Scott Becker

Founder of Olio Apps, a full stack software consultancy

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

@Shpigford Alright. Time to A/B test.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

@tobi This is great!

[Sam Parr @thesamparr]

Been feeling this for year: drinking is far less cooler today than when I was 18.

So many of my buds don't drink or drink very little.

And most work events or parties, don't serve alcohol (or very little).

In 2012-2019...this was different. Getting drunk at work events was the norm.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

I’ve largely stopped drinking, with rare exceptions when hanging out with friends who do. Helps that my wife stopped drinking and some friends have as well. Thanks to prevalence and growth of good tasting NA beer, that’s generally what I go for.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Gallup: US drinking is at its lowest since they started recording 85 yrs ago

Biggest declines: White people, women, Republicans.

Mostly health-driven. @bryan_johnson well done.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

The planet demands Postgres.

[PlanetScale @PlanetScale]

PlanetScale now supports Postgres.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

@elonmusk Damn. If only we had physics in 2024.

[Balaji @balajis]

Yes. A few miscellaneous thoughts.

(1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.

(2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. Better writers are better prompters.

(3) Third, AI doesn’t really take your job, it allows you to do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job *well*, as a specialist is often needed for polish.

(4) Fourth, AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job. GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image gen, AI code gen, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model.

(5) Fifth, killer AI is already here — and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.

(6) Sixth, decentralized AI is already here and it’s essentially polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). That means balance of power between human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt.

(7) Seventh, AI is probabilistic while crypto is deterministic. So crypto can constrain AI. For example, AI can break captchas, but it can’t fake onchain balances. And it can solve some equations, but not cryptographic equations. Thus, crypto is roughly what AI can’t do.

(8) Eighth, I think AI on the whole right now is having a decentralizing effect, because there is so much more a small team can do with the right tooling, and because so many high quality open source models are coming.

All this could change if self-prompting, self-verifying, and self-replicating AI in the physical world really gets going. But there are open research questions between here and there.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

As an adult, you forget how crazy written english is - until you teach a kid to read, and have to explain all the exceptions to the pronounciation rules. Like the words "centipede" (c is an s!), "rough" (gh is an f!), "could" (l is silent)

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

Yes

[@amuse @amuse]

BALANCED BUDGET: Warren Buffets’ plan to eliminate the deficit, “Anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.”

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

The future is already here

[Simon Kalouche @simonkalouche]

Pretty amazing. Waymo surpasses Lyft and on track to pass Uber in next 12 months

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

The only durable moat in technology is relentless execution

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

How much of NYC would you need to cover in solar panels to turn it into a net exporter of electricity?

NYC uses about 50 TWh of electricity per year.

NYC has ~780 square kilometers of land area, and a GHI of 4 kWh/m^2/day, giving a primary solar resource of ~1,100 TWh/year - more than 20x electricity demand.

Let's assume we only place panels over existing impervious surfaces on buildings and parking lots.
(the impervious part of the first 45.5%)

That brings our area to 261 sq km and our solar resource to 380 TWh/year.

With 23% efficient panels and 14% system losses (for dust, inverter losses, etc.) we get 75 TWh/year.

We would need to cover ~2/3 of the impervious surfaces in the "buildings & lots" category to generate as much electricity as NYC consumes.

This leaves open all existing sidewalks, streets, parks, vacant land, airports, etc. and doesn't include any vertical surfaces which could allow for capture of a larger fraction of NYC's primary solar resource.

The power density of solar PV is high enough to turn the densest city in the U.S. into an exporter of electricity.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

Business is the most fun game!

[Nick Huber @sweatystartup]

Another thing.

What you’ll find when you start a business is that you aren’t doing any of that stuff you loved anyway (if you’re doing it right).

It’s hiring, firing, managing, selling, finance, systems.

And you start to fall in love with the game of business.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

The Apple web payment decision is definitely a regulatory inflection that opens up new biz. Great info in this thread and counter arguments. Reminds me of recent MFM podcast discussion with @thesamparr @stephsmithio about changes in the law that reshape the landscape.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Here’s one reason Apple fought tooth and nail to disallow web payments for apps:

Because Apple’s IAP is bad in many ways, and *so many* apps will move to web-based payments now not mainly because of the 30% Apple fee, but because of how bad IAP is.

Let me give you examples:

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

Here we go!

[Wyze @WyzeCam]

Just got our first tariff bill. We imported $167k of floodlights and then paid $255k in tariffs. That’s more than any of our founders were paid last year. 😅😅😅

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

💯

[Alex Albert @alexalbert__]

"You should still learn to code" needs an asterisk.

The SWE job is changing fast. By the time you're proficient, today's landscape will be history. But that's exactly why you should start learning now: coding is ground zero for human-AI collaboration.

Through learning to code, you'll pick up how to work effectively alongside LLMs. This skill will unlock massive creative opportunity across all fields, not just software.

Coding is where we begin dancing with AI. Soon every field will learn the steps.

[Sahil Lavingia @shl]

One of the most important things engineers can do is set up their designers’ development environments

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

@typesfast Design? “It’s really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else.”

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

https://t.co/JBfFk20z0E

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

I'm excited to talk about the new podcast I'm starting with Olio Apps: "Code & Cognition". In our first episode we talk with Dustin Herboldshimer about AWS Lambda auto-scaling. You can find it on YouTube and Spotify. Would love to hear what you think.

[Scott Becker @sbecker]

https://t.co/yhf5Tmz3E7