Julius Narkus

Husband | Girl dad | CMO @IPRoyal_proxies | B2B Growth @modernhealthco | o1 holder | 90s Lithuania | History, books, personal finance, geopolitics.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

I don’t believe the volume of diesel Russia will export will affect the price. Moreover, we see that they can export from 300,000 to 500,000 tons a month today. Meanwhile, global consumption stands at 120 million tons a month. What kind of impact can that have? I don’t think it would have any. If some people think otherwise, so be it.

So I believe there are entirely different reasons behind these actions. If this is the approach, then why isn’t America making a “diesel deal” with Ukraine? Let Ukraine propose a “diesel deal.” We do have influence over whether these ships can sail or not, whether these refineries can operate or not. If that’s the case, then let’s do it.

Electricity is what matters to us. That’s clear. If we can be guaranteed protection for our power system, then we will not strike Russia’s diesel infrastructure in response. Electricity is first and foremost about helping people – keeping their lights on. It also means helping Europe. Everyone knows that we are connected to the European power grid. And if our energy infrastructure is not being destroyed, we can help some countries that are facing shortages by supplying them with cheaper electricity.

So, yes, let’s sign a corresponding “diesel deal” with the President of the United States.

From remarks at the Warsaw Security Forum. (1)

[Carl Bildt @carlbildt]

A very vivid illustration of where responsibility for the high fuel prices lie.

[NBA @NBA]

NO-LOOK. CROSSCOURT. BEHIND-THE-BACK DIME.

ARE YOU SERIOUS, JOKER 🤯

[Deedy @deedydas]

my favorite Paul Graham essay “how to do great work” in under 200 seconds of video

(thanks opus)

[Institute for the Study of War @TheStudyofWar]

MORE: Arguments that NATO runs the risk of “war enthusiasm” and inducing a Russian attack by preparing for its own defense mistakenly accept the Kremlin’s framing that Russia was or will be provoked into illegally invading its neighbors.

Pragmatic responses to Russian threats — such as shooting down Russian drones in NATO airspace, increasing NATO’s conventional presence in frontline states, or hardening critical infrastructure against the threat of Russian strikes or sabotage — are not escalatory actions by NATO, no matter how often the Kremlin frames them that way.

They are necessary and justified responses to Russian threats and attacks. Preparing better defenses against and responding appropriately to escalating attacks is not escalation; it is prudence.

Concerns expressed by some policymakers in frontline NATO states that they do not want to overly alarm their populations or drive away economic investment by moving to a war footing or publicly discussing Russian threats are understandable on the surface but impede necessary efforts. Europe may not need alarmed populations, but it needs informed populations and certainly does need alarmed governments.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Some details: Kremlev, the Russian who sponsored Don Jr's wedding, is a former member of the Night Wolves biker gang, went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children

[conor brennan-burke @contextconor]

one of the strangest things about moving from new york to sf was realizing how often extremely important things happen here in settings that don't feel important at all

i lived in new york for four years. i sometimes spent entire days moving icons around in powerpoint, but i was doing it in a skyscraper with great views, surrounded by attractive people in patagonia vests. afterward i'd walk onto a packed street and go to a beautiful restaurant

even when the work itself was mundane, everything around it told you it mattered

sf is almost the opposite

the blue bottle in south park feels like a normal coffee shop. it is also a place where an absurd amount of capital gets allocated

sand hill road is one of the most powerful financial centers in the world and looks like a collection of dentist offices

you'll meet someone dressed like they just rolled out of bed who can't make eye contact and discover later that they control billions of dollars or have built a product you use every day

i've been to parties where almost everyone had raised millions of dollars or built products used by millions of people. in another city, each person would have seemed like a big deal. in sf, they were just standing around a cramped apartment at a "party" that honestly wasn't even that good

i used to live in a closet in a slightly dilapidated hacker house with creaky floors and old furniture. people who lived there went on to create companies worth tens of billions of dollars

new york puts a lot of effort into making importance visible. sf often seems actively uninterested in doing that

some of this is probably because sf is more focused on creation than consumption. some of it is the personality of builders, who often care much more about the thing they're making than the room they're making it in

but i think the lack of polish also lowers the barrier to entry. you don't need to look important before doing something important here

new york makes ordinary work feel important

sf makes important work feel ordinary

[Rohin Dhar @rohindhar]

If Anthropic IPOs at a $2 trillion valuation

It will be 4x larger than all the IPOs in the history of San Francisco combined

When/if Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks IPO

We are truly in for the mother of all booms in San Francisco and all that entails. The scale will have no precedent

[Chris K. @chriskh]

You could move to New York City.

Walk out your door at 2am for a bacon egg and cheese and not think twice about it. Get on a subway that takes you from a mosque to a synagogue to a cathedral to a noodle shop that's been slinging the same bowl since 1987, all in twelve blocks. Watch strangers from four different continents argue about a parking spot in a language that is somehow entirely made of hand gestures.

Sit in a park designed 170 years ago by geniuses who wanted you, specifically, to have somewhere green to sit. Catch a Tuesday night set from a musician who's about to be enormous, in a room that fits eighty people. Walk past a building where somebody invented something, or wrote something, or changed something, roughly every four minutes, whether you notice or not.

Realize your commute is also a people-watching seminar, a smell-based cultural exchange program, and free comedy.

Order the good pizza at 1am standing up, off a paper plate, next to a guy in a tux and a guy who clearly just got off a double shift, both getting the same slice with the same reverence.

Pay too much for too little space and get, in exchange, eleven million other people's worth of energy pointed directly at your life every single day.

Move to Iowa. Get the four bedrooms, the garage, the yard. Never again have a 3am conversation with a stranger that changes how you think about something. Never walk into a museum on a random Wednesday because it's just there. Never get that specific electric feeling of being one tiny gear in the greatest machine humans have ever built.

But hey. At least parking's easy.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated career advice: Choose to work in a place with high talent density early in your career.

You tend to rise or fall to the level of the people around you. When you work with exceptional people, you absorb their standards, pace, frameworks, and instincts almost through osmosis.

High-talent environments compress learning cycles and force you to grow faster than you would on your own. They change your opportunity set and rewire your brain. The compounding effect of a few years in that environment can change the trajectory of your life.

Early in your career, there’s probably nothing more valuable than choosing the room with the highest talent per square foot.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities

Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness

London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard

And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve

The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible

That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self

SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively

And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years

When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront

Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s

At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening

And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway

You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later

At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Completely disagree with this take

Ken Griffin figured out something that is incredibly simple on paper, but very hard to execute

That is

1. Hire the smartest people you can with a very high bar and focus on talent

2. Give them incredible incentives to pour 100% of their talent and effort into generating returns for you

3. Fire bad people quickly, do everything you can to retain the best people

This is much more difficult for companies to implement than one might think, especially at scale

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

Norway knocked out Brazil, then the army posted a Viking celebration video.

[Claude @claudeai]

Fable 5 is back.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is a new paradigm for interacting with Claude that is significantly more "inline" with all the other human activity org-wide. Once you do all of the under the hood engineering work to make this "just work" (e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory, security, etc.), Claude basically joins the team in a seamless way - you can talk to it as you would talk to a person and it can help with a very large variety of workloads.

Imo this is the 3rd major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to, the second was that it is an app you download to your computer. This third one is that it is a self-contained, persistent, asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans. It really takes a while to wrap your head around it, but it works and it is awesome.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

here is Mamdani's entire speech at the Knicks parade, which is easily the best speech I've ever heard at an event of this sort

[Ben Stiller @BenStiller]

This is great

[Ben Stiller @BenStiller]

YES https://t.co/pYNePA4e5S

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

Next week’s cover, “After the Comeback,” by Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet, captures the joy on the streets of New York City after the Knicks’ historic win in Game Four of the N.B.A. Finals. https://t.co/zLRZzgL83N