Ervin Chua

Likes tinkering with design and performance on the web. Product engineer @investorhub

[Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 @Chris_arnade]

Think I’ve walked enough in Australia to say, while it has good pedestrian infrastructure, drivers are aggressive jerks and if I die it here it will be in a CBD from someone in a suburban-outfitted Land Rover cosplaying outback warrior

[Ervin Chua @pancrisp]

@poteto @elshayib_ they don’t have lauren mode 🙂‍↕️

[Sean Geiger @sean_geiger]

When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing code that was 15 years old. Every file had a comment at the top with the date and the author’s name. You’d open a file and read through it, sometimes touching a feature no one had touched in a decade.

Everything felt very permanent, like a house made of bricks. Everyone who made a brick put their name on it before slotting it into the house. Even in a massive company, you were proud of your bricks. Each one fit so satisfyingly into the bricks around it.

When someone was renovating a room you had worked on years ago, they’d reach out and say, “I found this brick with your name on it. Can you tell me what it was doing here?”

Sometimes old bricks would get taken out during a renovation, but they were usually kept in a pile in the corner to reuse in the future.

Now you can will whole houses and neighborhoods into existence. You don’t even see the bricks go in. They just tumble in from the sky. You walk into the new house and wave your hands to push walls back, throw up a chimney, or drop in a kitchen.

It's so fucking cool. But you forget what a brick feels like.

And it’s hard to know how sad to be about that. The houses are better, they go up faster, and building them increasingly feels like magic.

Still, every once in a while you miss holding a brick.

[vas @vasuman]

https://t.co/haApURmzAN

[Gracia Ventus @the_rosenrot]

This is only true if you’re looking at mass market brands.

There are niche or artisanal brands all over the world who make tasteful designs in great materials. You have to do your homework to find them if you actually care about clothes as design objects instead of simply looking at them as tools you use to not offend others with your nakedness.

In China, the low barrier of entry for fashion production has forced young designers to compete so aggressively that they are coming up with good-looking clothes at reasonable prices, some of them in natural fibres. Due to the proliferation of independent clothing brands on Taobao, Chinese consumers have become spoilt with choices. They are also not afraid to try out the latest trends. Whenever I head out to trendy areas I can see what the rest of the world will be wearing the year after.

[“paula” @paularambles]

unsurprisingly the website this is from is literally

cookingforengineers dot com

[Ervin Chua @pancrisp]

@alecttrona https://t.co/Si7ds1BWhm

Aussie brand too

[Akshay Kothari @akothari]

There’s an insane amount of alpha in:
- People in SF leaving SF to see how people and companies around the world are using AI (hint: most are still using it primarily as search)
- People outside SF spending even two weeks in SF to see how people and companies are operating here (hint: many are already living in the future)

This may be obvious to some, but the gap right now is staggering. The global diffusion of AI is a massive opportunity.

[// Kayla @kaygelly]

went to cursor cafe today - met at least 5 aussies over here. students, software & hardware engineers. back home, its preached to build in private whilst having a full time job. over here, you’re taught to build loudly with passion. spaces like this is what Australia needs, thanks @cursor_ai 🤍

[Ervin Chua @pancrisp]

@kaygelly ohh mate, you need to meet the 7 girls of sf!! @paularambles @Madisonkanna @lillysharples, pls look after her. there's heaps more on twitter but yeah they'll take you under their wing 🫡

[Ryan Hoover @rrhoover]

I don’t understand the argument that LLMs can’t come up with original ideas.

“It’s just trained on existing data, predicting the next token.”

How is that different than human ideation?

We’re also pattern-matching machines, influenced by our life experience.

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

When I moved to SF in 2013, I was making $100K a year. My boyfriend and I found a 1br apartment for $3,800/mo and split it down the middle. As a percentage of my income, I was paying more for rent than the couple profiled here could easily rent a 1br apartment for.

It seems to me that the real issue with the article isn't just that it ignores the root cause of rising prices, which is our systemic failure to build enough housing. It's that the writer chose a bizarrely unsympathetic focal point.

There are plenty of people who genuinely cannot afford to live in San Francisco anymore. The starting salary for a public school teacher here is around $70K. Librarians average about $85K. These are the people who actually keep the city running, who anchor communities, and who are being priced out by the market.

Instead, the piece focuses on tech workers making well over $180K who gave up their housing search because they couldn't find a place under $5,000 a month after three months. Anyone who opens Zillow can see there are hundreds of 1-bedrooms available for less than that right now.

One reason for this framing might be the narrative allure of the "AI boom vs. traditional tech" friction, but it ends up sounding incredibly out of touch. San Francisco has always required trade-offs, and it has always been expensive. But if we are going to talk about the crisis of affordability, we should probably focus on the people who are actually struggling to survive, not those who are just struggling with expectation management.

[Natalia Emanuel @NataliaHEmanuel]

Published an op ed in @nytimes: remote work hurts mental health.

Let me explain why
🧵⤵️

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

https://t.co/TjJDFgynKm

[VoidZero @voidzerodev]

VoidZero is joining Cloudflare.

Our mission stays the same: to make JavaScript developers more productive than ever before. Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ remain MIT-licensed. Evan and the VoidZero team will continue leading them.

Cloudflare shares our commitment to open source. Together, we can keep investing in the tooling developers rely on every day, while bringing the Vite ecosystem and Cloudflare’s platform even closer together.

[ Q-Cap  @qcapital2020]

Retail investors are being invited to the IPO party after the cake has already been eaten

[shadcn @shadcn]

okay I solved it. we're done here.

[Cameron Kusher @cmkusher]

The most tax effective investments in Australia for individuals are now family homes and superannuation. The government says young people can’t afford homes and if you put money in Super you can’t touch it until you are in your 60s. So what is a young person actually supposed to invest in?

[1eozim @1eozinho01]

A sensação do twitter recarregar a pagina enquanto vc ta lendo um otimo tweet

[Joestar @Joestar_sann]

so let me get this straight

all of ai twitter was telling people to buy a mac mini to run openclaw, which is literally just a framework, an orchestration layer that sends api requests to actual ai models. something you can run on a $5/month vps. which is exactly what i do btw

but when google drops gemma 4, an actual large language model that you can run and fine-tune locally on that same mac mini, with no api costs, no subscriptions, no third party dependencies, completely yours under apache 2.0

the ai community is silent

you were buying $800 hardware to run a wrapper but ignoring the actual ai model that would justify that hardware

this tells you everything you need to know about the average iq of ai twitter