Qil

just another tinkerer

[The Happy Path @The_HappyPath]

@tanujDE3180 The slashes open the host section of a URL.

Tim Berners-Lee took the pattern from Apollo workstations, where // meant leaving the local machine and a single slash meant a local path. He has since said the slashes were unnecessary.

[Qil @qilyourself]

love the fact that I can articulate my planning process and implementation more seamlessly with sol. codex is game changer

[love drops @lovedropx]

The absolute best advice for achieving a long term goal by Tolstoy.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Paul Graham on how to do great work:

“Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in.”

[Jared Friedman @snowmaker]

Software engineering changed more in the last 3 months than the preceeding 30 years.

Everything about running a software company needs to be rethought from first principles.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

https://t.co/3GQUlfH58t

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

People generally don't go after their most ambitious ideas. But that's what creates the most value. Plus there's fewer people who play in that space.

Go for the hard thing.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

Everything from a job offer to a marriage proposal is a yes to one thing and a no to hundreds of thousands of other opportunities. It’s easy—the universal default—to get pulled into the quicksand of half-hearted yesses and promiscuous overcommitment, ending up stressed and reactive, wondering where your time has gone.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

How to cultivate discipline:

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

“A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful.”

https://t.co/0cf8SXcIjk

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

So many people are afraid to start something new because they think they’re about to lose what they have. But losing what you have only matters if you can’t get it back. And the reality is - the door to mediocrity is always open. So you have one of the few asymmetric bets in life. Risk nothing to gain everything.

When you go after your dreams, you’re not closing any doors, just opening them.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If I could send my 18 year old self a message, it would have three parts:

1. Prestige is often mistaken. Follow curiosity instead.

2. There's no way to avoid hard work. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary.

3. Don't take your parents for granted.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Andrej Karpathy literally revealed why "perfect grades" are a waste of precious time:

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

How to become expert at thing:
1 iteratively take on concrete projects and accomplish them depth wise, learning “on demand” (ie don’t learn bottom up breadth wise)
2 teach/summarize everything you learn in your own words
3 only compare yourself to younger you, never to others

[Kevin Gee @kevg1412]

Larry Page: Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely. That's the thing that people don't get.

[Z Fellows @zfellows]

"If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger, there is almost certainly no leverage.” - Paul Graham

[konstantinpaulus @konstipaulus]

Cursor for video editing doesn't exist for a reason.

Since I've been tagged under this post multiple times and we have first-mover advantage in the space, I felt obligated to share our findings and explain why video editing isn’t on the same level as code editing (yet):

- There is no "VS Code for video editing." There's no open source professional video editing UI that fits this use case, so you first need to build an AI friendly editor before anything else. Adding AI on top of that is the easy part.

- Building NLEs is VERY VERY hard. If you're building one from scratch you'll spend at least 2-3 years (full time) on table-stake features, and there are very few ways to make money before that. On top of that you have to operate in one of the hardest problem spaces in software engineering. I've seen countless video editing startups fail due to technical complexity since I started this company in 2023.

- You'll have to master delayed gratification. With 2-3 years just to build the foundation, you'll have to say no to a lot of temptations, like building a VS Code fork instead that can generate serious revenue in a few months. And once it becomes plausible that you can succeed at building a competitive NLE, you'll get a flood of job offers from well funded startups and corporations that you need to resist. You have to genuinely care about video processing and be intrinsically motivated by something other than "I want to make money fast."

- There is no StackOverflow or GitHub for video editing. You have to teach LLMs a lot of custom constructs, whereas they already have billions of lines of general code in their training data.

- Multimodal requirements are a huge challenge. A coding agent only deals with text in and text out. A video editing agent needs to handle audio, video and images at the same time, which is far harder to process and much more expensive.

- Chat is not the best UX for video editing. Often it’s faster to just make cuts on the timeline than type instructions into a chat box and wait for the result, especially when the LLM makes lots of mistakes that you then have to fix. Our view is that it’s better to have AI actions you can trigger with a button than to describe everything in a prompt.

- Videos require far more bandwidth than text. Uploading footage to the cloud can take hours, while text is instantly accessible anywhere. We experimented with local models (FastVLM), but that path is a dead end due to context window limits. You’re better off with an upload flow.

At Diffusion we don’t see a chat sidebar as our core advantage, but as a helpful feature in specific situations. We’d rather invest the majority of our time into building the best NLE UX than trying to automate everything.

[Karthik @karthikponna19]

> Linux is free
> Docker is free
> Kubernetes is free
> Git and Github are free
> GitHub Actions is free
> Python is free
> AWS, GCP, Azure are free (limited use)
> Terraform is free
> ArgoCD and Flux are free
> Prometheus and Grafana are free

your laptop and internet connection, that's all you need to start.

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Pro tip: If you're afraid to take the risk, write down in excruciating detail what you're actually afraid of having happen. Step by step what happens next when you fail. You'll often find it's not so bad when you spell it out.

Fear exists in the vague, not the specific.