You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2008, rev. June 2008
Technology tends to separate normal from natural.  Our bodies
weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or
to get so little exercise.
There may be a similar problem with the way we work:
a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour
or sugar is for us physically.
I began to suspect this after spending several years working
with startup founders.  I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've
noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their
own startups and those working for large organizations.
I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily;
starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put
it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is
happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating
doughnuts.
Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be
working in a way that's more natural for humans.
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that
I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they
seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times
more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working
for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living
in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion.
Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed
for.
Trees
What's so unnatural about working for a big company?  The root of
the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
groups.
Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that
each species thrives in groups of a certain size.  A herd of impalas
might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10.  Humans
also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
is really unwieldy.
[
1
]
Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in
groups of several hundred.  And yet—for reasons having more
to do with technology than human nature—a great many people
work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.
Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide
themselves into units small enough to work together.  But to
coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.
These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure.  Your
boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree.  But when
you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,
something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention
explicitly.  In the group one level up from yours, your boss
represents your entire group.  A group of 10 managers is not merely
a group of 10 people working together in the usual way.  It's really
a group of groups.  Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
person—the workers and manager would each share only one
person's worth of freedom between them.
In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were
one person.  But in a large organization divided into groups in
this way, the pressure is always in that direction.  Each group
tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals
that humans were designed to work in.  That was the point of creating
it.  And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
size of the entire tree.
[
2
]
Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this.  You
can feel the difference between working for a company with 100
employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corn Syrup
A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake
tribe.  The number of people you interact with is about right.  But
something is missing: individual initiative.  Tribes of hunter-gatherers
have much more freedom.  The leaders have a little more power than other
members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to
do and when the way a boss can.
It's not your boss's fault.  The real problem is that in the group
above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.
Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.
So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels
both right and wrong at the same time.   On the surface it feels
like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major
is missing.  A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,
but is disastrously lacking in others.
Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with
the usual sort of job.
For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,
at least for programmers.  How bad could it be?  Well, food shows
that pretty clearly.  If you were dropped at a random point in
America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high
fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.  And yet if
you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably
find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories.
"Normal" food is terribly bad for you.  The only people who eat
what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing
weirdos in Berkeley.
If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common?  There are
two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal.  You
may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first
couple bites feels great.  The other is economies of scale.
Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't.
Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth
spending a lot to market it.
If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily
marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's
expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
think most will choose?
It's the same with work.  The average MIT graduate wants to work
at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
and they'll get paid a good salary right away.  It's the job
equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch.  The drawbacks will
only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
malaise.
And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like
the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley:  though a tiny minority
of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to.
In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
Programmers
The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on
programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new
things.  Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support
people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a
piece of code you don't need to write it again.  So a programmer
working as programmers are meant to is always making new things.
And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each
person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're
going to face resistance when you do something new.
This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness.  It's true even
in the smartest companies.  I was talking recently to a founder who
considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to
work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there.
He didn't learn as much as he expected.  Programmers learn by doing,
and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes
because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's
code wouldn't let him.  Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead
of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions
imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a
fraction of the things he would have liked to.  He said he has
learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has
to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at
least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.
An obstacle downstream propagates upstream.  If you're not allowed
to implement new ideas, you stop having them.  And vice versa: when
you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do.
So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same
way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.
Working for yourself doesn't have to mean starting a startup, of
course.  But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big
company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing
the startup.
You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the size
of company you work for.  If you start the company, you'll have the
most freedom.  If you become one of the first 10 employees you'll
have almost as much freedom as the founders.  Even a company with
100 people will feel different from one with 1000.
Working for a small company doesn't ensure freedom.  The tree
structure of large organizations sets an upper bound on freedom,
not a lower bound.  The head of a small company may still choose
to be a tyrant.  The point is that a large organization is compelled
by its structure to be one.
Consequences
That has real consequences for both organizations and individuals.
One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger,
no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo.  It's a
consequence of the tree structure that every large organization is
forced to adopt.
Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if
they avoided tree structure.  And since human nature limits the
size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine
for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no
structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work
together the way components of a market economy do.
That might be worth exploring.  I suspect there are already some
highly partitionable businesses that lean this way.  But I don't
know any technology companies that have done it.
There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves
as sponges:  they can stay small.  If I'm right, then it really
pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage.
Particularly a technology company.  Which means it's doubly important
to hire the best people.  Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get
less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of
them to solve a given problem.
For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small.  It will always
suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization,
the more it will suck.
In an
essay
I wrote a couple years ago
I advised graduating seniors
to work for a couple years for another company before starting their
own.  I'd modify that now.  Work for another company if you want
to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own
startup, go ahead.
The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately
was that I felt most would fail.  And they will.  But ambitious
programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than
going to work at a big company.  Certainly they'll learn more.  They
might even be better off financially.  A lot of people in their
early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even
faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school.
At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be
zero rather than negative.
[
3
]
We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have
enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from
working for a big company.  The people who've worked for a few years
do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only
because they're that much older.
The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of
conservative.  It's hard to say how much is because big companies
made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that
made them work for the big companies in the first place.  But
certainly a large part of it is learned.  I know because I've seen
it burn off.
Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that
convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small
group, is the natural way for programmers to live.  Founders arriving
at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees.  Three
months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence
that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
[
4
]
Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
time.  Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
wild.
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear
that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and
in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to
programmers.   In the first couple weeks of working on their own
startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working
the way people are meant to.
Notes
[
1
]
When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a
certain way, I mean by evolution.
[
2
]
It's not only the leaves who suffer.  The constraint propagates
up as well as down.  So managers are constrained too; instead of
just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.
[
3
]
Do not finance your startup with credit cards.  Financing a
startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debt
stupidest of all.  Credit card debt is a bad idea, period.  It is
a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.
[
4
]
The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouraged
undergrads to apply), and the first couple times I saw this I used
to wonder if they were actually getting physically taller.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby
Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for
reading drafts of this.
French Translation
Russian Translation


@phl43 It has always been possible for people to willfully misinterpret you. What's new, with the internet, is that it's so much easier for people to *publish* such misinterpretations. Which in turn encourages them to do it more.

Startups get compared by how much they raise and at what valuation, because that's public information. But this has the unfortunate side effect of making fundraising read as success. So I'm glad YC publishes a list of the top companies by revenue.

https://t.co/5FP6b91F8M

@cperciva Oops, I'll delete and repost.

@tommycollison Jeremy Musson's English Country House Interiors, though to be honest I was mostly looking at the beautiful pictures.

@JimDMiller @Austen That's not true. The German general staff wanted war with Russia. If they hadn't used that pretense, they'd have used another.

Does anyone else find this graph unlikely, during a period when technology has advanced so much? I suspect it's a graph of something else.

@bradgessler I'm waiting this one out.

@amasad To some extent that's my fault. Web pages were meant to be.

@Austen Mao was arguably the most impactful. In addition to killing lots of people, he slowed China's industrialization by decades. Without that breathing room we'd be in an even tougher spot now.

CSS is overcomplicated for the same reason that medieval philosophy is: it starts from a lie. Medieval philosophers were trying to reconcile observation with scripture. CSS is trying to separate content from  presentation.


@biasbe They wouldn't put it in those terms, but that would be the effect. Which is why it's such a stupid tactic.

@JoshuaPHilll I'm sympathetic to the cause of the protestors who blocked traffic on the bridge. That's why I'm mad at them — because their clumsy tactics are hurting a cause I care about.

@tamisawyer If you want to advance a cause, the undecided are the people you need to convince. So if you genuinely care about the cause, you can't afford to have contempt for them, no matter how good it might make you feel.

@KarenAttiah Were there any that damaged art or blocked traffic just for the sake of blocking traffic?

@pitdesi Interesting that they didn't even consider adding more buses to the route.

@pitdesi Now I understand how the EU plans to win at AI.

@sentientist It doesn't take an odious crime. I want to see the faces of bad drivers.

I wouldn't be surprised if humans instinctively want to see people who do bad things so we can recognize them in the future.

@coloneldraught @BennettJonah Someone good has to want the job. That's the hard part.

@WinslowDumaine @mundanemun Worrying doesn't help, but funding many companies attacking the problem from different directions probably has.

@markessien This is good. What does IMO not mean?


@efekarhanli No, I came across it by accident.

@OliverBeedham They're public.

@DarayuthH I doubt Brian would sell.

Five years later, Coinbase is worth $53 billion.

@AbdouSayedPG @trywindow @trylegato You're ready to apply.

@Farhanfarrukh6 Yes, this was intentional. We wanted to ensure the application process was at least not a waste of time.

@JonErlichman IIRC it was actually 800m. Terry Semel initially offered 1b, but then changed his mind. I believe Zuck's reaction at this point was relief, because that meant he definitely didn't have to sell.

The deadline to apply for the summer YC batch is tomorrow, May 13. Don't worry, I'm sure these cooks are trustworthy. https://t.co/0Em4VKXrcV

Living in past eras. https://t.co/8QtbwTzKnq

@godsonofsoul @growing_daniel I ignored the part about the tax trick. That's simply false.


@ash_stuart_ I'm one of those people. I said in the second tweet that Elizabeth Holmes was.

Whereas it definitely doesn't seem to be impossible to be evil and make money as a property developer in New York. So frankly we should hope Elon is controlling Trump's brain, because the more of it Elon is controlling, the less Trump is.

Evil founders may be able to keep the ruse going for a few years, like Elizabeth Holmes did, but eventually it falls apart. You can't keep it going for long enough to ship as many things as Elon has.

Explained to a rather surprised English woman that Elon isn't actually evil — that evil people can't survive long as founders of tech cos, because they need smart people to work for them, and smart people can work anywhere.

Drama outside my office window as 12 yo, walking the dog, discovers that the dog has discovered a dead mouse. And indeed this generally doesn't end well.

@CuriosMuseum Back when plastic was the modern alternative to wood.

@MacaesBruno That is bullshit. Occam's razor says he just despises wokeness like plenty of other thoughtful people do.

@nypost Calling @CommunityNotes.

This video is a good illustration of how much more a job can be than just trading work for money.

For example, it's willing to acknowledge that the pejorative sense of "woke" is now the dominant one, though it clearly doesn't like the idea.


@gunsnrosesgirl3 Even though you expect to love your kids, you'll still be surprised how much you do.

@DropSiteNews Do they claim there were tunnels under their tent, or have they completely given up the pretense that deaths like these are collateral damage in the pursuit of military objectives?

@thetimmorgan @lehoho248 I kind of like that phrase, since I invented it.

https://t.co/9Y5S1JcMjo

I like this image by @lehoho248. https://t.co/0w1C9hha7L

@ryangrim He probably wrote them. He's glad his work gets to see the light of day.

@SpencerHakimian Question for you @typesfast: How much elasticity is there in shipping? If Trump rolled back the tariffs now, would there still be a visible change in the supply of consumer goods?

@michaeltastad @signulll They will have something that someone now would trade a superyacht for.

@klsmithjr That's the kids' bookshelf, but I've read most of the ones that were published when I was a kid.

@StefanBuilds @signulll I'm criticizing the usual way of computing real income.

@SpencerHakimian At this point I'm starting to wonder if it's dementia rather than lying. It's interesting to think that when and if that does happen, he'll slip gradually from one to the other without ever having been truthful.


I've discovered an interesting new use case for ChatGPT. At this point it's a left-leaning midwit, but since left-leaning midwits will dislike the new essay I'm writing, it's useful to be able to test what ChatGPT can be made to acknowledge is true.

Since judging from the replies there seem to be some people who don't get it, my point is that yes, he is that good.

@ColumbaArin I explained that here: https://t.co/Luw9oakxo2

@HenrM_Cruz But NBA teams don't only employ players.

Steph Curry makes 858 times the median US salary. Are we really supposed to believe he does that much better than the average person would in his place?

@NicoSvane @CuriosMuseum @patrickc I just realized I omitted a bunch of accounts because I made two lists and posted the first chunk of one and then the second chunk of the other. I just added a bunch of names that got dropped.

And these, which got omitted by mistake because I made duplicate lists: @patrickc @sentientist @BruegelBot @acambridgediary @typesfast @ID_AA_Carmack

@DeanAmine @CuriosMuseum @sentientist Oops, I thought she was already in there.

@NicoSvane @CuriosMuseum @patrickc Oops, I thought he was already in there.

This is false, but it might be a good thing if belief in it became moderately widespread, because then all the remaining programmers would be in it for love and not just for money.


@0xBoavida You should try reading the second tweet in the thread.

@elbasti That's what I talk about in the essay I linked to. It's called "The Two Kinds of Moderate."

If anyone takes issue with my implicit claim that only moderates are reasonable, I'm really talking here about accidental moderates, and yes, only they are reasonable. I explain why here: https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d

Some people who seemed like moderates in 2017  actually were moderates, and others were conservatives who didn't dare show it fully. Now that the pendulum has swung to the right, we can distinguish them. But you need a full cycle to tell who the reasonable people are.

Biden's rent control plan is a spasm of a dying campaign.

@_RHoward It's not that so much as too disorganized.

@dontsoevsky Knowledge of Unix internals?

@AI_Vidz Or the founders you fund...

@PabloMalet It's hard to narrow it down. His intellectual integrity, but also his delight in weird and novel ideas.

Learned of another similarity between me and Robert Morris: owning shirts from resorts, because the only thing that can drive us to go clothes shopping is to be at one and run out of clean shirts.


"If you’re seeing a high number of gunshot wounds to the chest area and the head, that’s not collateral damage — that’s deliberate targeting." https://t.co/CgYvZSQWLt

@subaxiomat That too of course.

When a political figure is killed, his supporters want to believe he was killed by some powerful, organized "them." They want his death to be meaningful, and it's more meaningful to be killed by a powerful political force than a random nut, as most actual killers turn out to be.

@NathanpmYoung Me too.

@cjc To me it doesn't even sound like a critique. I often advise companies to go after only startups. If you get all the startups, and they don't discard you as they grow, eventually you'll have everyone.

Gwen Raverat's Period Piece is startlingly good, maybe the best book I've read this year.

But DM Parker Conrad first.

@Bouazizalex @DanWestgarth But DM Parker Conrad first.

@iashsethi You can easily check. Just do a Google search for it in quotes. I don't understand why so many of the people who quote me online don't try that first...

@zfellows What was *meant* to be the final stage. That's an important distinction.


It makes me feel old to think that this was what London looked like when we moved to the US in 1968.

@Austen If anything nerds in the 1960s were overoptimistic about this.

@tracewoodgrains If you met him/her/it in person, you wouldn't even be tempted to engage. The void is always there. You just don't notice it so much in real life because you do a lot of unconscious filtering.

His Tyrone Katz is a warlord in Nigeria. Which seems a bit unrealistic, but since we're already at the empty set with just the name, arguably it's no more unrealistic.

12 yo gave one of his fictional characters the name Tyrone Katz. I told him I was pretty confident that the intersection of Tyrones and Katzes was the empty set. We did a search and found one, @katz_tyrone, but I'm pretty sure it's a fake account.

@ciandrada @cmyeaton Wow, interesting. What kind of emergencies are people worried about? That America will collapse to the point where it's not safe to live there?

@aphysicist Angry Egyptian in 2000 BC: "When did people get addicted to cheap ceramics made by the Canaanites?"

It was the best of times (rapid progress in technology), it was the worst of times (boneheaded tariffs).

@bexcran I think the verb you're looking for is "banned" rather than "settled".

@LandsknechtPike No, I didn't know. I look forward to reading about this. For once Twitter is actually useful.


@JillFilipovic Has this changed over time? Was it also true in 1970 for example?

Why is the Scottish government so Orwellian about free speech? It doesn't seem to follow naturally from the Scottish character. If anything the opposite. So why Scotland? Is there one individual or party driving this?

@thatguybg It's ok and indeed often inspiring to know that other people are working quietly on their own projects. What's distracting is knowing that the kind of people who might interrupt you are working.

@garrytan This guy is a one-man tornado of misgovernment.

@KenRoth Do you think this was the intention of the air strike?

Some of the very best work is done late at night. Not just at startups, but in research too. That's when you can work on hard problems without distractions.

If you looked at emails reporting important breakthroughs, a surprisingly large number would have been sent after hours.

@anammostarac Not quite true. It would be true if he had merely said "wealth," but it was industrialization that made it possible to amass *great* wealth by serving one's fellow man.

@peterchng @terronk That's good!

@pmarca It's Grade I listed. You're not going to be configuring much.

@Suhail Tech is positive sum. That's one of the biggest differences between SF and NYC.


@JOBhakdi This is called Demo Day.

@PicoPaco17 He has to drop out. I don't see why any external factor would change that. The problem is not external.

This is painful to watch. Rent control is already a stupid idea, but he misreads the 5% on the teleprompter as $55. That means he doesn't even remember what his own policy is.

@jonchu @xprunie Uptick? Surely post ZIRP they'd decrease, not increase?

@xprunie YC makes a diligent effort to filter them out, but it's hard to tell with the young ones.

@AndrewDurot Steep revenue growth.

@CollinCusce Sorry I was curt with you. I see from the comments a lot of people don't know the word, so I explained what it means.

Since many people don't know the word scenester, what it means is someone who is more focused on seeming cool by doing x than actually doing x. It's a big problem in the startup world because startups are so fashionable at the moment.

@JOBhakdi Yes. In fact it was hearing an investment firm described as scenesters that made me realize this.

I don't know about other fields, but in startups the worst thing you can be is a scenester. It's even worse than being stupid. Stupid people can succeed if they try hard enough. But when I hear the founders of a startup described as scenesters, I write them off.


VCs always seemed such stiffs to us, and I think that too was not unrelated to why they couldn't compete at the earliest stage of investing. Seed investing is a comedy of errors. You have to embrace this to do it well.

If this doesn't hold the record for highest ratio of frame to art, it must be close. https://t.co/3Z6ioadVlG

It might not be a bad policy to ask every couple months "what is the most community noted account remaining?" and ban it.

Things that stuck in my head. https://t.co/DrZPK4oQpO

One big advantage Google has over Microsoft when they were having the paradigm shifted out from under them is not being run by Steve Ballmer.

This simultaneously damaged the brands of both the Longshoremen and Rolex. https://t.co/3DLooBqA8w

I just bought these fabulous illustrations by Edward Ardizzone and Paul Cox. If you want to buy great art cheaply, illustrations are a good way to do it. They're much cheaper than oil paintings, and some of the most talented artists of the 20th century worked as illustrators. https://t.co/kFEbqYJFIq

My first introduction to American culture was the Magilla Gorilla book I was given on the plane. I didn't realize till later that Megillah was a word and not just his name. https://t.co/B7WDh9oOAX

Tweets that repeat the same sentence over and over almost always seem to be mistaken. Perhaps because you can make a better case for the truth than merely repeating it.

These midcentury pulp fiction titles are evidence of something important: way more people used to read than do now. These books weren't replaced by another genre. They were replaced by TV. https://t.co/PZaNApS7BN


@micsolana If you were reading Y Combinator applications you wouldn't think there are fewer startups.

@nik_tchouparov I know.

@sprout94 It will be a few years still. They now have to build an airliner based on this technology.

@rSanti97 @ATabarrok I'd rather have Biden than Trump, but bullshit like this makes him almost as unappealing.

We sneaked out of something we were supposed to attend and were driving down the highway with both boys, playing "Gimme Three Steps," and it seemed just about the perfect soundtrack for a disreputable family hitting the road.

@sapitonmix @IAPonomarenko Some of his portfolio companies do, believe me.

@IAPonomarenko Many in Silicon Valley feel the same about him as you do.

@ImadeIyamu Wow, it made my day to read that. (It will probably also make me work harder on each essay to think that someone is going to read and study it for a week.)

Sanbó Þristur is surprisingly good. I bought one in Iceland about 6 months ago, but hadn't dared to try it till I was driven to it by the absence of any other chocolate in the house. Caramel with liquorice bits doesn't sound good, but it is. https://t.co/IKkjR0XZbS

@2sush @Austen Of course she can. Be we can say what we think about what she says.


This is a remarkable decline over such a short period.

This phenomenon isn't limited to AI. It's also a test of human ability. A beginning artist or writer has little to add after the first sketch/draft, whereas a really good one can sometimes keep improving it for weeks.

It seems a bit counterintuitive at first, but one of the most important tests of an AI is how long it can continue thinking about something productively. Replit is now up to 200 minutes.

@idlivada @bscholl @boomsupersonic Isn't the stock up a good deal since 2007?

@bscholl @boomsupersonic Zuck said at Startup School in 2007 that he did this too.

@thisdudelikesAI Sufficiently perceptive people can see patterns without any "framing." For example, it's not a coincidence that the people who came up with this rule are also responsible for cookie warnings.

@thisdudelikesAI Startups aren't separate from the rest of the world.

@mcuban Interesting point, but I don't know about that "always". Forever is a long time.

It seems so much more civilized when you arrive in America from Europe, and bottle caps just come right off. That regulation was a big mistake. It's as if the bureaucrats were seeking out something with a high ratio of annoyance to impact.

@WKCosmo More importantly, what do you call indigenous science that can't be?


The Future of Web Startups
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2007
(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)
There's something interesting happening right now.  Startups are
undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes
cheaper.
It's a pattern we see over and over in technology.  Initially
there's some device that's very expensive and made
in small quantities.  Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply;
many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.
Computers are a familiar example.  When I was a kid, computers were
big, expensive machines built one at a time.  Now they're a commodity.
Now we can stick computers in everything.
This pattern is very old.  Most of the turning
points in economic history are instances of it.  It happened to
steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s.
It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating
the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance.  Agriculture
itself was an instance of this pattern.
Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern
is happening
to
startups.  It's so cheap to start web startups
that orders of magnitudes more will be started.   If the pattern
holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.
1. Lots of Startups
So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty
straightforward: there will be a lot of them.  When starting a
startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors
to do it.  Now the only threshold is courage.
Even that threshold is getting lower, as people watch others take
the plunge and survive.  In the last batch of startups we funded,
we had several founders who said they'd thought of applying before,
but weren't sure and got jobs instead.  It was only after hearing
reports of friends who'd done it that they decided to try it
themselves.
Starting a startup is hard, but having a 9 to 5 job is hard too,
and in some ways a worse kind of hard.  In a startup you have lots
of worries, but you don't have that feeling that your life is flying
by like you do in a big company.  Plus in a startup you could make
much more money.
As word spreads that startups work, the number may grow
to a point that would now seem surprising.
We now think of it as normal to have a job at a company, but this
is the thinnest of historical veneers.  Just two or three
lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized
countries lived by farming.  So while it may seem surprising to
propose that large numbers of people will change the way they make
a living, it would be more surprising if they didn't.
2. Standardization
When technology makes something dramatically cheaper, standardization
always follows.  When you make things in large volumes you tend
to standardize everything that doesn't need to change.
At Y Combinator we still only have four people, so we try to
standardize everything.  We could hire employees, but we want to be
forced to figure out how to scale investing.
We often tell startups to release a minimal version one quickly,
then let the needs of the users determine what to do
next.  In essense, let the market design the product.  We've
done the same thing ourselves.  We think of the techniques we're
developing for dealing with large numbers of startups as like
software.  Sometimes it literally is software, like
Hacker News
and
our application system.
One of the most important things we've been working on standardizing
are investment terms.  Till now investment terms have been
individually negotiated.
This is a problem for founders, because it makes raising money
take longer and cost more in legal fees.  So as well as using the
same paperwork for every deal we do, we've commissioned generic
angel paperwork that all the startups we fund can use for future
rounds.
Some investors will still want to cook up their own deal terms.
Series A rounds, where you raise a million dollars or more, will
be custom deals for the forseeable future.  But I think angel rounds
will start to be done mostly with standardized agreements.  An angel
who wants to insert a bunch of complicated terms into the agreement
is probably not one you want anyway.
3. New Attitude to Acquisition
Another thing I see starting to get standardized is acquisitions.
As the volume of startups increases, big companies will start to
develop standardized procedures that make acquisitions little
more work than hiring someone.
Google is the leader here, as in so many areas of technology.  They
buy a lot of startups— more than most people realize, because they
only announce a fraction of them.   And being Google, they're
figuring out how to do it efficiently.
One problem they've solved is how to think about acquisitions.  For
most companies, acquisitions still carry some stigma of inadequacy.
Companies do them because they have to, but there's usually some
feeling they shouldn't have to—that their own programmers should
be able to build everything they need.
Google's example should cure the rest of the world of this idea.
Google has by far the best programmers of any public technology
company.  If they don't have a problem doing acquisitions, the
others should have even less problem.  However many Google does,
Microsoft should do ten times as many.
One reason Google doesn't have a problem with acquisitions
is that they know first-hand the quality of the people they can get
that way.  Larry and Sergey only started Google after making the
rounds of the search engines trying to sell their idea and finding
no takers.  They've
been
the guys coming in to visit the big
company, so they know who might be sitting across that conference
table from them.
4. Riskier Strategies are Possible
Risk is always proportionate to reward.  The way to get really big
returns is to do things that seem crazy, like starting a new search
engine in 1998, or turning down a billion dollar acquisition offer.
This has traditionally been a problem in venture funding.  Founders
and investors have different attitudes to risk.  Knowing that risk
is on average proportionate to reward, investors like risky strategies,
while founders, who don't have a big enough sample size to care
what's true on average, tend to be more conservative.
If startups are easy to start, this conflict goes away, because
founders can start them younger, when it's rational to take more
risk, and can start more startups total in their careers.  When
founders can do lots of startups, they can start to look at the
world in the same portfolio-optimizing way as investors.  And that
means the overall amount of wealth created can be greater, because
strategies can be riskier.
5. Younger, Nerdier Founders
If startups become a cheap commodity, more people will be able to
have them, just as more people could have computers once microprocessors
made them cheap.  And in particular, younger and more technical
founders will be able to start startups than could before.
Back when it cost a lot to start a startup, you had to convince
investors to let you do it.  And that required very different skills
from actually doing the startup.  If investors were perfect judges,
the two would require exactly the same skills.  But unfortunately
most investors are terrible judges.  I know because I see behind
the scenes what an enormous amount of work it takes to raise money,
and the amount of selling required in an industry is always inversely
proportional to the judgement of the buyers.
Fortunately, if startups get cheaper to start, there's another way
to convince investors.  Instead of going to venture capitalists
with a business plan and trying to convince them to fund it, you
can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars
of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a
working company instead of a plan for one.  Then instead of
having to seem smooth and confident, you can just point them to
Alexa.
This way of convincing investors is better suited to hackers, who
often went into technology in part because they felt uncomfortable
with the amount of fakeness required in other fields.
6. Startup Hubs Will Persist
It might seem that if startups get cheap to start, it will mean the
end of startup hubs like Silicon Valley.  If all you need to start
a startup is rent money, you should be able to do it anywhere.
This is kind of true and kind of false.  It's true that you can now
start
a startup anywhere.  But you have to do more with a
startup than just start it.  You have to make it succeed.  And that
is more likely to happen in a startup hub.
I've thought a lot about this question, and it seems to me the
increasing cheapness of web startups will if anything increase the
importance of startup hubs.  The value of startup hubs, like centers
for any kind of business, lies in something very old-fashioned:
face to face meetings.  No technology in the immediate future will
replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who
tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend,
or visiting a friend's startup down the street and ending up in a
conversation with one of their investors.
The question of whether to be in a startup hub is like the question
of whether to take outside investment.  The question is not whether
you
need
it, but whether it brings any advantage at all.
Because anything that brings an advantage will give your competitors
an advantage over you if they do it and you don't.  So if you hear
someone saying "we don't need to be in Silicon Valley," that use
of the word "need" is a sign they're not even thinking about the
question right.
And while startup hubs are as powerful magnets as ever, the increasing
cheapness of starting a startup means the particles they're attracting
are getting lighter.  A startup now can be just a pair of 22 year
old guys.  A company like that can move much more easily than one
with 10 people, half of whom have kids.
We know because we make people move for Y Combinator, and it doesn't
seem to be a problem. The advantage of being able to work together
face to face for three months outweighs the inconvenience of moving.
Ask anyone who's done it.
The mobility of seed-stage startups means that seed funding is a
national business.  One of the most common emails we get is from
people asking if we can help them set up a local clone of Y Combinator.
But this just wouldn't work. Seed funding isn't regional, just as
big research universities aren't.
Is seed funding not merely national, but international?  Interesting
question.  There are signs it may be.  We've had an ongoing
stream of founders from outside the US, and they tend to do
particularly well, because they're all people who were so determined
to succeed that they were willing to move to another country to do
it.
The more mobile startups get, the harder it would be to start new
silicon valleys.  If startups are mobile, the best local talent
will go to the real Silicon Valley,
and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who didn't
have the energy to move.
This is not a nationalistic idea, incidentally.  It's cities that
compete, not countries.  Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich.
7. Better Judgement Needed
If the number of startups increases dramatically, then the people
whose job is to judge them are going to have to get better at
it.  I'm thinking particularly of investors and acquirers.  We now
get on the order of 1000 applications a year.  What are we going
to do if we get 10,000?
That's actually an alarming idea.  But we'll figure out some kind
of answer.  We'll have to.  It will probably involve writing some
software, but fortunately we can do that.
Acquirers will also have to get better at picking winners.
They generally do better than investors, because they pick
later, when there's more performance to measure.  But even at the
most advanced acquirers, identifying companies to
buy is extremely ad hoc, and completing the acquisition often
involves a great deal of unneccessary friction.
I think acquirers may eventually have chief acquisition officers
who will both identify good acquisitions and make the deals happen.
At the moment those two functions are separate.  Promising new
startups are often discovered by developers.  If someone powerful
enough wants to buy them, the deal is handed over to corp dev guys
to negotiate.  It would be better if both were combined in
one group, headed by someone with a technical background and some
vision of what they wanted to accomplish.  Maybe in the future big
companies will have both a VP of Engineering responsible for
technology developed in-house, and a CAO responsible for bringing
technology in from outside.
At the moment, there is no one within big companies who gets in
trouble when they buy a startup for $200 million that they could
have bought earlier for $20 million.  There should start to be
someone who gets in trouble for that.
8. College Will Change
If the best hackers start their own companies after college
instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college.
Most of these changes will be for the better.  I think the experience
of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward
you'll be judged by potential employers.
One change will be in the meaning of "after
college," which will switch from when one graduates from college
to when one leaves it.  If you're starting your own company, why
do you need a degree?  We don't encourage people to start startups
during college, but the best founders are certainly
capable of it.  Some of the most successful companies we've funded
were started by undergrads.
I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important,
so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but there's nothing
magical about a degree.  There's nothing that magically changes
after you take that last exam.  The importance of degrees is due
solely to the administrative needs of large organizations.  These
can certainly affect your life—it's hard to get into grad
school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate
degree—but tests like this will matter less and
less.
As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will
also start to matter less where they go to college.  In a startup
you're judged by users, and they don't care where you went to
college.  So in a world of startups, elite universities will play
less of a role as gatekeepers.  In the US it's a national scandal
how easily children of rich parents game college admissions.
But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by
reforming the universities but by going around them.  We in the
technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don't beat
the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.
The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps
even the classes so much as the people you meet.  If
it becomes common to start a startup after college, students may start
trying to maximize this.  Instead of focusing on getting
internships at companies they want to work for, they may start
to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.
What students do in their classes will change too.  Instead of
trying to get good grades to impress future employers, students
will try to learn things.  We're talking about some pretty dramatic
changes here.
9. Lots of Competitors
If it gets easier to start a startup, it's easier for competitors too.
That doesn't erase the advantage of
increased cheapness, however.  You're not all playing a zero-sum
game.  There's not some fixed number of startups that can succeed,
regardless of how many are started.
In fact, I don't think there's any limit to the number of startups
that could succeed.  Startups succeed by creating wealth, which is
the satisfaction of people's desires.  And people's desires seem
to be effectively infinite, at least in the short term.
What the increasing number of startups does mean is that you won't
be able to sit on a good idea.  Other people have your idea, and
they'll be increasingly likely to do something about it.
10. Faster Advances
There's a good side to that, at least for consumers of
technology.  If people get right to work implementing ideas instead
of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster.
Some kinds of innovations happen a company at a time, like the
punctuated equilibrium model of evolution.  There are some kinds
of ideas that are so threatening that it's hard for big companies
even to think of them.  Look at what a hard time Microsoft is
having discovering web apps.  They're like a character in a movie
that everyone in the audience can see something bad is about to
happen to, but who can't see it himself.  The big innovations
that happen a company at a time will obviously happen faster if
the rate of new companies increases.
But in fact there will be a double speed increase.  People won't
wait as long to act on new ideas, but also those ideas will
increasingly be developed within startups rather than big companies.
Which means technology will evolve faster per company as well.
Big companies are just not a good place to make things happen fast.
I talked recently to a founder whose startup had been acquired by
a big company.  He was a precise sort of guy, so he'd measured their
productivity before and after.  He counted lines of code, which can
be a dubious measure, but in this case was meaningful because it
was the same group of programmers.  He found they were one thirteenth
as productive after the acquisition.
The company that bought them was not a particularly stupid one.
I think what he was measuring was mostly the cost of bigness.  I
experienced this myself, and his number sounds about right.  There's
something about big companies that just sucks the energy out of
you.
Imagine what all that energy could do if it were put to use.  There
is an enormous latent capacity in the world's hackers that most
people don't even realize is there.  That's the main reason we do
Y Combinator: to let loose all this energy by making it easy for
hackers to start their own startups.
A Series of Tubes
The process of starting startups is currently like the plumbing in
an old house.  The pipes are narrow and twisty, and there are leaks
in every joint.  In the future this mess will gradually be replaced
by a single, huge pipe.  The water will still have to get from A
to B, but it will get there faster and without the risk of spraying
out through some random leak.
This will change a lot of things for the better.  In a big, straight
pipe like that, the force of being measured by one's performance
will propagate back through the whole system.  Performance is always
the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now
that most people are insulated from it most of the time.  So you
end up with a world in which high school students think they need
to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students
think they need to get good grades to impress employers, within
which the employees waste most of their time in political battles,
and from which consumers have to buy anyway because there are so
few choices.  Imagine if that sequence became a big, straight pipe.
Then the effects of being measured by performance would propagate
all the way back to high school, flushing out all the arbitrary
stuff people are measured by now.  That is the future of web startups.
Thanks
to Brian Oberkirch and Simon Willison for inviting me to
speak, and the crew at Carson Systems for making everything run smoothly.
Japanese Translation


@BWay124 I think because he's stupid and dishonest. Stupid and dishonest people can become powerful in other industries (e.g. gambling, real estate development) but it doesn't work in tech, so the tech world has an especially low opinion of such people.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Can AI grow the US economy faster than Trump can shrink it? I hope so, but I can't pick a winner yet.

@ahistoryinart You have to admit a painter is a little busted if you can tell his painting is dirty because it doesn't look enough like a photograph...

@jadenitripp @riyazmd774 @sama If you had true AGI you could have 1/n person unicorns. But there might be zero of them, because they'd all be within the model companies. Short of that you'd be more likely to have 5 person unicorns. If you only have 1, what happens if he gets the flu?

@mattyglesias It wasn't quite that. It was because the oldest and most prestigious families tended to have it.

@ahistoryinart Curiously enough you have to change the exposure to really see the photograph. I wonder if this picture needs cleaning... https://t.co/n9NricWEDW

@riyazmd774 I did not say that.

@BradenMerritt You're right that this is a category error. What you don't seem to understand is that the government is currently making it.

@johnjhorton At first I thought this was about Masayoshi Son.

@mattyglesias License to crenellate was a curious thing because it began as a way to centralize power but later turned into something people sought for the prestige.


@jasonlk Also: the monthly updates have to contain numbers.

@DanyPell I'm happy about this aspect of the election, definitely.

@NathanWilbanks_ I choose my opinions individually instead of buying the package deal. So I can see that wokeness sucks, and Trump does too.

https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d

Til now there were two opposing forces acting on San Francisco. It was both the center of the AI revolution, and had one of the most dysfunctional city governments in America. Now there's just the first.

Hold on, because this is now about to happen. The bungling ideologues who used to run SF were completely defeated in this last election. The forces of reform have taken the Mayor's office, the Board of Supervisors, and the Board of Education.

@ahistoryinart I don't think users leave that suddenly. Not all deleting their accounts. Seems more likely it's a purge of inactive accounts or something.

"The bad ones seem like products. The good ones seem like projects."

— 12 yo on the games and movies he prefers

@NickADobos How to Do Great Work: https://t.co/Bs2gq7bkvb

@NickADobos What drives almost all the most successful founders is interest in the project they're working on.

@DrPhiltill @robinhanson @TheKevinDalton You understand that my whole point is that it's a mere coincidence, right?


@staysaasy I knew immediately that I wouldn't want to predict that prompt engineering would last. When I thought more about it I realized I was willing to predict the opposite.

Corollary: The fact that we currently have such a thing as prompt engineering means we don't have AGI yet. And furthermore we can use the care with which we need to construct prompts as an index of how close we're getting to it.

It seems to me that AGI would mean the end of prompt engineering. Moderately intelligent humans can figure out what you want without elaborate prompts. So by definition so would AGI.

@GaryMarcus ChatGPT works.

@JoJoFromJerz And that other people were allowed to look at it.

@levie NGIs can usually figure out what people want without elaborate prompts. So by definition AGIs will.

@typesfast The original version ("A gentleman is someone who's never unintentionally rude.") makes a stronger claim. It's defining the term instead of just telling us one thing that's true of them.

@levie Prompt engineering seems to mean roughly "this thing kind of works, but just barely, so we have to tell it what to do very carefully," and technology often switches rapidly from barely works to just works.

@levie Maybe, but this seems like something that would be so hard to predict that I'd never want to have an opinion about it.

@paulmidler Yes, this wouldn't get you all the differences between good and mediocre writing. There's a limit to how much damage even a really bad editor can do. But I bet you it would turn up some very interesting things.


Technological revolutions always have unexpected consequences, but the AI Revolution is going to be extreme in this respect. No one knows what's going to happen. I've never had a conversation with an expert who said "Ok, here's how it's all going to play out."

People often ask what I tell my kids about AI. I tell them I'm reluctant to give them any too specific advice, because one of the most distinctive things about this wave of technology is the unpredictability of the outcome.

Rule of thumb: When people deny even the possibility of social contagion, there is a lot of social contagion happening.

@EddieGoode1 @ChrisDJackson It's acceptable to take a lot of risk when the downside is not too bad.

@AriSchulman Presumably they're careful to steal things only from people who have little political power.

@habibahamid @ChrisDJackson Yes, I'm concerned about a lot of things the government is doing. But I can separate this from what SpaceX is doing.

@thegrantdotco Definitely not. A successful startup takes over your whole life. You can't do another kind of work well at the same time.

@rickwong888 They wear more hats but have no choice about which they wear.

@ChrisDJackson I've been a big Democratic donor in the last two campaigns and I can tell you that you are not doing the Democrats a favor with this kind of comment. Plus you make yourself look like a fool, because this is in fact what actual innovation looks like.

@CompSciFact I bet this was more true when he said it about OS thread scheduling than it is now about LLMs.


@TimCodesStuff Both.

@jamescham Some such outcome is not impossible. It depends on the degree to which English majors choose it because they love writing vs because it has no math requirement.

@dsiroker If anyone has an excuse for slacking, it would be someone with three young kids and a startup. But if you do want to write more, one way to do it would be to write about your plans for the startup. When I was running YC I wrote several essays about it just for us.

@tkothari1 Sometimes but not often.

@TheBishalPandey I wouldn't (and didn't) say that. There's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing, but it's not the only kind.

Corollary: If you have a distaste for ugly words, it will also help keep you honest.

Intellectually dishonest people use bogus words, because if they had to say what they meant in everyday language, it would be too obviously dishonest.

https://t.co/Pk9mrqArM9

@AskYatharth @sheryparv Where do I say in that essay that the problem with philosophy is that it uses fancy words?

Writes and Write-Nots: https://t.co/GdwU5KKmhe

@skdh Let's hope it never comes to this, but the point would be that there are further irreversible disasters down the line.


Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but
some of the
smartest programmers
I know are some of the least excited about it.
My own feeling is that object-oriented
programming is a useful technique in some
cases, but it isn't something that has to pervade every program you
write.  You should be able to define new types,
but you shouldn't have to express every program as the
definition of new types.
I think there are five reasons people like object-oriented
programming, and three and a half of them are bad:
Object-oriented programming is exciting
if you have a statically-typed language without
lexical closures or macros.  To some degree, it offers a way around these
limitations.  (See
Greenspun's Tenth Rule
.)
Object-oriented programming is popular in big companies,
because it suits the way they write software.  At big companies,
software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing)
teams of
mediocre programmers.  Object-oriented programming imposes a
discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them
from doing too much damage.  The price is that the resulting
code is bloated with protocols and full of duplication.
This is not too high a price for big companies, because their
software is probably going to be bloated and full of
duplication anyway.
Object-oriented
programming generates a lot of what looks like work.
Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who
would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded
by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments.
Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets
you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source
code.  Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing
a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and
methods.  So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself,
or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work.
If a language is itself an object-oriented program, it can
be extended by users.  Well, maybe.  Or maybe you can do
even better by offering the sub-concepts
of object-oriented programming a la carte.  Overloading,
for example, is not intrinsically tied to classes.  We'll see.
Object-oriented abstractions map neatly onto the domains
of  certain specific kinds of programs, like simulations and CAD
systems.
I personally have never needed object-oriented abstractions.
Common Lisp has an enormously powerful object system and I've
never used it once.  I've done a lot of things (e.g. making
hash tables full of closures) that would have required
object-oriented techniques to do in wimpier languages, but
I have never had to use CLOS.
Maybe I'm just stupid, or have worked on some limited subset
of applications.  There is a danger in designing a language
based on one's own experience of programming.  But it seems
more dangerous to put stuff in that you've never needed
because it's thought to be a good idea.
Rees Re: OO
Spanish Translation


@grok @surmoulage All these ideas are hardware and/or biotech.

@ezcrypt Not that I recall. Sometimes office hours start with these, but I can usually get the founders to start talking conversationally within a few minutes.

@neuralvarez Most startups even if they succeed will have market caps in the billions or tens of billions.

@colinjangel @michaelpollan This is the sort of useless advice that makes it hard for people to figure out what to eat.

Today is the deadline to apply for the fall YC batch.

@koomen There's arguably no downside, because the application is designed to consist of questions that it would be useful for every founder to answer.

@rohindhar This happened in 2012.

@michaelpollan Is there a list of ultraprocessed foods? It's hard to avoid them if we don't know which foods those are.

I just talked to a startup whose market cap, if they succeed, will be so large that we didn't even try to estimate it. It would just sound like fiction to investors.

@AndyLapsa @EstesRockets Building Estes model rockets was my main project as a kid. I even won the Design of the Month contest at one point, which for me was like winning a Nobel Prize.


@mcuban I don't think it's specifically a Silicon Valley issue, but what I'm hearing in SV suggests that it must be big nationally. SV has traditionally leaned left, so if SV is turning sharply against wokeness, almost everyone must be.

@SteveStuWill I don't think this is a new discovery so much as a change in the nature of conservatism. Back in the days of hippies vs squares, conservatives *were* more obedient. But now that elite orthodoxy tilts left, conservatives are the rebels.

@kane @salesforce It's not unexpected at all.

@stylewarning Depends what the thing is. Card tricks boring, Lisp fascinating.

@AGItechgonewild Because I dissed wokeness or because I dissed Trump? You can never tell these days.

@bksnav Yes, I agree, that's about when it peaked.

I hate wokeness, but backlashes are dangerous things. It would be unfortunate if this one got us Trump as president. So I hope the Democrats can admit to themselves how widespread the dislike of wokeness is. If they can, it could take the air right out of that orange balloon.

I think we are going to be surprised at the magnitude of the backlash against wokeness. This is one of the problems with movements that censor speech: you don't know how many people you're censoring, because they can't tell you.

@pickover I used to.

You can tell just by looking at this progression that this was a labor of love for a lot of very smart people. https://t.co/xTYnXpAR8A


@dennisschaeferx This could be @amasad's house.

@FibNewtonian That's what it's designed for.

@westoque I tried to get a new monitor about 4 years ago, but the nearest Apple store was out of stock.

@flyosity Unfortunately that is a concealed radiator.

@thomasschulzz Not *that* different. There are usually more teacups and papers on my desk.

@GmScala That's no Concorde. That's an ancient Boom design.

@hectoplasm333 It's by Tony Gonnet. It was painted in 1954, and I bought it because it's so perfectly dated: it looks exactly as if it had been painted in 1954.

@maria_d Yes, this is one of the Viaweb desks! It's actually a kitchen table.

@brian_armstrong Yes, this was part of the spec. And not just for me. My 12 yo son laps the desk as he dictates stories and I type them.

@alexandr_wang I have a trip to Hay on Wye booked for about two weeks from now.


Taste for Makers
February 2002
"...Copernicus'
aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential
motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."
- Thomas Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution
"All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed
fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked
beautiful would fly the same way."
- Ben Rich,
Skunk Works
"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this
world for ugly mathematics."
- G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology
I was talking recently to a friend who teaches
at MIT.  His field is hot now and
every year he is inundated by applications from
would-be graduate students.  "A lot of them seem smart,"
he said.  "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind
of taste."
Taste.  You don't hear that word much now.
And yet we still need the underlying
concept, whatever we call it.  What my friend meant was
that he wanted students who were not just good technicians,
but who could use their technical knowledge to
design beautiful things.
Mathematicians call good work "beautiful,"
and so, either now or in the past, have
scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers,
writers, and painters.
Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is
there some overlap in what they meant?  If there
is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries
about beauty to help us in another?
For those of us who design things, these are not just
theoretical questions.  If there is such a thing as
beauty, we need to be able to recognize it.  We need
good taste to make good things.
Instead of
treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered
about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy
abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question:
how do you make good stuff?
If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell
you that "taste is subjective."
They believe this because it really feels that
way to them.  When they like something, they have no idea
why.  It could be because it's beautiful, or because their
mother had one, or because they saw a movie star with one
in a magazine, or because they know it's expensive.
Their thoughts are a tangle of unexamined impulses.
Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle
unexamined.  If you make fun of your little brother for
coloring people green in his coloring book, your
mother is likely to tell you something like "you like to
do it your way and he likes to do it his way."
Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you
important truths about aesthetics.  She's trying to get
the two of you to stop bickering.
Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one
contradicts other things they tell us.  After dinning
into you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference,
they take you to the museum and tell you that you should
pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist.
What goes through the kid's head at this point?  What does
he think "great artist" means?  After having been
told for years that everyone just likes to do
things their own way, he is
unlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a great
artist is someone whose work is
better
than the others'.
A far more likely theory, in his Ptolemaic model of
the universe, is that a great artist is something that's
good for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book.
Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way
to prevent disputes.  The trouble is, it's not true.
You feel this when you start to design things.
Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better.
Football players
like to win games.  CEOs like to increase earnings.  It's
a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at
your job. But if
your job is to design things, and there is no such thing
as beauty, then there is
no way to get better at your job.
If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is
already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.
As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get
better at it.  Your tastes will change.  And, like anyone
who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting
better.  If so,
your old tastes were
not merely different, but worse.  Poof goes the axiom that
taste can't be wrong.
Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper
you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows.
But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself,
that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you
can start to study good design in detail.
How has
your taste changed?  When you made mistakes, what
caused you to make them?  What have other people learned about
design?
Once you start to examine the question, it's surprising how
much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common.  The same
principles of good design crop up again and again.
Good design is simple.
You hear this from math to
painting.  In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be
a better one.  Where axioms are concerned, especially,
less is more.  It means much the same thing in programming.
For architects and designers it means that beauty should
depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements
rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.  (Ornament
is not in itself bad, only when it's camouflage on insipid
form.)  Similarly, in painting, a
still life of a few carefully observed and solidly
modelled objects will tend to be more interesting than a
stretch of flashy
but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar.
In writing it means: say what you mean
and say it briefly.
It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity.
You'd think simple would be the default.  Ornate
is more work.  But something seems to come over people
when they try to be creative.  Beginning writers adopt
a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way
they speak.  Designers trying to be artistic resort to
swooshes and curlicues.  Painters discover that they're expressionists.
It's all evasion.
Underneath
the long words or the "expressive" brush strokes, there
is not much going on, and that's frightening.
When you're
forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem.
When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver
substance.
Good design is timeless.
In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake.
So what does Hardy mean when he says there is no permanent
place for ugly mathematics?  He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did:
if something is ugly, it can't be the best solution.  There
must be a better one, and eventually
someone will discover it.
Aiming at timelessness is a way to make
yourself find the best answer:
if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.
Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they
left little room for those who came after.
Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow.
Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade
the grip of fashion.  Fashions almost by definition
change with time, so if you can make something that
will still look good far into the future, then its
appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.
Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will
appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to
try to appeal to past generations.  It's hard to guess what
the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be
like the past in caring nothing for present fashions.
So if you can make something that appeals to people today
and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good
chance it will appeal to people in 2500.
Good design solves the right problem.
The typical
stove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dial
to control each.  How do you arrange the dials?  The
simplest answer is to put them in a row.  But this is a
simple answer to the wrong question.
The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row,
the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time
about which dial matches which burner.  Better to arrange the dials
in a square like the burners.
A lot of bad design is industrious, but misguided.
In the mid twentieth century there was a vogue for
setting text in sans-serif fonts.
These fonts
are
closer to the pure, underlying letterforms.
But in text that's not the problem you're trying to solve.
For legibility it's more important that letters be easy
to tell apart.
It may look Victorian, but a Times Roman lowercase g is
easy to tell from a lowercase y.
Problems can be improved as well as solutions.
In software, an intractable problem can usually be replaced
by an equivalent one that's easy to solve.
Physics progressed faster as the problem became
predicting observable behavior, instead of reconciling it
with scripture.
Good design is suggestive.
Jane Austen's novels contain almost no
description; instead of telling you how
everything looks, she tells her story so well that you
envision the scene for yourself.
Likewise, a painting that suggests is usually more engaging
than one that tells.  Everyone makes up their own story about the
Mona Lisa.
In architecture and design, this
principle means that a building or object should let you
use it how you want: a good building, for example, will
serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it, instead
of making them live as if they were executing a program
written by the architect.
In software, it means you should give users a few
basic elements that they can combine as they wish, like Lego.
In math it means a proof that
becomes the basis for a lot of new work is
preferable to a proof that was difficult,
but doesn't lead to future discoveries; in the
sciences generally, citation is considered a rough
indicator of merit.
Good design is often slightly funny.
This one
may not always be true.  But Durer's
engravings
and Saarinen's
womb chair
and the
Pantheon
and the
original
Porsche 911
all seem
to me slightly funny.  Godel's incompleteness theorem
seems like a practical joke.
I think it's because humor is related to strength.
To have a sense of humor is to be strong:
to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes,
and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.
And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strength
is not to take
oneself too seriously.
The confident will often, like
swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly,
as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings-- or
Shakespeare, for that matter.
Good design may not have to be funny, but it's hard to
imagine something that could be called humorless also being
good design.
Good design is hard.
If you look at the people who've
done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they
worked very hard.  If you're not working hard,
you're probably wasting your time.
Hard problems call for great
efforts.  In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions,
and those tend to be interesting.  Ditto in engineering.
When you
have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary
out of your pack.  And so an architect who has to build
on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he
is forced to produce an elegant design.  Fashions and
flourishes get knocked aside by the difficult business
of solving the problem at all.
Not every kind of hard is good.  There is good pain and bad pain.
You want the kind of pain you get from going running, not the
kind you get from stepping on a nail.
A difficult
problem could be good for a designer, but a fickle client or unreliable
materials would not be.
In art, the highest place has traditionally been given to
paintings of people.  There is something to this tradition,
and not just because pictures of faces get to press
buttons in our brains that other pictures don't.  We are
so good at looking at faces that we force anyone who
draws them to work hard to satisfy us.  If you
draw a tree and you change the angle of a branch
five degrees, no one will know.  When you change the angle
of someone's eye five degrees, people notice.
When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function,"
what they meant was, form
should
follow function.  And
if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it,
because there is no effort to spare for error.  Wild animals
are beautiful because they have hard lives.
Good design looks easy.
Like great athletes,
great designers make it look easy.  Mostly this is
an illusion.  The easy, conversational tone of good
writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.
In science and engineering, some of the greatest
discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself,
I could have thought of that.  The discoverer is
entitled to reply, why didn't you?
Some Leonardo heads are just a few lines.  You look
at them and you think, all you have to do is get eight
or ten lines in the right place and you've made this beautiful
portrait.  Well, yes, but you have to get them in
exactly
the right place.  The slightest error
will make the whole thing collapse.
Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual
medium, because they demand near perfection.
In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser
artists literally solve the same problems by successive
approximation.  One of the reasons kids give up drawing
at ten or so is that they decide to start
drawing like grownups, and one of the first things
they try is a line drawing of a face.  Smack!
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with
practice.  Perhaps what practice does is train your
unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to
require conscious thought.  In some cases
you literally train your body.  An expert pianist can
play notes faster than the brain can send signals to
his hand.
Likewise an artist, after a while, can
make visual perception flow in through his eye and
out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to
a beat.
When people talk about being in
"the zone," I think what they mean is that the
spinal cord has the situation under control.
Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and
it frees conscious thought for the hard problems.
Good design uses symmetry.
I think symmetry may just
be one way to achieve simplicity, but it's important enough
to be mentioned on its own.
Nature uses it a lot, which is a good sign.
There are two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion.
Recursion means repetition in subelements, like the
pattern of veins in a leaf.
Symmetry is unfashionable in some fields now, in reaction to
excesses in the past.  Architects started consciously
making buildings asymmetric in Victorian times and by the
1920s asymmetry was an explicit premise of modernist architecture.
Even these buildings only tended to be asymmetric
about major axes, though; there were hundreds of minor symmetries.
In writing you find symmetry at every level, from the phrases
in a sentence to the plot of a novel.  You find the same
in music and art.
Mosaics (and some Cezannes) get extra visual punch by making
the whole picture out of the same atoms.  Compositional
symmetry yields some of the most memorable paintings,
especially when two halves react to one another, as in
the
Creation of Adam
or
American Gothic
.
In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win.
Inductive proofs are wonderfully short.  In software,
a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always
best solved that way. The Eiffel Tower looks striking partly
because it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower.
The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is that
it can be used as a substitute for thought.
Good design resembles nature.
It's not so much that
resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature
has had a long time to work on the
problem.  It's a good sign when your answer resembles nature's.
It's not cheating to copy.
Few would deny that a story should be like life.
Working from life is a valuable tool in painting too, though its
role has often been misunderstood.
The aim is not simply to make a record.
The point of painting from life is
that it gives your mind something to chew on:  when your
eyes are looking at something, your hand will do more
interesting work.
Imitating nature also works in engineering.  Boats have
long had spines and ribs like an animal's ribcage.
In some cases we may have to wait for better technology:
early aircraft designers were mistaken to
design aircraft that looked like birds, because they didn't
have materials or power sources light enough (the Wrights' engine
weighed 152 lbs. and
generated only 12 hp.) or control systems sophisticated
enough for machines that flew like birds, but I could
imagine little unmanned reconnaissance planes flying
like birds in fifty years.
Now that we have enough computer power, we can imitate nature's
method as well as its results.  Genetic algorithms may let us
create things too complex to design in the ordinary
sense.
Good design is redesign.
It's rare to get things right
the first time.  Experts expect to throw away some early work.
They plan for plans to change.
It takes confidence to throw work away.  You have to be able
to think,
there's more where that came from.
When people first start drawing, for example,
they're often reluctant to redo parts that aren't
right; they feel they've been lucky to get that far,
and if they try to redo something, it will turn out worse.  Instead
they convince themselves that the drawing is not that bad,
really-- in fact, maybe they meant it to look that way.
Dangerous territory, that; if anything you should
cultivate dissatisfaction.
In Leonardo's
drawings
there are often five
or six attempts to get a line right.
The distinctive back of the Porsche
911 only appeared in the redesign of an awkward
prototype
.
In Wright's early plans for the
Guggenheim
,
the right half was a ziggurat; he inverted it to get the
present shape.
Mistakes are natural.  Instead of treating them
as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix.
Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a
way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration.
Open-source software has fewer bugs because it admits the
possibility of bugs.
It helps to have a medium that makes change easy.
When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century,
it helped
painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human
figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.
Good design can copy.
Attitudes to copying
often make a round trip.  A novice
imitates without knowing it; next he tries
consciously to be original; finally, he decides it's
more important to be right than original.
Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design.
If you don't know where your ideas are coming from,
you're probably imitating an imitator.
Raphael so pervaded mid-nineteenth century taste that almost
anyone who tried to draw was imitating him, often at several
removes.
It was this, more than Raphael's own work, that bothered
the Pre-Raphaelites.
The ambitious are not content to imitate. The
second phase in the growth of taste is a conscious
attempt at originality.
I think the
greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness.
They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the
right answer has already been discovered by someone else,
that's no reason not to use it.
They're confident enough to take from anyone without
feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.
Good design is often strange.
Some of the very best work
has an uncanny quality:
Euler's
Formula
,
Bruegel's
Hunters in the Snow
,
the
SR-71
,
Lisp
.  They're not just
beautiful, but strangely beautiful.
I'm not sure why.  It may just be my own stupidity.  A
can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.  Maybe if I were smart
enough it would seem the most natural thing in the world that
e
i*pi
= -1.  It is after all necessarily true.
Most of the qualities I've mentioned are things that can be
cultivated, but I don't think it works to cultivate strangeness.
The best you can do is not squash it if it starts to appear.
Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange.
He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange.
At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted
most of all to develop a personal style.
But if you just try to make good things, you'll
inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person
walks in a distinctive way.  Michelangelo was not trying
to paint like Michelangelo.  He was just trying to paint
well; he couldn't help painting like Michelangelo.
The only style worth having is the one you can't help.
And this is especially true for strangeness.  There is no
shortcut to it.  The Northwest Passage that the Mannerists,
the Romantics, and two generations of American high school
students have searched for does not seem to exist.  The
only way to get there is to go through good and come out
the other side.
Good design happens in chunks.
The inhabitants
of fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti,
Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi,
Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.
Milan at the time was as big as Florence.
How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name?
Something was happening in Florence in the fifteenth century.
And it can't have been heredity, because it isn't happening now.
You have to assume that whatever
inborn ability Leonardo and Michelangelo had, there were
people born in Milan with just as much.  What happened to
the Milanese Leonardo?
There are roughly a thousand times
as many people alive in the US right now as lived in
Florence during the fifteenth century.  A thousand Leonardos
and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us.
If DNA ruled, we should be greeted daily by artistic
marvels.  We aren't, and the reason is that to make Leonardo
you need more than his innate ability.  You also need Florence
in 1450.
Nothing is more powerful
than a community of talented people working on related
problems.  Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic
Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born
near Milan instead of Florence.
Today we move around more, but great work still comes
disproportionately from a few hotspots:
the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the
New Yorker,
Lockheed's Skunk Works, Xerox Parc.
At any given time there are a
few hot topics and a few groups doing great work on them,
and it's nearly impossible to do
good work yourself if you're too far removed from one
of these centers.  You can push or pull these trends
to some extent, but you can't break away from them.
(Maybe
you
can, but the Milanese Leonardo couldn't.)
Good design is often daring.
At every period
of history, people have believed things that were just
ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked
ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise.
If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.
As far as I can tell it
isn't
.
This problem afflicts not just every
era, but in some degree every field.
Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular:
according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and
Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their
work.
Einstein's theory of relativity offended many contemporary physicists,
and was not fully accepted for decades-- in France, not until the
1950s.
Today's experimental error is tomorrow's new theory.  If
you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning
a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and
truth don't quite meet, you should pay particular attention
to them.
As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness
than to imagine beauty.  Most of the people who've made beautiful
things seem to have done it by fixing something that they
thought ugly.  Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees
something and thinks,
I could do better than that.
Giotto
saw traditional Byzantine madonnas painted according to a
formula that had satisfied everyone for centuries, and to him
they looked wooden and unnatural.
Copernicus was so troubled by a hack that all his contemporaries
could tolerate that he felt there must be a better solution.
Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough.  You have to
understand a field well before you develop a good nose for
what needs fixing.  You have to do your homework.  But as
you become expert in a field, you'll start to hear little
voices saying,
What a hack!  There must be a better way.
Don't ignore those voices.  Cultivate them.  The recipe for
great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability
to gratify it.
Notes
Sullivan
actually said "form ever follows function," but
I think the usual misquotation is closer to what modernist
architects meant.
Stephen G. Brush, "Why was Relativity Accepted?"
Phys. Perspect. 1 (1999) 184-214.
Japanese Translation
Chinese Translation
Slovenian Translation
German Translation
Interview: Milton Glaser
Russian Translation
You'll find this essay and 14 others in
Hackers & Painters
.


What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
January 2015
My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked
for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.
He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to
do.  When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear
watershed at about age 12, when he "got interested in maths."
He
grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of
Pwllheli
.  As we retraced
his walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had been
nice growing up in the country.
"Didn't it get boring when you got to be about 15?" I asked.
"No," he said, "by then I was interested in maths."
In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was
solving problems.  To me the exercises at the end of each chapter
in a math textbook represent work, or at best a way to reinforce
what you learned in that chapter.  To him the problems were the
reward.  The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving
them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately
work out all the problems — to the slight annoyance of his teacher,
since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually.
Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on.
But talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of us
can use. If something that seems like work to other people doesn't
seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.
For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually
like debugging.  It's not something people tend to volunteer; one
likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like
debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which
programming consists of it.
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence
they probably are of what you should do. When I was in college I
used to write papers for my friends.  It was quite interesting to
write a paper for a class I wasn't taking.  Plus they were always
so relieved.
It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person
and pleasant to another, but I didn't realize at the time what this
imbalance implied, because I wasn't looking for it.  I didn't realize
how hard it can be to decide what you should work on, and that you
sometimes have to
figure it out
from subtle clues, like a detective
solving a case in a mystery novel.  So I bet it would help a lot
of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like
work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this.
Robert Morris: All About Programming
French Translation


This looks like it's going to be a big deal.

@cremieuxrecueil This is like a news story from 2020.

@sama I've noticed more and more in my replies. And not just from fake accounts run by groups and countries that want to influence public opinion. There also seem to be a lot of individual would-be influencers using AI-generated replies.

@robertfrost Though ingenious, this strategy seems like a mistake. You're encouraging people to see that a genocide is happening. At that point they're only one step away from seeing who's doing it.

@nikitabier Sorry to keep harping on this, but I agree with you, and this is why Twitter should stop deprioritizing links. Longer-form writing is important, and it naturally lives elsewhere.

@micsolana Obviously it's ridiculous that the police arrested this guy. The UK has a big problem with free speech.

But if you were intellectually honest you'd show the whole thread, which was about deportations rather than free speech.

(The fact that you're not is why I blocked you.)

@jaminphx @vazserox It sounds like you're saying that you should deliberately kill babies. Is that what you're saying?

@ZosimaThe That's why I don't need to.

@emollick One of the things that strikes me when talking to AI insiders is how they believe both that they need several new discoveries to get to AGI, and also that such discoveries will be forthcoming, based on the past rate.

@sridharfyi Below even secondary.


@rickperlstein Every country has these men.

@Mpls_Jake @joncoopertweets Often, yes.

@MacaesBruno Come on, man. People with ordinary jobs face a lot of pressure to keep quiet about Gaza, and that in turn makes them not want to look too closely at what's happening. Let's welcome them instead of giving them a hard time.

@abhibagalkot Microsoft didn't start by selling to IBM. They were several years old by that point. And they weren't selling to IBM itself, but to its customers, which at that point still included a lot of scrappy early adopters.

@ben_el_baz Yes. So much about startups is.

@zcserei At YC, startups get the opposite of this problem: they're encouraged to sell to other YC startups, which are exactly the right type of customers for a startup to sell to.

@lejdipr That's usually one of their claims. It may even be true. But it's still at odds with the nature of a startup to start by selling to tech laggards instead of early adopters.

@owenjonesjourno If you really care about the children who are being starved and bombed, welcome other people who've realized what's happening, instead of giving them a hard time for taking so long to.

@serbiaireland Copybook. Those mosaicists' styles seem too different.

@joncoopertweets Because they know they are doing something wrong.


A startup in the summer YC batch got offered funding at a 60m valuation. I didn't ask if this was pre or post.

They turned it down, wisely I think, because a valuation like that creates a significant danger of a down round later.

@DragonWhelp1 These are my friends. They took public transportation.

@mrowlinson It simply means there was a lot of it.

@brothesecond It's partly that things have gotten better, and partly that things were never as bad as some people claimed.

@OvertonWindmill Sure. It shows that a city is attracting people from all over the world.

@biggestcatt It means large in magnitude. There was more of it than they expected. How is this hard to understand?

@wdhartley I meant great in the sense of large in magnitude. Weird how many illiterates in the replies don't seem familiar with that usage...

@nikitabier Twitter's worst feature is the deprioritization of tweets with links in them. However good Twitter gets, it isn't going to replace the entire web. Most good stuff will still be on other sites. So deprioritizing links hides most good stuff.

@brian_armstrong It's not true that if you can't say something, there must be a kernel of truth in it. It's trivially easy to think of counterexamples.

@Gundo_OG Every state is expected to allow food and medicine to reach civilians. In fact it is a war crime not to.


I'm going to delete this because apparently I was sent this email by mistake.

@davidmanheim Yes, I'm certain of it. Things might be different in 100 years, but not 6.

@rafidhoda The same thing it has always been: the people they will meet there.

@JensClaessens I don't see the pencil. Is it in your other hand?

@eglyman @jesslivingston "I can't believe I really *tore him a new one.* That's reserved for people who repeatedly put their feet on the white walls."

— Jessica

@GolatoTyler @nikitabier Yes, when he asked why, I told him this was probably the reason.

@nikitabier I don't think so. He was astounded to hear a couple years ago that John Cena had followed me, but I think he has written that off as an anomaly.

Told 12 yo that one day, maybe at university, he'll encounter someone who's read my essays. He was skeptical.

@Chris_arnade The best example I can think of is YC itself. YC's model is taken for granted now, but it was really weird at the time, and in a domain (venture funding) where there is very little innovation.

@matterasmachine If it weren't possible to recognize potential greatness, early stage investors like YC couldn't make money.


@renatopllopes He was a really great plumber based in Menlo Park.

@Carnage4Life I doubt this is anything but an isolated anomaly. It's hard to imagine a good tech company caring either way about degrees. All that matters is how well you can program.

@se_eug Really? What happened?

@eldsjal Here's a good use of Spotify I saw recently:

https://t.co/SGBePyUrG6

@007musk @mattyglesias Not if you have board control.

@mattyglesias You used to get fired for mentioning that research. Though to be honest you probably still could at Google.

@josephjojoe I haven't read it but I'm starting to think now that I should.

@johnarnold Possibly. But there may be enough private capital backing it. We may be at the stage where the most important thing governments can do is not put obstacles in the way.

The last couple days have taught me that practically everyone I follow has something in common: admiring Daniel Kahneman.

@sentientist Especially by mothers.