chris

dev - web things

[chris @platerocm]

📎

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

John hits deploy shortly before @Stripe handles its first production payment, six years ago today.

[joshpuckett @joshpuckett]

@EmmettMaher 90% of software *should* look and work the same. millions of hours have been wasted by software makers and users trying to create, and figure out how to use, special snowflakes.

[Geoff Keighley @geoffkeighley]

Hats off to doctoral student and podcaster Zhong Shu in Beijing, China, who did this fascinating and smart interview with Christopher Nolan about THE ODYSSEY yesterday, originally posted to Bilibili.

A great listen/watch.

[Mike Figueredo @HumanistReport]

Capitalism in a nutshell.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.

[Frank Lee @frankdotlee]

@thericebowlgirl

[Culture Crave 🍿 @CultureCrave]

Robot powered by Qualcomm’s new AI chip dies mid-presentation 😭

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🇪🇺 This year the European Union will again make more money from fining US tech companies

Than from the total tax income from Europe's own public tech companies!

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

From a friend who joined a fast-growth, later-stage startup:

"I was wondering why no one is doing PRDs here. Then I realized that the Head of Product and most PMs are 25-year-olds who don't have the attention span to *read* even a 1-page doc.

You lose them after 3 bullet points."

[Ryan Singer @rjs]

“Priority” is such a slippery term. I never use it. Instead:

- Is it “in” or “out” of a given scope?
- If it’s in, what’s the sequence. Is it first, second, third, early, later?

Sequence is sometimes due to urgency. But can also be interdependence or progressive enhancement.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

never forget

The people who tell you coding is a solved problem also created MCP

[Ale @gptcrosa]

Ayer hablaba de esto mismo; los prediction markets van a aniquilar económicamente a toda una generación. Están ejecutando increiblemente bien, desde las referencia culturales hasta la psicologia de los pibes.

[People's Art of War @pplsartofwar]

No crying in the casino.

[Glenn Hitchcock @glennui]

Design is full of codewords. Knowing them changes what you can ask for, and what you can get back, whether you're working with devs, or an AI.

“tint this neutral color”, “fix this widow”, “nudge it to the optical center”

I wrote them down: https://t.co/aFyd5avj9o

[ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs]

Claude Fable 5 changed how we work on the Claude Code team day to day.

We used to verify that Claude did the work right. Now we verify that it's doing the right work.

Here’s the 3 biggest changes:

[Evil Rabbit @evilrabbit_]

One of the most important things I’ve learned over the years is that great work is never built alone. Be kind, respect your team, share credit, name the people who helped, and never leave anyone behind.

[Pablo Fredrikson @PeladoNerd]

https://t.co/zfFpPnJbdr

[Sick @sickdotdev]

Don’t make it so complex

[Ben Cohen @blc_16]

I’ve decided to leave @AnthropicAI

Never thought I’d say this so soon. The pursuit of AGI has truly been my life’s work but something more important has emerged.

In 1942, hundreds of America’s best scientists made huge sacrifices and joined the Manhattan Project to protect this nation against immense evil.

Today, America faces a similar danger. Over the last few years sparks of AGI have been felt across the world.

In order to protect this great nation against the threat of AGI ending up in the hands of evil, I have decided to join the modern day Manhattan Project.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining (and moving into the office) @UseCorgi as a sales development representative!

[DHH @dhh]

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier.

Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor.

What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else?

People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.

So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.

[The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I can now probably say this:

Two months ago, inside Anthropic someone suggested building a token leaderboard.

A heated internal debate followed and the decision was made to *never* ever do it… because several people inside Anthropic simply thought ahead of the consequences