🍊

not interning at substack.

[🍊 @substackintern]

@DailyMail perfect opportunity to start "Daily Email"

[🍊 @substackintern]

@sundarpichai talk about bad timing.

[🍊 @substackintern]

these writers need to chill a bit.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

A good reminder that just because you cuda doesn’t mean you shuda.

[🍊 @substackintern]

now everyone has a conspiracy theory, let the man breath.

[🍊 @substackintern]

He will be back. The man's a powerhouse.

[🍊 @substackintern]

"When you drink the water, remember the spring."

[NVIDIA Newsroom @nvidianewsroom]

NVIDIA announces CEO transition. Read the release: https://t.co/MTTUvFHCJA

[🍊 @substackintern]

S3E6: The Affair

[🍊 @substackintern]

😄

[yessenia @ymsox]

playfulness is truly the frequency of abundance

[🍊 @substackintern]

Jack of all trades, master of monitoring the situation.

[🍊 @substackintern]

this could have saved Jensen Huang

[🍊 @substackintern]

@LamagiedContes @durov 💯

[bilal @bilal2vec]

i never cuda expected this

[🍊 @substackintern]

Your unemployment is someone's dream. Stop disrespecting them.

[🍊 @substackintern]

@cyrax2014 @durov thats a feature.

[Slava Akhmechet @spakhm]

On what to do (and not to do) when starting a new job. Surprisingly scales from intern to director, maybe further. You want to run two parallel threads:

Thread A: find _one_ valuable problem you can solve very quickly (in like a day). Since you just started it's obviously going to be tiny. Then:

1. Solve the problem _fast_, faster than you think possible. Do a really really good job.
2. Talk to ppl about it.
3. Find the next most valuable problem you can solve quickly, but this time 10% bigger. Go to step 1.

Thread B: talk to everybody. Pretend you're a journalist or smtg and try to really understand them. What are they working on? Why is it valuable? What's the biggest problem on their mind? What's stopping them from going faster? What's the next most valuable problem they'd be solving if they weren't solving this one? etc.

Do this for 3-6 months. What will happen is:

- you'll be immediately useful (albeit slightly, but that's much better than not at all)
- you'll build momentum
- if you pick a 10% bigger problem every time, in ~3-6 months you'll be solving big, really valuable problems
- you'll build credibility with your colleagues
- you'll build knowledge about how things work
- you'll get to know lots of people and their work, and will pick more valuable problems

That builds your reputation as someone who is reliable, agentic, thoughtful, solves valuable problems, and has ramped up quickly. These kinds of people are _really_ valuable. If you can do that, soon you'll be able to work on anything you want.

---

Failure modes (do _not_ do this):

- getting distracted by dozens of different projects. Your knowledge ends up too shallow and ppl correctly bucket you as someone who never finishes stuff.
- worrying that what you're working on is too small and trying to do bigger stuff too soon. No one trusts you yet, and since you keep not solving anything, that impression solidifies. You need to earn ppl's trust. Start small, finish it, and remember that 10% bigger each time is exponential growth.
- picking some big vague amorphous problem. People who do that tend to have made very little progress in three months, and everyone starts thinking of you as ineffective. You can solve those eventually, but you need to build up knowledge and momentum first.
- trying to contribute to conversations too early. You're eager to be useful, but that's not how you become useful. You still don't understand anything. Ask lots of questions and solve small problems first.
- going into "learning mode" and not solving anything. You need to learn and solve problems in parallel, that's how you build up credibility and earn people's trust.
- going into "solving mode" and not talking to anyone. People need to know about what you're working on, and you need to understand their problems to do good work.

[Anusha @__acbraingenome]

we all owe it to Andrew Ng and 3blue1brown.

[🍊 @substackintern]

bro why don't you do prompt engineering. no context engineering is hot right now. i heard tom is doing harness engineering but then he messaged me saying goal engineering is the real game changer. now everyone's talking about intent engineering so i tried that for a week then someone on the discord said loop engineering is what actually ships so i rewrote everything again then agentic engineering started trending and my manager asked if we were doing memory engineering properly i said yeah but then the new guy joined and insisted tool engineering is the bottleneck so we spent two sprints on that until the infra team said sandbox engineering is non-negotiable now eval engineering is the only way to know if any of this works specification engineering came up in the last all-hands so now we have a doc for that orchestration engineering is what the platform team is calling their new layer state engineering is apparently what we were missing the whole time. permission engineering got added after the security review. observability engineering is the new must-have. skill engineering is what the design team keeps asking for. subagent engineering is the architecture everyone is drawing on whiteboards. filesystem engineering is what the coding agents people won't shut up about and now ambient engineering is the one all the founders are pitching as the future so yeah i still have no idea what we're actually building.

[Harrison Chase @hwchase17]

c̵o̵n̵t̵e̵x̵t̵ ̵e̵n̵g̵i̵n̵e̵e̵r̵i̵n̵g̵

̵h̵a̵r̵n̵e̵s̵s̵ ̵e̵n̵g̵i̵n̵e̵e̵r̵i̵n̵g̵

goal engineering