Tanner Johnson

LDS | BYU | Utah Jazz/Mammoth | Tech | AI | InfoSec | Crypto

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

What a neat exercise. LOC is not a good indicator of productivity and the planner vs worker paradigm is taking off.

[Cursor @cursor_ai]

We had a team of agents rebuild SQLite from its 835-page manual.

It created a replica in Rust which passed 100% of a held-out test suite.

Interestingly, cost varied 15x depending on which model mix we used.

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

@XDevelopers: the official X MCP is a great direction. Please make personal account management affordable - and make the real limits match the docs.

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

So I had what I thought was a pretty simple idea - use AI to go through all 550+ accounts I follow, look at their bios and recent posts, and organize/clean up my lists so they’re actually useful.

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

This is exactly the kind of personal account maintenance that AI + MCP should make easy.

Instead, the pricing and unexplained limits turned it into a multiple-day, $30+ ordeal.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

Example of why the Founding Fathers rejected a government-by-plebiscite in favor of a republic in which representatives are supposed to “refine and enlarge” the public’s views.

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

@UtahWildfire The map link you posted doesn't work

[Kostas Moros @MorosKostas]

Uh...why shouldn't the President have that power? We elected the President, not a bunch of agency heads.

Yes, it's a lot of power, I agree. That's why Congress should claw it back and shrink back down the executive branch.

But so long as Congress has handed the executive such power, it "shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Not a bunch of random agency heads.

Big "deep state" L today, gotta love it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

We're gonna abundance so much, you may even get tired of abundance. And you'll say, please, please, it's too much abundance. We can't take it anymore. Mr. Musk, it's too much, and I will say no it isn't, we have to keep abundance, we have to abundance more, we're gonna abundance more!

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

"Marc, why do you care about SPLC's crimes & other activists/companies/gov't agencies who may have done the same/complicit?"

I sat in so many meetings for a DECADE where these groups determined who got cancelled/debanked/censored. Wholly un-American. People need to go to jail.

[Inter Miami CF @InterMiamiCF]

Views hit different out here 😍🏔️

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

🧵🚨 THREAD: Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. Within TWO HOURS, leaders of 7 "bridge-building" organizations assembled on a conference call. Why so fast? Because UVU was THEIR campus. 🚨

This is Maury Giles, incoming CEO of Braver Angels, admitting on camera at the National Conference on Citizenship:

"Within two hours of the assassination, a group of us, all Utahns, we gathered on a call. We'd become friends over the last 5 years through our work in the community. And we also happen to be leaders in seven different national organizations that work in civic renewal."

Two hours. Seven national organizations. But this wasn't a spontaneous reaction to a tragedy. This was a network protecting its home turf. Because UVU wasn't just the place where Kirk was shot. It was the institutional center of the entire bridge-building / Dignity Index apparatus... and had been for years.

And the kicker?

These seven national organizations don't hide their own intent: replicate color revolution tactics in the United States. And, yes, that includes MWEG - Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

I have the receipts... they all admitted this on camera.

As always, patience as I pull together the thread. 👇

[Utah Mammoth @utahmammoth]

We are IN ‼️

#TusksUp | @Delta

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Boil the Oceans

You know the phrase: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone’s said it in some overly ambitious meeting. It’s good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think it’s time to retire saying it.

Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first.

I was recently with a university endowment’s head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it — that’s the natural first reaction. But it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment.

Instead of worrying about doing the same thing we’ve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why can’t that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why can’t a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why can’t we have fusion energy? Why can’t we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product?

These aren’t rhetorical questions anymore. They’re engineering problems with paths to solutions.

Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten.

If you’re a worker — someone who trades labor for a living — this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if you’re already management or capital, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now?

The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now — if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves.

Buckminster Fuller coined the term “ephemeralization” in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables — each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasn’t describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization.

This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t use less of it — you use vastly more. Steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine.

But Jevons Paradox doesn’t activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions — to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee

That’s what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present.

Time to start.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.

[Timon Wong @t31kx]

Claude Code: "You've hit your limit · resets 7pm"

Me from 5-6.59pm

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

https://t.co/NMHGh4J2D6

[Tanner Johnson @tannerwj]

**Keep Your Identity Small** (Feb 2009)

Politics & religion yield uniquely useless discussions b/c they become part of ppls' identity → no fruitful argument possible; ppl become partisan by definition.

Any topic can degenerate into "religious war" once it engages identity (e.g. prog langs → X vs Y programmers; old battles w/o living sides stay calm).

Root cause isn't the topic (politics/religion), but identity. Exclude identity-driven participants → discussion can be fruitful.

Politics/religion are minefields b/c they engage so many identities; even harmless topics (Ford vs Chevy trucks) can be risky w/ certain ppl.

Go beyond tolerating opposing views: avoid labels altogether. More labels → dumber you get.

Let as few things as possible become part of your identity.