Murat Gürel

Game Developer

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

"If one day, my words are against science, choose science."
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I had a similar reaction. Everyone should applaud performance improvements, but gauge against the “speed of light”, not just a sloppy competitor. If you are measuring in seconds, you may have already anchored yourself incorrectly.

Structure the UI so you can put locally cached media up just a few vblanks after the process launches.

Structure the server so it can return everything necessary for the dynamic UI in one single query that was kicked off in parallel with the Gfx API initialization, branching to a modern transport protocol for large media files.

You should be able to double click on the launcher and have it responsive before your muscle memory can slam the pointer to a location to click on.

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

I wouldn’t recommend asking people about theoretical spending. If the answer doesn’t cost them real money, it’s not a real answer.

But I would find out what they’re doing instead. What are you doing right now? How do you handle this today? Always get to now. Don’t ask them about what they might do or what they could do or even what they should do. Now is what they know, everything else is a guess.

[Murat Gürel @muratgurel]

@FishAudio DRAMA!

[Gabriel Dechichi @gdechichi]

I never gave a fuck about them. to quote Chris Ericson

"Design patterns are spoonfeed material for brainless programmers incapable of independent thought, who will be resolved to producing code as mediocre as the design patterns they use to create it."

[a16z @a16z]

Patrick Collison's advice to people in their 20s: find where the highest standards are, and go experience them firsthand.

"When I talk to people in other domains, this is so frequently the thing that I hear from them."

"That when they worked with X person or Y organization or in Z environment, they learned what great actually is, and that just permanently changed their sense for what their own standard for their work ought to be."

"Maybe one version of what people in their twenties should do is... figure out, where can you learn the highest standards? Where are the highest standards embodied, and where can you go and experience that firsthand?"

@patrickc w/ @dwarkesh_sp (Feb 2024)

[Brandon Luu, MD @BrandonLuuMD]

Frequent video gamers performed on cognitive tests like non-gamers that were ~13.7 years younger

[DHH @dhh]

This is why founder-led companies tend to do so well. Why they even have a chance when the paradigm shifts. Executive agency, the willingness to just say WE'RE DOING THIS NOW, is the key ingredient. @tobi is among the very best at this, and thus Shopify blossoms.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Yep. Except:

1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case.

2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here.

3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem.

4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄

the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose.

But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.

I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).

The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.

In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.

They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.

I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.

I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.

I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.

Number one tip: act with agency.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

Someone out there seems to know that an LLM is not an AGI, nor will better LLMs ever be AGIs.

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Stripe is worth $159 billion now. Like Bezos and Buffett, the Collison 'way of building a business' will create trillions in value and is worth studying.

800-word post on:
1. Craft & Beauty
2. Humility
3. Hiring
4. Culture
5. Decisions

1. On craft & beauty,
You can work on something you're not proud of for 2 years. You can't do it for 30.

Beauty has a practical function most people miss. When we go to a city or building that's beautiful, there's generosity in that construction. You never meet the architect, but it's a gift they've bestowed on us. Products are no different.

And craft has another function that might matter even more: it's the single best way to attract extraordinary people. The best people consider themselves craftspeople, and above almost all else, they want to work alongside other craftspeople.

Put bluntly: really good people don't enjoy working on shitty things.

2. On founder humility,
Think carefully about what's cool and what's high status, and then make sure not to do that.
Once you're succeeding, the real danger begins. Success breeds complacency. Other people are studying what you built and looking to replicate it. You can always be a month away from losing your business.

The antidote is simple but uncomfortable: stay close to reality. Every week at Stripe's leadership meeting, they hear directly from a customer. It's not an A-plus scorecard every time. That's the point. It prevents you from getting delusional.

And when you see a smart person holding a view that's different from your own, rather than figuring out how they're wrong, try to figure out how they're right.

3. On hiring,
Think like a value investor. You're not looking for the best resume. You're looking for human capital the market has significantly underpriced.

It took Patrick and John a full year to get to four people. No group will ever shape your company more than your early hires. When hiring anyone, ask: will I like the 50 people they hire?

Prioritize rate of learning over everything. Over a decade, fast learners obliterate credentialed hires. It's not even close.

For senior hires, one question: can they get you where you need to be in four years, in two?

4. On culture,
Stripe's moat isn't technology or process or perks. It's that the people there genuinely care about solving the problems they say they're solving. That's rarer than it sounds.

Care for the customer's problem, executed with craft and rigor. A culture that prizes small details and careful abstraction.

And an operating rhythm that keeps it honest: micro pessimism, macro optimism. Everything is terrible today. Total conviction it'll be fantastic in two years.

That tension is what keeps generational companies from getting comfortable.

5. On decisions,
Make twice as many decisions at half the precision. That's almost always better than the alternative. You'll never have perfect information and you don't need it. Make the call, move forward, course correct if you're wrong. You pay a far larger price for paralysis than for mistakes.

For co-founder disputes, one simple rule: whoever cares more carries the decision. Deeper conviction wins.

These ideas have shaped how we build Gamma and 1000s of others.

@patrickc @collision

[Evren Önem @eonem]

Code is a liability, so you ship the absolute minimum that moves the needle for the specific costumer value you care about. LoC only matters to folks who don’t know what costumer value they care about, so they have something “measurable”.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

How to become expert at thing:
1 iteratively take on concrete projects and accomplish them depth wise, learning “on demand” (ie don’t learn bottom up breadth wise)
2 teach/summarize everything you learn in your own words
3 only compare yourself to younger you, never to others

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

PG’s 6 principles for making new things:

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I have never seen it expressed exactly like that, but I wholeheartedly endorse it:

Feedback beats planning.

My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

I'm going to call it right now. A lot of stuff is going to break on this mission.

By design.

As part of the plan.

Don't get upset. I'm not saying SpaceX plans to fail. I'm pointing out that SpaceX has taken an ultraimportant principle from software engineering, and realized it applies to all engineering.

Feedback beats planning.

And that, you see, is why SpaceX doesn't do things the NASA way. The NASA way was to gold-plate everything, plan and test and plan and test, and generate mountains of paper detailing every contingency, with every scenario prepared for.

SpaceX just shrugs, says "it's unmanned", and sends it.

Half the time it blows up. That's the whole point. They don't actually want it to blow up, of course, but they're anticipating that it might.

That possibility is part of the plan. Because one rocket blowing up, or crashing, in an actual end-to-end test, beats many, many man-years of planning and plotting.

The key realization here is that knowledge only comes from empirical observation. Everything else is just speculative.

The sooner you get into a feedback loop, and the faster you run it, the more iterations you can do in less time. This means, while others are planning and speculating, you actually learn something.

Relevant data is the most precious thing in the universe. And it's worth blowing up any number of rockets to get it.

Because rockets are just stuff. They're just made of stuff. And you can always get more stuff.

You can never get more time.

So expect to see a lot of things go wrong on this, and other SpaceX missions. Anticipate it. Accept it when it happens. Doesn't mean the dream of the stars is dead.

It just means we're doing it cowboy style.

This is a valuable lesson for our own lives. If there's something you want to do, something you want to try, some goal you have, it's easy to dip a toe in the water, test the temperature, and plan. A lot.

Planning makes us feel good if we're afraid. Because it provides us with the illusion of security. Never mind that we don't know which scenarios are actually going to happen, never mind that we're planning for the wrong thing, planning makes us feel safe. And if we're nervous, we can plan forever.

But the difference between the expert and the novice isn't theory or intelligence or plans. It's relevant domain knowledge. Gathered from empirical observation.

So the trick is to get into that feedback loop as soon as possible, and run it as fast as possible. Give yourself the most possible opportunities to learn, per unit time.

We only learn while we are moving.

[Geert Wilders @geertwilderspvv]

BYE BYE @RTErdogan.

Freedom and a secular state is what Türkiye needs NOW!

#Freedom #secularism #Turkey #imamoğlu

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Man, sesame’s voice model is absolutely insane. You have to try this demo. GG @brendaniribe

https://t.co/UwfKxjSnPx

[Casey Muratori @cmuratori]

The guy really did not like the educational system: "No one survives early education without some scars. In my experience, the intellectually degrading influence of some educational processes is a serious bar to clear thinking." - Edsger Dijkstra, 1969