside a broken system is always the worst response to that system. That's because a system is never truly broken. It's just producing exactly the outcomes its own incentive structures were designed to produce, whether intentional or not. Working harder inside this system increases your output in the payoff matrix, but it simply won't change the actual structure of the system's matrix. Thus, the correct response is not more effort. Instead, you must aim to identify whose interests the current structure serves and position yourself in favor of those interests rather than against them. Change the game, or play the game that is actually being played. Either way, you must stop optimizing for the game you wish it to be and start acting realistically.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

When you hit a wall in math, coding, or any hard skill, do not immediately conclude that you lack talent. Most walls are just prerequisite debt finally coming due. Go back, fill the gaps, make the basics automatic, and the wall often turns into a staircase.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

Most of what is frightening you about the future was probably written by people with no intention of building any of it.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

lmao

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

How bad was life before modern science, technology, and economic growth? Awful.

The example I will use in class this Wednesday is Henry Clay (1777-1852). He was one of the most powerful men of his time in the U.S., not just among the elite but among the elite of the elite: Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, Senator, and three-time presidential candidate. He was also rich and a large slaveholder. The U.S. was among the richest countries in the world (perhaps only behind Great Britain) and among the most technologically advanced. And we are not talking about the early Middle Ages, but about the first half of the 19th century.

Given the constraints of his time, he had nearly everything within reach.

Clay and his wife, Lucretia (both in the photograph), had eleven children: six daughters and five sons. He buried all six daughters. By 1835, all were dead: two as infants, two as children, two as young mothers. He also buried a son in a war his father had opposed. Another son, Theodore, fractured his skull as a child, but since nobody could treat him, he spent decades in an asylum in Lexington.

Think about this for a second: seven children dead and one handicapped out of eleven, in the first half of the 19th century, among the elite of the elite, in one of the richest and most advanced places on the planet.

And I was angry yesterday because my cell phone coverage in Toddington (England) was poor.

[Scott Armstrong @scottnarmstrong]

An update on Lean (auto)-formalization.

Speaking about my own research workflow, in 2026, we have gone from:

March: Lean formalization is not possible (for my papers).

May: Lean formalization is possible... but way too costly in time and tokens to be practical most of the time.

July: Lean formalization is now practical. I can probably formalize most of my papers now before they hit arxiv.

August: Lean formalization is now essential-- it increases efficiency of my workflow dramatically.

That is, the papers are getting written *informally* and finished much faster because of the Lean formalization.