Pathik

Building interesting impactful shit 🚀 | Finding a worthy life quest 🔥 | Learning how the world works 🤯 | Trying to find/form my tribe 😎

[Pathik @pathik]

🙂

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I fell in love with my wife all over again when I saw her as a mother. Hard to explain. An entirely different kind of love than the early years of our relationship. I now believe that the greatest gift I can give our son is the love I give his mother.

[Pathik @pathik]

🤣

[Ava @noampomsky]

the only time i beg is to differ

[Pathik @pathik]

💯

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

Elder millennials have had some hard breaks but maybe the biggest generational bit of luck is that most of us got partnered before dating apps really took off.

Any time I read about dating strategies and hundreds of dates and hypergamy and hegemony and swipes and pro accounts.

It all seems absolutely miserable.

[Pathik @pathik]

Simple

[Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson]

My opinion on tokenmaxxing is companies shouldn’t mandate/constrain any tools at all and then evaluate software developers by output / (salary + token use)

[Pathik @pathik]

🙂

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Pathik @pathik]

💯

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Building something is a brutal way to discover which parts of your intelligence were only verbal.

[Pathik @pathik]

🙂

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

There are two loops in every founder's head.

The autism loop: run your own model to the floor, ignore consensus, hold a thesis when everyone says you're wrong. That makes conviction.

The empathy loop: feel what the user feels, sense what the market wants before it has words. That makes traction.

Most people crank one and starve the other. Pure conviction builds something brilliant nobody wants. Pure empathy builds consensus mush.

PG put the whole job in four words: make something people want. The autism loop makes the something. The empathy loop knows it's wanted. The founder is the bridge.

Most great founders show up dominant in the first loop. That's why they're contrarian enough to try at all. The work is grafting on the second.

There is no place in the world that helps founders make the two loops work together to make great startups than Y Combinator. It is the most gratifying part of our work.

[Pathik @pathik]

🤣

[Karthik Hariharan @hkarthik]

My PM using Claude Opus to push a markdown file to GitHub.

[Pathik @pathik]

Marketing in the age of AI. 😐

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

This dude on FB Marketplace has multiple listing for heavy Caterpillar industrial equipment superimposed with AI-generated female models. Must have industry-leading click through rates.

Absolutely crying rn.

[Pathik @pathik]

🤣

[Karthik Hariharan @hkarthik]

I caught up with a friend who was an EM in Big Tech and decided take a sabbatical over the last year. He completely unplugged from tech during this period.

I was explaining everything that happened from the December launch of Opus, getting AI pilled, EMs writing code again, OpenClaw, Tokenmaxxing, and now the Token Budgeting and questions around the ROI of AI.

He calmly looked at me and said "maybe I should take another year off and let the dust settle a bit."

[Pathik @pathik]

🙂

[Tiago Forte @fortelabs]

I think the main thing AI has taught me, through all the time savings it brings, is that I’m not a very interesting person

Faced with a surplus of free time, I realize I don’t really have hobbies besides content consumption

I’m forced to conclude that I don’t have very deep friendships, and am not a core member of any particular community

I’m not very cultured, I’m finding, and don’t have abiding interests in art or literature or history or much that isn’t directly related to my work

I have a work-centric life, in other words. AI pulls back the curtain on just how impoverished such an existence is, by disabusing me of its necessity

Given the freedom I’ve always said I wanted, I’m at a loss as to what to do with it, except plow myself even harder into work, thus exacerbating the lesson

There’s nothing more confronting to humans than freedom

[Pathik @pathik]

🤣

[Siddhartha Saxena @siddsax]

Anthropic onboarding day: Michael Scott introducing Karpathy like he just signed Wemby in free agency.

[Pathik @pathik]

Life is Hunger Games.

[Mo @atmoio]

tldr: ClickUp is hosting a company-wide Hunger Games where if you can figure out how the hell to make AI work you’ll win a million dollars.

[Pathik @pathik]

Everyone in Tech.

[Ariel @redtachyon]

As an ex-Meta employee, I genuinely don't understand why people get butthurt about the constant layoffs.

That's the game you signed up for. A deal with the devil. You get paid top of market, and in return every couple of months you have to do Hunger Games.

It's not a secret.

[Pathik @pathik]

🤣

[Richa Sharma @richa_lq]

Men in SF are Karpathy-sexual: a hyper-specific strain of sapiosexuality that only activates in response to clear, first-principles explainer videos.

[Pathik @pathik]

💯

[Gurpriya @GurpriyaSidhu]

One of the best culture practices an organization can have is to encourage its employees to take time off work and spend it with their friends, families, or hobbies.

Instead they ask employees to participate in team bonding activities, organise off-sites, and parties.

People bond over doing difficult things together. Work itself will make them bond as a team.

Culture should make sure good people and good work exists in the org and then get out of the way.

[Pathik @pathik]

Anthropic mogs Google IO AI announcements with this.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Pathik @pathik]

India has a black market for everything.

[Arjun Malhotra @BadCapitalVC]

this is why we can't have nice stuff.

https://t.co/YimCkXoZ1J

[Pathik @pathik]

🤣

[Zara Zhang @zarazhangrui]

AI psychosis: cycling between two mental states every single day
↑ after using coding agents: holy shit I'm omnipotent. I can build anything. I've never felt this powerful in my life.
↓ after scrolling twitter: holy shit I'm completely behind. everyone's ahead. the wave is moving and I'm going to get left.

[Pathik @pathik]

All knowledge work will become gig work reviewing / verifying / fixing model outputs.

[Varunram Ganesh @varunram]

The free money around labs and data is going to make most of knowledge work like DoorDash jobs (with a lot of downward pressure very soon) but we're not ready to have that conversation as a society just yet