Mike Ritchie

Founder @definiteapp (a data team that never sleeps)

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

The average company buys Snowflake, then Fivetran, then a BI tool, then spends 6 months connecting them. We spin it all up in 30 seconds.

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

remember the joy of finding the solution to your problem on stackoverflow buried in a comment on the 8th ranked answer

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@swyx 0% chance conductor got 10m per engineer

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@SCHIZO_FREQ it's a fortunate reality: they're free and fun

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@sweepy_twt @ducaswtf what's "god awful" about cloud run? I've run dozens of services on it and never had an issue.

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@Memoraxis @ducaswtf that's literally what an agent can do... I've had IAM issues before and cc easily sorts them out

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@denk_tweets @marclou punching down is never worth it

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@erhannah i was more a "HERE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" guy

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

1. it's a cool word that shifts a little attention away from their blunder

2. it's an assumption of what the stolen keys will be used for

[luna @ImLunaHey]

i still dont get what distillation has to do with api keys being leaked?

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@ImLunaHey 1. it's a cool word for them to use that shifts a little attention away from their blunder

2. it's an assumption of what the stolen keys would be used for

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@thesamparr for my nephew and niece, first 3 bday and xmas i just put money into custodial account (ETFs) for them.

nephew is almost 18 and the account has thousands in it now.

it'll be an awesome surprise when they find out.

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@thdxr you're working on opencode, right?

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@GergelyOrosz this would point more to something being wrong with the other devs.

I don't see how this is possible vs. a capable person using AI.

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@mattturck once everyone has videos like this, none of them standout

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@philkellr get some sort of social / distraction blocker, I made one, but SelfControl is very good and FOSS.

Also, take up whittling.

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

I've heard this story multiple times and I've never been satisfied with the answer, so I had claude make this.

one key point that was never clear to me:

when Pizarro first captures Atahualpa, the thousands of Inca surrounding Atahualpa are not soldiers, they are servants (e.g. "sweepers").

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

New episode with military historian Si Sheppard.

The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history.

Hernan Cortés and some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered the 6 million strong Aztec empire.

Then, a decade later, Francisco Pizarro did the same thing to an Incan Empire of some 10 million inhabitants.

In both cases, the Conquistadors consistently beat native armies while being literally 100x (or even in some cases 1000x) outnumbered - and in many cases, did so without taking a single casualty.

And they did this with 99% of their military forces being made up of the very natives they were trying to subjugate.

We often forget how wild human history is. People talk about AI takeover as if it would be some crazy, unprecedented sci-fi outcome. But this would not be the first time an alien force whose motives the defenders barely understand use more advanced technology and diplomatic cunning to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and long established existing order.

0:00:00 – Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs
0:22:39 – Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca
0:26:59 – Explaining Conquistador military superiority
0:34:39 – Could the natives have beat the Conquistadors?
0:48:56 – The Aztecs and Incas did not learn from each other
0:56:11 – Why Spain still lost in the long run
1:07:47 – Why didn’t the Aztecs/Incas adapt better to European warfare?
1:14:16 – Conquistador motivation
1:26:22 – Why Mughal India also couldn't play the Europeans off each other
1:33:42 – Diplomacy was just as important as technology

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@GergelyOrosz theres a good mac app for this called SelfControl (FOSS)

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@PeterJ_Walker > AI startup revenue

big assumption that it's even charting revenue

[Mike Ritchie @thisritchie]

@ElliotComite if Instinct was hacked right now, what are the chances they'd even know? I'd say < 10% unless the hackers told them.