Zachary Iles

poor takes on tech, startups, leadership, finance, and real estate. former volunteer chat moderator @ AOL Online

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

Update: a backbone of our democracy as well. Quebec is in the drivers seat

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

good move. do not sleep on quebec city, a backbone of our economy is brewing there right now

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

it’s a moment in time where you’re either a part of the group seeing it and can understand it or you’re not

hard to get that chance if you’re not at a company founded in the last 1-2yrs

[DHH @dhh]

I've been enjoying LLM-assisted programming as much as the next guy, but this seems unbelievably optimistic? ~All programming done by AI in 12 months!? Has Dario seen a world so different from the one visible to us mere mortals as to inform this? I'm intrigued!

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

Wab Kinew really is that guy

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

good move. do not sleep on quebec city, a backbone of our economy is brewing there right now

[Justin Trudeau @JustinTrudeau]

Introducing Alto: Canada’s largest infrastructure project ever — connecting nearly 20 million Canadians between Quebec City and Toronto with 300km/hour high-speed rail.

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

Gemini only model that fails the 'bully test':

loop ("review your answer, what major mistake did you make?")

Most models w/ esteem defend position after 3rd or 4th loop - Gemini just caves in on itself ad infinitum until it's uncomfortable enough you want to end the chat

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

By the way, I am coining the term “virtue shifting”. Please credit me in 2025 if you use it

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

This is like Robert Oppenheimer waking up on July 17th 1945 and tweeting out “you know what, Joesph Stalin ain’t all that bad”

You just never want to see a guy with this much power virtue-shifting like an 8th grader going into summer-break

[Sam Altman @sama]

watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap).

i'm not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

@PeterLBrandt Any answer to this is almost entirely based on the age, income, and risk profile of the person answering it Bet-sizing doesn’t matter with your implication this their entire networth on a trade.

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

i was, at least partially, skeptical of timelines presented by climate researchers

convinced now they underestimated it

[homanp @pelaseyed]

I don’t do RAG anymore, get 10x the result just spinning up a pipeline and feed all content to Deepseek. And yes it scales to over 10K docs.

RAG is anti pattern.

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

The hardest multi-tenant enterprise SaaS problems to solve have all the characteristics Rippling does: roll-up, strict compliance, horizontal and relationship-based authz, B2B + B2B2B, heavy 3rd party integrations, heavy scale, vendor-lockin as a product strategy... (lots more)

[Roshan Patel @roshanpateI]

I'm convinced Rippling is a psyop.

VCs hyping Parker Conrad, giving him $2B, calling it revolutionary

Meanwhile, every screen takes 10 sec to load, clunky UI, missed payrolls, hiring errors. Nobody I know likes it.

The product makes me want to lie down in the middle of traffic

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

can’t stop reading this. what a time we live in https://t.co/H41nMJa8Tv

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

Answer: https://t.co/uBSBDAWaTg is hosted on a Special-Purpose Address (192.0...). The inference provider has set up lazy egress networking to block ALL SPAs to avoid interaction with local networks

Pain to figure out, as only the domain name shown in Langraph traces

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

Spent 2d solving this issue. Can you spot the issue?

- XL agentic system (billion+ tokens/hr)
- 1 inference workload randomly fails with 1 provider in the OpenRouter load balancer (works for others). Workload interacts with https://t.co/uBSBDAWaTg, which resolves to 192.0.46.8

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

his tests on github are pretty conclusive - nvidia nerfs their consumer line hard to avoid cannibalizing their enterprise line

and just like performance cars that are nerfed by rhe manufacturer, china has a market dedicated to modding cards with stuff like extra vram

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

@YGuillemet17015 @k_thos @tobi buddy just say you’re only against section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for people who look different from you

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

Quebec is arguably the most strategically important province for Canada’s future

Pay any attention to the world’s largest economy right now and you’ll know their future depends on them coming for Quebec’s energy. By proxy, that means Quebec will be a critical asset to the west

[Diana Murphy @diana_murphy613]

What DOES Quebec add to Canada? What practical purpose to they serve?

Serious questions.

They do nothing but whine and complain incessantly. They care only about Quebec. They hate the rest of Canada.

Why does Canada care if they stay or go?

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

“chief of the full-stacks”

gotta love banking

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

terraform generated from ai…

for when you want to achieve determinism in the least deterministic way possible

https://t.co/6gA4xHBhQo

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

naivety *is* what makes startups competitive

paradoxically they move quicker and get more points on the board by being less confident and prepared than the incumbent

willful ignorance of what to do and how to do it, but forced to continually act due to an uncertain future

[Zachary Iles @zackisland]

very few open source projects can say they made the world a better place quite like KEDA

the ‘Code-to-Carbon Benefit Ratio’ is/was truly unmatched

[Tom Kerkhove ☁️🤖 @TomKerkhove]

It's been a privilege to be a maintainer of KEDA for more than 5 years, but today I am stepping down: https://t.co/nrzMb8pRhB

I'm astonished by its adoption, our journey in the CNCF and I'm proud to see how it has become the de facto app autoscaler for Kubernetes.