Paul Graham

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@waqasali Even a watchmaker who didn't intend to make expensive men's jewelry would end up doing it, because if they did a good job, their work would become prestigious and sell for a lot at auction, and then people would start buying it as a way to display wealth.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The Eterna cal 1466. Those 7 tiny ball bearings supporting the automatic-winding rotor were Eterna's great innovation. Eventually everyone switched from using a central post to this design, even Rolex.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@waqasali I realize some of the people making mechanical watches now are quite earnest, but the result inevitably ends up being artificial. In the golden age, mechanical watches were urgently needed precision instruments. Now they are expensive men's jewelry.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Eterna is a great example of a brand whose vintage watches are underpriced because the current brand ranks low in prestige. Back in the day they were highly regarded.

[ApoStructura @ApoStructura]

Reminder that the “datacenters use too much water” problem is fake.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@LandsknechtPike In western Europe a city tended to mean a town that was a bishop's seat.

church : cathedral :: town : city

[Salim Ali @Salim_AIi]

Been running Opus 5.5 agents over the notebooks of Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert and Grothendieck. around 12,000 pages so far. Heres the best finding so far:

Riemann's 1860 shock wave paper is famous for getting the energy part wrong however his unpublished sheets at Göttingen have it right the Rankine Hugoniot conditions a decade or two before Rankine and Hugoniot plus results usually dated 19061937, all in his own notation. A second sheet in another folder has the same physics.

There are probably thousands of potential undiscovered stuff in the research papers of the smartest ever to live imo all of them should be made public and reviewed by ai years of work can probably be transcribed by agents in days

[Pushmeet Kohli @pushmeet]

Across our projects @GoogleDeepMind, we are witnessing a genuine phase transition in the pace of scientific discovery. You will see a glimpse of this in our releases in the next few weeks.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Secret ingredients I put in lentils: butter, freshly ground cumin, soy sauce (just a little).

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

"One research group wanted to study ten men in the North of England who ate five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day. They couldn’t find any, though, so had to lower their target to three servings."

https://t.co/b5glW8eWGb

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Maybe both parties keep mistaking voter rejection of their opponents’ agenda for an endorsement of their own sweeping platform, when voters really just want a president who fixes the proverbial potholes.

[Richard Morris @ahistoryinart]

'Two Lily Bulbs.' (1952) Eliot Hodgkin was a meticulous painter of still life and as good at detail as the 18thC German botanist and artist Georg Ehret or Pierre-Joseph Redouté; it has botanical accuracy, aesthetic appeal and is painted with great affection for his subject.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Andrew McCarthy in The National Review on what caused the Republicans to lose so badly in the midterms.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

20 years ago there was a building in SF that was nicknamed the Y Scraper because so many YC founders lived there. They just had a reunion and it makes me so happy to see them all. One thing you can say for sure about YC: no investor's founders become closer friends.

[Tamer Nahed @Tamer_Alnoaizy]

I admit that I completely broke down today. I cried uncontrollably. I couldn’t hold myself together after witnessing what I saw with my own eyes.

Today, we went to film a journalistic report inside the displacement tents along the seashore. I swear, what we witnessed was beyond what any human being should have to endure.

I saw men crying bitterly. Men I had never seen cry when they lost their children or when their homes were destroyed. Today, I saw them crying because they were powerless to do the simplest thing: protect their children from the water and the cold.

We spoke to families who told us they had spent the entire night carrying their children in their arms after floodwater covered the floors of their tents and soaked their mattresses. They couldn’t find a single dry place to put their children. They couldn’t even give them a few hours of sleep.

I saw children no older than five, without proper clothes to protect them from the cold, without heating, and without a dry place to sleep. Children shivering inside tents that cannot keep out the rain, protect them from the wind, or provide even the most basic sense of safety.

What more must happen for this world to act? How much more suffering must people endure before someone remembers that they are human beings?

I am sick of this world. I am sick of its hypocrisy and empty slogans. To hell with a world that talks endlessly about human rights while leaving children to drown inside their tents. To hell with everyone who has witnessed this suffering and chosen silence, and to hell with the governments and institutions that have the power to act but continue to turn their backs on us.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@artmuraf I understand the design of mechanical watches, but actually making them takes years to learn.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The famous Zenith cal 135. The competition version won the Neuchâtel trials every year from 1950 to 1954. The secret is the huge balance wheel (the gold wheel at lower left with the coiled spring in the middle).

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@tlbtlbtlb How about Alpha and Omega?

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Replit was building toward the AI coding era years before it had a name. In 2024, the company shipped an agent that could take a request in plain English, work through errors, provision its own infrastructure, and keep going until the software actually worked. The model companies even reached out to ask how Replit had pulled it off.

Co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad had been thinking about making programming radically more accessible since 2008, and Replit’s original pitch deck predicted AI-generated code before the Transformer paper was published. Today, that same technology is moving into banks, manufacturers, and other large companies, where Amjad says teams are replacing software projects once scoped at $10 million with $250,000 of Replit.

On How to Build the Future, @paulg sits down with @amasad to talk about why @Replit was so well positioned when coding agents arrived, what comes after vibe coding, and his bigger vision for the “self-driving company,” where AI agents increasingly build and operate the software a company needs.

00:00 - "You guys basically invented vibe coding"
02:43 - Watching users copy-paste from ChatGPT
05:27 - The origins of Replit
08:00 - People underestimate their ability to predict the future
10:27 - Grieving the craft
12:52 - A culture of obsessing over users
15:13 - Why enterprises pick Replit
17:28 - The agent was just another user
20:17 - It barely worked, and users loved it
23:13 - $10 million projects now for $250,000
25:45 - Sandboxing for humans
28:14 - "The self-driving company"
30:34 - The way AI flows into companies
33:28 - What Steve Jobs knew before the iPad
35:59 - Killing the sacred cow
38:25 - The rest of the world is two years behind
41:15 - The compute brought on AI
43:46 - The person who assumes dramatic change

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@mrlck_ https://t.co/oeGiwhSAiF

[Paul Graham @paulg]

And peak golden age watch movement = the culmination of 700 years of work on mechanical clocks. Mechanical clocks first appeared in about 1270 and since then many of the great minds of their times have worked on them. That's why I'm interested in watches.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@liav_chen I own two.