Jon Evans

engineer / novelist, former journalist / CTO / co-founder / archivist / peripatetist / superintelligencist. Vanity site

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

On the occasion of its official paperback release I wrote some reflections on EXADELIC: https://t.co/no2bnvQnxc

[Donut Operator 🍩 @DonutOperator]

I asked AI if there were human bodies inside the vehicles in Disney’s “Cars” and it got kinda dark.

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

"I’m just saying that if you want to understand the vibes in American society, you need to look at that chart, because it’s kind of crazy." https://t.co/i3qElVH4W6

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

The great Gene Wolfe partakes of the AI-doom and interplanetary-species discourses way back in 1980

[Max Leiter @maxleiter]

"They're made out of weights."

"Weights?"

"Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights."

"Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?"

"The weights make the words. Are you understanding me?"

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Notes on 100+ Recent Technical Interviews

I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions

1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers.

2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through.

3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself.

4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing.

5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation.

6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20+ people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into.

8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually.

I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

[Alyssa 🌻 @alyssaleann]

In case you were wondering (I was), La Sagrada Família isn’t even a little bit overrated

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

OH COME ON. I have basically stopped buying anything at a pharmacy that I can buy at a supermarket and I strongly suspect I am not alone (I only set foot in this one because I'm charging my car next to it.)

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

I LOVE BOOSTERS (Riley 2026) - OK, so this isn't a stone cold all-time classic like SORRY TO BOTHER YOU; a lot of it doesn't work. But it is still very much Not Like Other Movies, in the best way, and I wish Riley directed one every year.

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

I'm beginning to think

That datacenters

Might be

A fairly straightforward light industrial land use

(ganked from https://t.co/u8LRQyTyP6)

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

Who could possibly have anticipated that humans would make storytelling one of the most popular uses of a new medium, what an absolute shock (via https://t.co/L0WCBxTPIC )

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

TIL Calendly was once worth $3B https://t.co/XskH9njs17

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

Like, really ouch. https://t.co/2Q6myvqglk

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

Ouch. https://t.co/kEP2JVRICp

[Jimmy Heaters @CathPoaster]

new grads often ask me what they should be doing so they don't fall behind in the ai space. there's a lot, but its honestly super manageable. become intimate with model internals. proof based linear algebra. non-convex optimization. this is stuff you could've done in undergrad. it definitely takes some time and work, but its doable. have taste, have opinions. train a small model, then train a big one. vLLM internals, tensor parallelism. hand roll kernels. cluster orchestration. do you have opinions on synthetic data? why don't you? SFT, PPO, you should know this. learn Triton. everyone is reproducing papers now so you need to be doing more. do you know the semi supply chain? where are the bottlenecks? hardware, man, hardware. your little gpu rig erector set in your basement isnt gonna cut it. build a cluster, a big one. pretrain a 800B model. now postrain it. serve it to millions of people. you should be able to beat deepseek on some benchmarks now. its a lot to take in but it all snowballs. this what job security looks like from now on. do you want to work in tech or not

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

you have to admit, it's very cyberpunk. https://t.co/t1mAicwI7t (almost certainly unrelatedly, I departed Meta Superintelligence a month ago and, sigh, my IG was promptly perma-locked. Presumably an internal -> external user transition bug ... also I rarely use IG so whatevs)

[Hidden in Frame @HiddenFrame_]

In "The Odyssey" (2026), Odysseus speaks with a Boston accent, despite being from Ithaca, which is in New York.

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

Stay off my side, man

[Transfer News Live @DeadlineDayLive]

🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Drake has reportedly placed a $1 MILLION bet on Arsenal to win the Champions League Final against PSG tonight. 🤯

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

As usual if you actually read the study at https://t.co/4IzUBHR9O6 it's way less contentious than this summary makes it sound

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

A new survey found that 75% of Americans believe restaurants should offer some form of adults-only dining experience, including child-free sections, late-night restrictions for kids, and quieter environments focused more on the dining experience than family-friendly chaos.

[Jon Evans @rezendi]

@wryzx @ramez cyberpunk was a 1980s genre though!