Scott Girard

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

For the better part of 20,000 centuries of human history, not much happened. We spent about 19,960 of those making slightly different variations of one tool before figuring out the metal thing

And stuff only really took off 2 centuries ago. That we can sort of keep up is amazing

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Everyone is now a programmer, because the present and future programming language is your natural language. If you can write or speak, you can build. This is the most important evolution in our field since its creation. And it's a tsunami that has *just* started.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I still believe that everyone is too fixated on the state of play in AI right now (which companies in which countries are winning, how to manage costs, etc.) and not focused enough on the continued steepness of the capability curve for AI

At high capabilities, a lot changes fast

[Scott Girard @scottgirard]

The software business model is changing. Instead of pre-built software, the future business model will be bespoke software built on-demand.

[Stefans Keiss @memphyssk]

@simonw honestly this tracks, real autonomy for an agent only works if it's sandboxed away from your own logins to begin with, not bolted onto your daily browser.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Jevons Paradox is about to hit AI harder than almost any industry we have seen before.

People once thought faster internet would simply let us load the same websites more quickly.

That was not even close to what happened.

Faster connections created video streaming, cloud software, online gaming, video calls, social media, and entire businesses that could not exist on slow internet.

Every increase in speed created new reasons to use more bandwidth.

AI will work the same way. Today, we mostly use models for chat, coding, search, writing, and a few business workflows.

But once intelligence becomes cheap enough, fast enough, and reliable enough, it will be built into every process that involves a decision.

The biggest AI workloads probably do not exist yet.

They are waiting for the cost of intelligence to fall.

It will create millions of new tasks that are currently too slow, too expensive, or simply impossible.

[Andrew McCalip @andrewmccalip]

Less than 100 miles away, about 50 tons of steel and copper are spinning at exactly 3,600 RPM. A giant rotor slews magnetic fields through copper windings and, per Faraday and Maxwell, induces a synchronized 60 Hz sine wave across an entire grid.

That electromagnetic wave propagates through grain oriented silicon steel, laminated transformer cores, kilometers of aluminum conductor steel reinforced cable, SF₆ insulated switchgear, substations switching hundreds of kilovolts, distribution transformers, oxygen free copper wiring, silicon MOSFETs, ferrites, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the USB C cable plugged into my phone.

There, power feeds a capacitive touchscreen. A transparent matrix of indium tin oxide is deposited on glass. The controller continuously scans the grid. My finger changes the mutual capacitance by a fraction of a picofarad, perturbing the local electric field just enough for dedicated analog front ends to detect before software reconstructs the touch.

Iron ore. Bauxite. Silica sand. Copper ore. Lithium brines. Rare earths.

Refined. Alloyed. Crystallized. Doped. Implanted. Deposited. Etched. Polished.

We purified sand into nearly perfect single crystal silicon, grew boules, sliced wafers, placed dopant atoms with nanometer precision, fabricated chips containing tens of billions of transistors, synchronized them with clocks billions of times per second, and engineered them to execute matrix multiplications at a scale no human could comprehend.

Somewhere along the way, matmuls started to look like us.

That is an astonishing thought.

The towers of abstraction are staggering. No one person built this. No one person fully understands it. Yet every morning millions of people wake up tired, answer emails, argue over specifications, chase margins, fix defects, make payroll, and try to cover their mortgages. Somehow the whole machine keeps humming.

A planetary Swiss watch assembled from physics, markets, bureaucracy, ambition, error, and human necessity.

And after all of that, I touch a piece of conductive glass and step into the Roman forum of modern thought, where millions of minds test ideas against one another in real time.

Clockwork humanity.

It staggers the mind.

[Captain Insight @CaptainInsightX]

One guy. One Navy ship. One file. 1 trillion databases.
He built it alone in 2000. And gave it away forever. 🤯

Meet D. Richard Hipp 🇺🇸

> American developer. Born 1961 in North Carolina.
> In 2000, working as a contractor on a US Navy destroyer.
> Got frustrated with bulky databases that needed servers and setup.
> Built SQLite in his spare time ~ a single-file database engine.
> No server. No installation. No configuration. Just one file.
> 25 years later, every iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows PC runs SQLite.
> Powers Chrome, Firefox, Safari, WhatsApp, iMessage, Skype.
> Runs inside Tesla cars and commercial airplanes. 🚀
> Over 1 trillion SQLite databases active worldwide today.
> Put the entire codebase in the public domain. Zero royalties forever.
> Trillion-dollar companies use his code. He's never charged a cent.
> Still maintains it full-time with a tiny team of 3.
> Pledged free support and updates until at least 2050.
> No VC money. No acquisitions. No spotlight. Just code.

Every app on your phone runs his invisible masterpiece.
Most engineers build for fame. He built for forever.

Database GOAT. 🐐

[signüll @signulll]

the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.

like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.

the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.

that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.

you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.

this all leads to some interesting questions:

- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.

the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.

we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.

the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.

[vas @vasuman]

Somewhere out there is a guy who uses Notion, Superhuman, OpenClaw on a Mac Mini, Raycast, a mechanical keyboard ($400), Wispr Flow, and gets nothing done every day

[Scott Girard @scottgirard]

Little did the guy behind me know that he was honking his horn at a robot.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

The Maduro capture, coupled with the air attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, suggest an extraordinary level of skill, technology and daring. Precisely the opposite signal from that sent by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

RE: Fraud in Minnesota

I’m not sure that most Americans understand that in large swathes of humanity, there is no actual concept of “fraud,” particularly fraud against the government. Instead, there is a belief in the virtue of getting away with what you can to help yourself and your tribe.

I spent a lot of my life in the Middle East and Central Asia, working closely with foreign contractors and foreign governments to provide support to American military operations. As a US Army officer with a big checkbook courtesy of Uncle Sam, I can’t really count the sheer number of times I was offered bribes to award a contract, or falsify records to do things like create larger (fake) headcounts at places like dining facilities, or to just simply be on the take for future illegal requests.

Of course I had enough sense to never comply with such requests. Moreover, they were never explicitly structured as “bribes”; instead it was usually along the lines of “Here I have these Rolexes as gifts for you and your wife to show our friendship.” (Unfortunately, too many US officers and NCOs succumbed to this siren song and ended up breaking rocks in Leavenworth.)

The weird thing about this to me was that whenever I turned down such an offering, it was treated as a grave insult. I was the one in the wrong, and not the fraudster trying to bribe me. They considered it rude that I was in their country and refused to accept how things got done. After all, why did I not want to help my tribe by helping their tribe?

Let me repeat: in these cultures, FRAUD IS NOT EVEN A CONCEPT. There is only what helps your tribe.

Such thought processes are so alien to Americans and much of the West. We are raised on the presumption that our institutions are valid, that the rule of law always prevails, and that integrity is universal. We need these presumptions to have working governments and economies, and without those presumptions—without the mental barrier that causes us not to accept outright fraud—our nation would quickly descend into the economic and social hellscape of countries like…. ummm… you know…. SOMALIA!

So when we import people en masse from cultures that accept bribery and fraud as routine, acceptable ways to advance one’s tribe, we should not be surprised that things like the $8 BILLION fraud schemes of the Somali population in Minnesota happen so easily.

Introducing a fraud-based culture based on tribalism into America is like introducing some sort of lethal virus into a population that has no natural immunity. The virus will spread and grow, unchecked, because it is so alien to the host. Similarly, a culture of fraud is anathema to American thinking, and it must be cut out before it consumes the host.

So when you see and hear patriotic Americans decrying what is happening in Minnesota or elsewhere, and when they seek deportation of the offenders, it is not “racism,” it is not “bigotry,” it is not “xenophobia”; instead, it is preserving the American tradition of responsible institutions and national integrity.

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

I don't know how to describe it, but 72 degrees with the heat on and 72 degrees with the A/C on are two totally different temperatures

[Scott Girard @scottgirard]

@gunsnrosesgirl3 Measure twice...

[Andrew Torba @BasedTorba]

People are flabbergasted that a machine built with the sole purpose of recognizing patterns in data is recognizing patterns in data.

[U.S. Senator John Fetterman @SenFettermanPA]

250 years of Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, Personal Courage—and the world’s greatest soldiers.

Happy Birthday, @USArmy! 🇺🇸

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

[D. Richard Hipp @DRichardHipp]

The first code check-in for SQLite happened 25 years ago today.

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

The more I learn about the semiconductor supply chain, the more implausible it all seems. There’s a small island vulnerable to invasion where all the chips are made? And the machines to make them all come from one firm in the Netherlands? Using lenses made by one firm in Germany?