everyone asking about his diet and lifestyle is missing the point.
every day, for the last eighty years or so, he’s woken up with a mission he’s irrationally excited about.
With the Boston Marathon today, a good time to re-up one of the greatest figures in sports data: the distribution of marathon finish times (n=9,789,093). The spike at 4:00 is not a coincidence.
You have no experience.
You’ve never started a company.
You’ve never had a full time job.
Nike is going to kill you.
You’re a kid.
You don’t have technical skills.
You shouldn’t build hardware.
Apple is going to kill you.
You can’t build hardware.
You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively.
Athletes don’t care about recovery.
Under Armour is going to kill you.
It won’t be accurate.
You don’t listen.
You’re an ineffective leader.
You can’t recruit great talent.
You’re going to have to pay every athlete.
You can’t measure sleep non-invasively.
It’s too expensive to research.
Athletes are a small market.
The product costs too much to make.
The product costs too much to sell.
Your valuation is too high.
Consumers aren’t going to want it.
Hardware is too hard.
You should measure steps.
Fitbit is going to kill you.
You can’t build a marketing engine.
You can’t raise enough money.
You need a real CEO.
Google is going to kill you.
You can’t be a subscription.
You can’t build a brand.
You can’t do consumer in Boston.
Your valuation is too high.
You shouldn’t make accessories.
You shouldn’t make apparel.
Lululemon is going to kill you.
You can’t predict Covid.
Stay in your niche.
You are going to run out of money.
You can’t build a health platform.
Amazon is going to kill you.
You can’t measure blood pressure.
You can’t get medical approvals.
The market is too small.
You don’t understand AI.
The market is too competitive.
It won’t work internationally.
The supply chain is too complicated.
You can’t build an AI.
You can’t raise enough money.
It’s too competitive.
Healthcare isn’t going to want it.
…
Just keep going ✌️
A new MIT paper by Acemoglu et al. models something I've felt for over a decade but couldn't quite name. When AI delivers personalised answers without requiring effort, it severs the joint product that human learning always created - the private benefit...
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To the other 12,000 people that, like me, have had this bookmarked since June but never actually read it, I have an unfortunate announcement: it is very good. Read it.
You have built an entire identity around being someone who could succeed if they tried. That identity is a warm blanket. Real action is a cold shower. When you finally attempt something, you risk losing the story that has comforted you for years. What if you try and discover you are average? What if you try and find no special talent? This is not fear of failure. This is fear of ordinariness. So you stay in the planning phase forever. You buy the notebook. You watch the tutorial. You tell friends your idea. Anxiety spikes whenever someone asks for a deadline. You are not protecting your future. You are protecting a fantasy that has already expired.
after reading a book about neuroplasticity I realized that learning hard things is the equivalent of an intelligence buff
that year I purposefully introspected within myself what I found difficult to do then I did just that
by year end I was doing bio research in a lab
Did not expect a question that starts out 'Do you think before you speak?' to go so well. A+ question from Charlotte Harpur A++ response from Eileen Gu.
If you are a software engineer "experiencing some degree of mental health crisis", now hear this, because I've been coding for 50 years since the days of punched cards and I have a salutary kick in your ass to deliver.
Get over yourself. Every previous "programming is obsolete" panic has been a bust, and this one's going to be too.
The fundamental problem of mismatch between the intentions in human minds and the specifications that a computer can interpret hasn't gone away just because now you can do a lot of your programming in natural language to an LLM.
Systems are still complicated. This shit is still difficult. The need for people who specialize in bridging that gap isn't going to go away.
As usual, the answer is: upskill yourself and adapt. If a crusty old fart like me can do it, you can too.
Please, do not let your home become your cage. There is a specific kind of danger in staying behind closed doors when the world is waiting for you. It isn't just boredom; it is a slow fading of the self. When you linger in the silence for too long, your mind loses its sharpness, not because it is empty, but because it turns on itself.
Psychology calls this mental rumination, but it feels more like haunting your own life.
It is a misconception that this is laziness. It is rarely a physical refusal to move, but rather a profound, bone-deep exhaustion of the spirit. The world outside begins to look jagged and overwhelming. The idea of stepping out, even just to buy a bottle of water, feels like climbing a mountain. It feels safer to stay hidden.
So, you begin to drift. You get used to the numbness. You exist in the soft, artificial glow of your phone screen, watching other people live while the hours bleed into late nights. You fight silent battles in an empty room, telling yourself you are recharging.
But you are not resting. You are withering.
You are quietly draining your own vitality, letting the dust settle on your soul. We are creatures built for the sun, for movement, for the friction of connection. Your brain is starving for a spark. Without it, your thoughts spiral inward, digging a trench that gets deeper every day.
The longer you stay in the safety of the dark, the taller the walls become. Go out. Let the noise and the light remind you that you are still part of the living.
You wake up at 25 yo. Make coffee. Go to work. Come home at 7. Too tired to do anything but scroll and sleep. Then Friday hits, maybe you go out, maybe you're too exhausted. Suddenly you realize: when did 15 become 10 years ago? You don't feel 25. You feel stuck in a loop you never signed up for. Here's what they don't tell you: this is by design. The 9-to-5 wasn't built for your dreams. It was built to drain you just enough to keep you compliant. You work, consume, repeat. No time to question. No energy to build. And before you know it, 25 becomes 35, then 45. The system needs you tired. Because tired people don't rebel. They just survive. So if you're 25 and feeling this, you're not broken. You're waking up. And that older version of you? They're not begging you to enjoy it. They're begging you to escape it
In 2018, I was rejected by universities so I did my own AI research (with 1 GPU). My second paper (Relativistic GAN) got picked up by @goodfellow_ian, who helped me enter the AI world. I then started a PhD with @bouzoukipunks.
=> Start on your own, and don't be afraid to fail