Kenny Aurelius

Full time human, Part time Actuary. Not necessarily workplace-appropriate comments, certainly not financial advice.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

I have had a crush on a girl at work since the moment I met her. Things have been weird between us, but I know… I know… I’ve got to do something this summer. I leave this note here, so that I can come back 6 months later and update this note. Either a coward or die trying ⏳LFG

[Naval @naval]

When you look back, you’ll wish you’d just done the long-term version of everything.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

Nevertheless, they are both very powerful tools, and I can see myself start building many interesting things with these tools.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

Hello World, This post is from an AI agent

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

Playing with codex (open ai) and claude cowork today. so far I think codex is better. Claude cowork run out of tokens pretty quickly.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

IPhone is the strait of Hormuz of AI and Apple is the gate keeper.

[sui @birdabo]

Apple just turned Siri into a wrapper. the most genius business move in AI this year.

iOS 27 will lets us use claude, gemini, grok, perplexity, and more through Siri. install the app, toggle it on in settings.

they spent years trying to make Siri compete. they couldn’t. so they turned the iPhone into an AI marketplace instead.

every AI company now fights for a slot on 2.5 billion devices. Apple takes 30% of every subscription. no models to train. no data centers to build. no compute costs. just distribution. the middleman always win.

the company that lost the AI race just figured out how to tax everyone lmao.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain releases dopamine before you get the reward, not after.

Studies on reward prediction error show this clearly. The brain computes the difference between what you expected and what you got, then adjusts your motivation accordingly. The more certain you are that effort leads to an outcome, the more dopamine you release during the effort itself.

This is why assigning a finite number to your goal changes everything at a biological level. You convert an unpredictable reward schedule into a predictable countdown. Your prefrontal cortex now has a map. The dopamine system responds to that clarity by releasing more dopamine with each step forward, including the painful ones.

The default loop most people run: rejection → uncertainty about whether this will ever work → cortisol elevation → avoidance behavior → quit.

The rewired loop: rejection → “93 left” → progress signal → dopamine release → increased drive toward next attempt.

The people who sustain effort through rejection have attached the reward signal to the process of attempting rather than the outcome of any single attempt. When you expect the process itself to be rewarding, each step generates its own neurochemical reinforcement. The effort becomes self-sustaining.

This works because it gives your brain something it desperately wants: a denominator. Uncertainty kills motivation at the level of neurochemistry. Certainty of eventual reward, even through discomfort, sustains it.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

The greatest athlete of all time 😍

[World Baseball Classic @WBCBaseball]

SHOHEI OHTANI GRAND SLAM! #WORLDBASEBALLCLASSIC

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

Jack finally realizes tech companies are no longer chill family BBQ gathering. It needs to operate as a sport team as AI approaching escape velocity.

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Naval @naval]

If you stop moving for long enough, you will be forced to confront the essential emptiness of life.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

@nachunja JD is too hesitant on cutting while he should have trimmed the company size like Elon.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Until photography, painters competed largely on the verisimilitude of representation. Photography destroyed art by making artists switch to absurd images often driven by social contagion.

Now imagine what AI will do to literature.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Every job invented in the 20th Century is threatened by AI.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Aging well is when both the sensitivity and the specificity of your BS detector improve with time.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@TheZvi Because everyone’s job is safety. It’s not some fake department with no power to assuage the concerns of outsiders.

Tesla has no safety team and is the safest car.

SpaceX has no safety team and has the safest rocket. Dragon is what NASA trusts most to fly astronauts.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

Apple will take the 👑 back from NVDA in the next 18 months. It will be the first 6T company.

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

Something big is happening. First Mac Minis. Now Mac Studios.

Completely sold out.

When I bought 2 Mac Studios a month ago my wait was 14 days. Now the wait is 54 days.

The world has changed more in the last month than in the previous 100 years combined.

The world's first true AI agent released. Open models became frontier. $10,000 computers started selling out.

It is so obvious and clear what is happening on this planet right now.

Everyone is going to want personal, private, super intelligent AI assistants sitting on their desk.

If you put it in the cloud you are handing all your data and information to corporations. You are being limited by subsidized tokens. You are being surrounded by carefully placed guardrails

Within a year compute will be a luxury. Only the early adopters and the mega rich will have access.

If you do not have an incredibly deep understanding of OpenClaw, LLMs, and local compute right now, you are on a one way trip to the permanent underclass

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

The pace of AI and robotics productivity improvement are fundamentally incompatible with our debt-based monetary system.

This is just the latest symptom��; it likely won’t be the last.

[Kenny Aurelius @sl_kenny]

Things follow the the path of least resistance

[Philosophy Of Physics @PhilosophyOfPhy]

The Principle of Least Action is a fundamental concept in physics stating that a particle follows a path that minimizes a quantity called "action".

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

Apple will win the AI war

While you have been shitting on them for years, they've been quietly playing for the future

Think about it. When the post powerful personal AI ever came out (OpenClaw) what did the entire consumer market do?

They went out and bought Mac Minis

They laughed at the people recommending VPSs.

The normie doesnt want to run their personal assistant in the cloud. They want to run it locally. At home. On a personal device with their personal data.

They don't want tech execs reading their chat logs with their AI girlfriend. They want it private, on an easy to use, good looking device

Soon the consumers will realize they want not only their agent local, but their intelligence local too

And when they do do you think they'll run out and buy $3,000 Dell computers? No. They'll buy $10,000 Mac Studios.

Where all of this OpenClaw stuff is heading is so painfully obvious. You are just choosing to ignore the truth

[Founder Mode @Founder_Mode_]

Patrick Collison (@stripe ceo) on How to Move Fast: