Yath

Figure it out.

[Rob Perez @WorldWideWob]

My watch has ended.
Thanks for everything.

[Yath @yatheender]

Must Read.

[Julie Zhuo @joulee]

https://t.co/TjJDFgynKm

[Yath @yatheender]

@ShanuMathew93 It’s overwhelming for non technical ppl to see the rapid advancement & unsure how to keep up / not be left behind. I am building the non technical version of this where u can just get going and not get lost in the details. would u like to chat? let me know. Maybe u can feeeback

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Jeff Bezos reveals why compromise is one of the worst ways to resolve a disagreement

"An example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. If I say the ceiling is 11 feet and you say 12 feet, we say let's call it 11 and a half. That's compromise"

"The advantage of compromise is it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth"

"Another really bad resolution mechanism is who's more stubborn. Two executives disagree, they have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates. You haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing"

"Escalation is better than a war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, we can't agree, we like each other, we're respectful, but we strongly disagree, we need you to make a decision"

"Exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. Compromise is not truth seeking"

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

🚨💣 BREAKING: Éderson to Manchester United, here we go!

Deal done with Atalanta for €45m package with add-ons included, agreement now in place.

Medical and formal steps to follow but deal in place.

Éderson will sign a four year deal plus option, as @TheAthleticFC reports.

[Naval @naval]

You aren’t starting a company. You’re laying bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Rick Rubin’s House on the Mountain test:

Create according to your own taste, not for applause, critics, algorithms, or market demand.

“Imagine going to live on a mountaintop by yourself, forever. You build a home that no one will ever visit. Still, you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you’ll spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows—all magnificent. Curated to your taste.”

“This is the essence of great art. We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves.”

“I'm willing to go to extremes to make the thing that I want to inhabit and it's not for anyone else. it's just for me.”

[Bruno Fernandes @B_Fernandes8]

how can I assist you? ☕

[David Senra @davidsenra]

This conversation with @RickRubin is special. Here's a 2 minute preview that I’ve watched 15 times.

The episode will be out tomorrow:

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Bob McGrew has a framework I keep thinking about: in the AI future there are only two jobs. The Lone Genius and the Manager.

That's it. Everything else gets absorbed.

The Lone Genius is the person sitting alone at a computer, amplified 1000x by AI. One person with taste, vision, and relentless focus who can now do what used to take a team of 50.

The Manager is the person who becomes CEO of their own "firm" where most of the employees are AI agents. They define the goals. They decide what matters. They coordinate. The AI does the execution.

The Marxists will hear "two jobs" and panic. "What about everyone else?!" But here's what they're missing: AI doesn't shrink these two categories. It explodes them open. More people get to be geniuses. More people get to be managers. The barrier to entry for both just collapsed.

What actually gets eliminated? David Graeber called them "bullshit jobs." Graeber was no libertarian! He inspired Occupy Wall Street.

His words: "Huge swaths of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe don't really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul."

Graeber said bullshit jobs are "a form of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being." They induce "hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing."

This is who the left should be fighting for. Not to preserve those jobs. To liberate people from them and give them better ones.

The dirty secret of the modern economy: millions of people sit in roles so pointless that even they can't justify their existence. Compliance layers. Reporting layers. Coordination layers. Meeting-about-the-meeting layers. They know it's meaningless. It eats them alive.

AI eats those layers. Good. That's a jailbreak.

What I love about Bob's framework is where it points. The Lone Genius used to require a PhD, a lab, institutional backing. Now a 19-year-old with taste and Codex can ship what took a research team a year. The genius bottleneck was never talent. It was access.

The Manager used to mean you needed to hire 50 people, raise money, build an org chart. Now you can orchestrate a fleet of AI agents from your laptop. The management bottleneck was never skill. It was capital.

AI doesn't concentrate genius and management into fewer hands. It distributes them into more hands. The working class kid in West Virginia. The single mom in Ohio. The 55-year-old who got laid off and now builds software for the first time. Those are some of Bob's future geniuses and managers.

The best founders I see at YC are already living this. They toggle between both modes in the same day. Morning: lone genius, creative insight, the thing nobody else sees. Afternoon: manager, spinning up agents, steering, shipping.

The cycle time between genius and manager IS the new productivity metric.

So when someone tells you AI means "only two jobs and everyone else starves," quote Graeber to them, they’ll get it.

Graeber knew the real violence was making people do meaningless work and pretending it was dignity. AI ends that. More genius. More agency. Fewer spiritual prisons.

[Manchester United @ManUtd]

There's a magic to Manchester United...

[Manchester United @ManUtd]

It's Carrick, you know ❤️

🇾🇪 We are delighted to announce Michael Carrick will continue as our head coach, having signed a new contract.

[Yath @yatheender]

@AlfieJCarter Claude

[Yath @yatheender]

@crptAtlas Brilliant

[Dickie Bush 🚢 @dickiebush]

https://t.co/uaiYnrtfP5

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

LLM Knowledge Bases

Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So:

Data ingest:
I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them.

IDE:
I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides).

Q&A:
Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale.

Output:
Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base.

Linting:
I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into.

Extra tools:
I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries.

Further explorations:
As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows.

TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

[du @thedulab]

You should always be trying shit. You might be unreal at sales or marketing or specifically this style of conversation or that type of medium and so on. Pretty exciting to think about how much you just don't know about yourself until you dabble

Microdose different identities, develop random lore, infinite features to be unlocked. Lean in, switch up, choose your adventure at any given moment. Putting the fate of your future in the hands of whatever major you choose at 18 is a thing of the past

[Will Ahmed @willahmed]

You have no experience.
You’ve never started a company.
You’ve never had a full time job.
Nike is going to kill you.
You’re a kid.
You don’t have technical skills.
You shouldn’t build hardware.
Apple is going to kill you.
You can’t build hardware.
You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively.
Athletes don’t care about recovery.
Under Armour is going to kill you.
It won’t be accurate.
You don’t listen.
You’re an ineffective leader.
You can’t recruit great talent.
You’re going to have to pay every athlete.
You can’t measure sleep non-invasively.
It’s too expensive to research.
Athletes are a small market.
The product costs too much to make.
The product costs too much to sell.
Your valuation is too high.
Consumers aren’t going to want it.
Hardware is too hard.
You should measure steps.
Fitbit is going to kill you.
You can’t build a marketing engine.
You can’t raise enough money.
You need a real CEO.
Google is going to kill you.
You can’t be a subscription.
You can’t build a brand.
You can’t do consumer in Boston.
Your valuation is too high.
You shouldn’t make accessories.
You shouldn’t make apparel.
Lululemon is going to kill you.
You can’t predict Covid.
Stay in your niche.
You are going to run out of money.
You can’t build a health platform.
Amazon is going to kill you.
You can’t measure blood pressure.
You can’t get medical approvals.
The market is too small.
You don’t understand AI.
The market is too competitive.
It won’t work internationally.
The supply chain is too complicated.
You can’t build an AI.
You can’t raise enough money.
It’s too competitive.
Healthcare isn’t going to want it.
…

Just keep going ✌️

[Yath @yatheender]

@yanndine GTM

[Atletico Universe @atletiuniverse]

🚨🇪🇸 Marcos Llorente speaks on his lifestyle.

Question: "Do you feel like a bit of an odd one?"

Llorente: "No. To me, the others are the strange ones. I���m a normal guy doing things that aren’t common today, but they’re actually very normal. I understand that in today’s society it’s hard to live the way I do, but it’s how we’re meant to live, like we did for many years before modern life."

Question: "Where did you learn this?"

Llorente: "From people who truly care about health and study beyond what’s commonly taught today. It’s not strange at all, it makes perfect sense when it’s explained properly. Living naturally makes more sense than living artificially, which is how we live now."

Question: "What do you consider “artificial”?"

Llorente: "This light you have on me right now, for example."

Question: "Does it bother you?"

Llorente: "Not really, I wear glasses. But it’s not natural or healthy. Using it occasionally is fine, but living like that all the time isn’t."

Question: "And red-tinted glasses?"

Llorente: "Those are for nighttime."

Questions "What bothers you about night light?"

Llorente: "Artificial light at night mimics midday sunlight. If your body is exposed to that at midnight, it doesn’t understand clocks, only light. It thinks it’s daytime when you should be sleeping."

Question: "Aren’t you worried about sun exposure?"

Llorente: "Not if you build a relationship with the sun. The problem is avoiding the sun all year and then spending seven hours under it in August. That’s like not training all year and then lifting 200kg. The problem isn’t the exercise, it’s you."

Question: "Do you do intermittent fasting?"

Llorente: "I do night fasting."

Question: "What does that mean?"

Llorente: "Not eating at night. I have my last meal before sunset."

Question: "Don’t you get hungry at midnight?"

Llorente: "Not if your body is well regulated. If your habits are bad, then yes."

Journalist: "Some might say this is a bit extreme…"

Llorente: "Humans have always lived with sunlight and darkness. We’ve artificially extended our days. What I do is actually the natural way."

Question: "And airplane emissions?"

Llorente: "That’s another topic we’d need half an hour to discuss it."

Question: "Do you think they affect the ecosystem?"

Llorente: "Have you looked at the sky today?
If you observe, you’ll start to notice things. The problem is we don’t stop to observe or think."

Question: "Maybe people don’t want to complicate their lives…"

Llorente: "Exactly and I understand that. It’s easier to go through life without thinking."

Journalist: "It’s good to have someone like you making people reflect."

Llorente: "It’s not about convincing it’s about observing, thinking for yourself, questioning things, and paying attention."

@sport