Rann

Machine Learning Engineer

[Rann @rstone_9]

Prompt: write a post on insider trading without saying ‘insider trading’

[Silicon Salvage @SiliconSalvage]

I have, at any given time, between four and six remote part-time jobs at small and mid cap technology companies whose stocks I either own or am considering buying, and I do this not because I need the money, which I do not, but because the only way I have ever found to actually understand how a software business works is to be inside one, on a Slack workspace, in the standups, watching the sales pipeline get debated on a Tuesday morning by people who do not know I have a 4% position in the parent.

I started doing this in 2019, almost by accident, when a portfolio company I owned posted a $40-an-hour contractor role for a customer success rep and I applied on a whim, mostly to see how the hiring process worked, and ended up taking the job for four months. I learned more about the actual business in those four months than I had learned in three years of reading their 10-Ks. I learned which features customers actually used and which were vanity items in the marketing deck. I learned that the renewal team was understaffed in a way the IR deck would never acknowledge. I learned that the CEO sent personal notes to every customer above $50,000 in ARR, which was the single most important piece of information about the company and which appeared nowhere in any public filing. I tripled my position. The stock doubled in 18 months.

I have done this seven more times since. I have worked, at various points, as a part-time SDR at a vertical SaaS company in legal tech, a contract content writer at a developer tools company, a customer support rep for a small fintech, a freelance Salesforce admin for a healthcare software company, and a 10-hour-a-week implementation consultant for an HR tech company. The pay, in aggregate, has been somewhere around $90,000 a year, which is irrelevant. The information has been worth roughly $4 million in compounded gains across my portfolio, which is not.

My wife, who I love deeply, has stopped asking what I do for work. She has, over the years, developed a small mental model in which I am simultaneously unemployed, employed by six companies, and managing a seven-figure investment portfolio, and she has elected to leave the contradiction unresolved. My CPA has a similar resignation. He files the W-2s in a folder labeled “miscellaneous.” The IRS has, to my knowledge, never asked any questions, although in 2024 they did send a polite letter requesting clarification on why a man with my stated occupation was receiving 1099s from a Series C company in Provo.

This is, in the most literal possible sense, the work. The 10-K tells you what management wants you to know. The earnings call tells you what management has been coached to say. The internal Slack tells you what the company actually is, and the only way to read the internal Slack is to be on it, which requires getting hired, which requires being willing to do the kind of unglamorous, low-status, technically beneath-you work that nobody else who manages real money would ever consider. That unwillingness is, as it has always been, the entire reason it works. The information is sitting there. The companies are hiring. The job listings are public. Almost nobody applies.

[Rann @rstone_9]

Not unexpected, labs benchmaxxing to inflate model performance. Would be interesting if someone can run experiments to prove benchmaxing on OlmOCR and OmniDocbench.
Simply, Prompt with 80% of the document text token without image and if it completes the 20% correctly = benchmaxx

[Rushabh Nagda @rushabh_nagda]

"When a metric becomes the target, it stops being a good metric" - Goodharts Law

last few days GLM-OCR has been trending after it claimed 95% on OmniDocBench, which is higher than Gemini-3-pro

in reality GLM-OCR is way worse than the story these benchmarks paint, lets see how

full disclaimer: ive been working in this space for the last 7 years with @nanonets

[hiroshi @daddynohara]

> be me, applied scientist at amazon
> spend 6 months building ML model that actually works
> ready to ship
> manager asks "but does it Dive Deep?"
> show him 37 pages of technical documentation
> "that's great anon, but what about Customer Obsession?"
> model literally convinces customers to buy more stuff they don't need
> "okay but are you thinking Big Enough?"
> mfw I am literally increasing sales
> okay lets ship it
> PM says there's not enough Disagree and Commit
> we need to disagree about something
> team spends 2 hours debating whether the config file should be YAML or JSON
> engineering insists on XML "for backwards compatibility"
> what backwards compatibility, this is a new service
> doesn't matter, we disagree and commit to XML
> finally get approval to deploy
> "make sure you're frugal with the compute costs"
> model runs on a potato, costs $2/month
> finance still wants a cost breakdown
> write 6-pager about why we need $2/month
> include bar raiser in the review
> bar raiser asks "but can we do it for $1.50? we need to be Frugal"
> spend another month optimizing to hit $1.50
> ready to deploy again
> VP decides we need to "Invent and Simplify"
> requests we rebuild the entire thing using a new framework
> framework doesn't exist yet
> "show some Ownership and build it yourself"
> 3 months later, framework is half done
> org restructure happens
> new manager says this doesn't align with team goals anymore
> project cancelled
> model never ships
> manager gets promoted to L8 for "successfully reallocating resources"
> team celebrates with 6-pager retrospective about what we learned
> mfw we delivered on all 16 leadership principles
> mfw we delivered nothing else
> amazon.jpg

[Rann @rstone_9]

Need some recommendations on beginner’s telescope to buy

[Rann @rstone_9]

It feels like you’ve just unlocked a hidden room in your mind, and you are quietly walking around, admiring the furniture.

You feel wonder, rather than curiosity.

[Rann @rstone_9]

What is it called when you are just high on your thoughts without any stimulants?

It is one of the most underrated and exquisite human experiences.

There is no restless urge to act, no sudden need to solve a problem. You are simply basking in it.

[Rann @rstone_9]

Continued Pre training ❗️🟰 continual learning 🤦‍♂️

[roominator @roominator]

> bezos starts a stealth AI lab
> immediately ships continual learning

just do the obvious thing

let your customers backprop

[Rann @rstone_9]

@rohitrango Stay strong brother

[Naval @naval]

People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws, until you finally get what you deserve

[Gargee Barke @gargee_barke]

I am beginning to agree, amazing weather and big houses making Bangalore > Mumbai

[Naval @naval]

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought - they must be earned.

[signüll @signulll]

in close up, life is a tragedy, in long shot, it’s a comedy.

[Noctara @rumilyrics]

The fastest way to attract what’s meant for you is to express yourself so honestly that everything misaligned falls away on its own.

[Rann @rstone_9]

@prajdabre Just rejected an ML candidate who couldn’t explain how transformers convert voltage. Kept talking about ‘self attention’ instead. These people man.

[Rann @rstone_9]

@daddynohara Suffering from success

[Rann @rstone_9]

@daddynohara I didn’t realise my teenage self was biohacking at 240p before it was cool.

[Rann @rstone_9]

@swstica My team is hiring for dev rel roles.
PS: not the founder

[Rann @rstone_9]

@monali_dambre Any notion doc we can exchange notes on?

[Rann @rstone_9]

This tweet was composed in an Uber on Outer Ring Road

[Karan Goel @krandiash]

Someone needs to study the number of hours of lost productivity due to traffic in India

Huge opportunity to make 0.5B people productive on the crazy hours spent sitting around

[Rann @rstone_9]

@rajvishah30 Shit I forgot what this post was about. Anyone else switched between 3 apps while reading this