Cynthia Chen
2 followers · 8 following · 298 views
on the atlas · 36
- Putting Ideas into Words7 savers
- HBS (full tuition) VS GSB (80% of tuition) : Admitted - Which BSchool to Choose?1 savers
- The Browser Company raises $50M at a $550M valuation | TechCrunch1 savers
- Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrative2 savers
- Natural Language Is an Unnatural Interface - by Varun3 savers
- rabbit — research3 savers
- The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you - The Verge1 savers
- Our chat with Groq's Chief Evangelist, Mark Heaps (Pt. 2)1 savers
- How Facebook Is Making Us Creepy, Desperate, and a Tiny Bit Undead | by The Archipelago | The Archipelago | Medium1 savers
- Why We Can’t Stop Rushing - The New York Times1 savers
- Opinion | I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is - The New York Times1 savers
- Ronald McDonald just chased me thru the play place and I spilled my apple juice13 savers
- LLMs shouldn’t write SQL - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack2 savers
- Nadia Asparouhova | Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity17 savers
- Public Experiments | Varun | Substack3 savers
- Video generation models as world simulators7 savers
- Quit Your Job59 savers
- There is no such thing as a typical day | MIT Admissions4 savers
- How Marx Pushed Me Toward Startups - Michelle Lim1 savers
- Gold Rush - Michelle Lim2 savers
- how to coparent baby ideas - by Anson Yu18 savers
- Philosophy | The Lovely Software Corp.5 savers
- Some Intuition on Attention and the Transformer3 savers
- My 2023 in NYC, and what I’m thinking about for 20243 savers
- good artists copy, great artists steal - by Molly Mielke6 savers
- The logic of waking up early8 savers
- turning point - by Dylan Hu - Dylan’s Substack1 savers
- Why You Should Join: Inside Edition1 savers
- What I Learned In 2023 - by Alexandr Wang20 savers
- look what the cat brought in - by Anson Yu32 savers
- Curius / Onboarding2704 savers
- Thirty Observations at Thirty62 savers
- What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman52 savers
- The Tail End — Wait But Why26 savers
- sparkly people and how to find them - by Anson Yu21 savers
- How to Twitter Successfully | near.blog11 savers
highlights · 58
The only model that’s had any success is to pair the browser with the search product and to place ads in the search. Browsers don’t really make sense without a search engine, so this is relatively intuitive, but it makes it pretty hard for a browser vendor to monetize without also competing with Google
The Browser Company raises $50M at a $550M valuation | TechCrunchbrowser will become an operating system and all software will be accessible through web applications
The Browser Company raises $50M at a $550M valuation | TechCrunchThe interface gets out of the way as much as possible. Prompting nearly always gets in the way because it requires the user to think. End users ultimately do not wish to confront an empty text box in accomplishing their goals. Buttons and other interactive design elements make life easier.
Natural Language Is an Unnatural Interface - by VarunNeural language models, by design, are not well suited to perform these tasks alone. Although they have shown the ability to understand and utilize application programming interfaces [16], user interfaces are very different and fundamentally less compatible with text
rabbit — researchthe unavailability of application programming interfaces (API) for major service providers
rabbit — researcha new kind of user interaction experience arises where a device`s primary user interface is via spoken natural language instead of touch
rabbit — researchWhat ChatGPT could be to web search, Rabbit OS could be to the app store
The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you - The VergeOver time, you can mature into a business that’s truly productizing and providing something that solves problems for individuals and enterprises at scale. Internally, this makes you realize you don't need to show every chart and every table - what users care about most is user experience and reliability, and that shifts the culture of your thinking
Our chat with Groq's Chief Evangelist, Mark Heaps (Pt. 2)Our culture, now as ever, rewards hustle. The Silicon Valley maxim “Done is better than perfect” can be constructive when applied to procrastination. But we bring it to bear on situations in which “done” is not necessarily a desirable goal.
Why We Can’t Stop Rushing - The New York TimesWhere do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? / To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Why We Can’t Stop Rushing - The New York TimesI find myself sometimes having a lovely time, out to dinner with friends, say, and I’ll notice an insistent hankering for the dinner to be over. Why? So I can get to the next thing, who cares what the next thing is, just keep going. Keep rushing, even through the good parts.
Why We Can’t Stop Rushing - The New York Times“Certainly at one point the day will definitely be over once and for all for each of us. Is that what we’re rushing toward?”
Why We Can’t Stop Rushing - The New York TimesI once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.
Opinion | I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is - The New York TimesI left said startup to do… something? I was a _________.
Ronald McDonald just chased me thru the play place and I spilled my apple juiceI want to crudely sketch it, and use AI to forgive my unsteady hand.
LLMs shouldn’t write SQL - by Benn Stancil - benn.substackI want to write code. Sort of.
LLMs shouldn’t write SQL - by Benn Stancil - benn.substackI want to push a button or use a hotkey.
LLMs shouldn’t write SQL - by Benn Stancil - benn.substackThe obvious point here is that natural language isn’t always a particularly useful way to create something. For certain types of output, English is crude, imprecise, and painfully inefficient.
LLMs shouldn’t write SQL - by Benn Stancil - benn.substackThe problem with drawing an owl like this is that the axiom that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has a corollary: It takes a thousand words to describe a picture.
LLMs shouldn’t write SQL - by Benn Stancil - benn.substackmany software companies struggle to mature or produce shareholder returns in public markets, as succeeding at this scale requires transitioning organizational culture from bimodal- to Pareto-distribution
Nadia Asparouhova | Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcitylatter skews more qualitative, favors lone “creative genius” archetypes, and has a positive-sum approach to talent
Nadia Asparouhova | Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcitydifferent models of talent partly explain the differences between McKinsey and Silicon Valley cultures. The former is highly quantified, favors tightly-coordinated teams of overachievers, and encourages a competitive zero-sum talent environment
Nadia Asparouhova | Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcityBut data with a high supply usually means its production is easy or commonplace, which, ceteris paribus, means it’s cheap to sell in turn
Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrativeexpressing that the success of a model is entirely inherent to the available data set
Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrativeIt’s actually a great expression of the issue, because AI isn’t replacing programming—it’s replacing Stack Overflow
Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrativeAgain, even assuming that’s all technologically possible, these examples, law and mental health, are extremely difficult to disrupt for structural reasons—not just because the vast majority of people want a final human overseer, but because a whole host of regulations, traditions, and legalities stand in the way
Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrativeThe 1st order consequences — how AI could reimagine UIs, robot process automation (RPA), contextual agents (that actually work), embodied toys, new forms of AI native hardware, diffusion-based rendering engines etc. — remain underexplored.
Public Experiments | Varun | SubstackMost current applications fit into narrow buckets: image generation, character chatbots, code generation. These are just 0th order consequences of basic capabilities
Public Experiments | Varun | SubstackProgress in capabilities doesn't automatically yield commercial viability
Public Experiments | Varun | SubstackSky-high valuations assume successful applications will naturally emerge once research translates to production systems
Public Experiments | Varun | SubstackI’ve shown my parents ChatGPT, and they’re both in careers where it could be super helpful3. It hasn’t been sticky for either of them, even after the “wow” factor.
Public Experiments | Varun | SubstackSora is trained on and subsequently generates videos within this compressed latent space. We also train a corresponding decoder model that maps generated latents back to pixel space
Video generation models as world simulatorsWe train a network that reduces the dimensionality of visual data.20 This network takes raw video as input and outputs a latent representation that is compressed both temporally and spatially
Video generation models as world simulatorsWhereas LLMs have text tokens, Sora has visual patches
Video generation models as world simulatorsThe success of the LLM paradigm is enabled in part by the use of tokens that elegantly unify diverse modalities of text—code, math and various natural languages
Video generation models as world simulatorsYou get good ideas from years of hard leisure.
Quit Your JobBut you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients.
Quit Your JobConsistently imperfect is more marketable than occasionally inspired.
How Marx Pushed Me Toward Startups - Michelle LimCraftsmanship is a liability because it compromises product consistency
How Marx Pushed Me Toward Startups - Michelle LimI feel the camaraderie when, dressed in Patagonia jackets with the company logo, we skip together over the urine on the sidewalk outside our office. When we walk past people in sleeping bags, we quicken our pace, evading eye contact while seamlessly continuing our conversation about high rent prices in San Francisco.
Gold Rush - Michelle Limthere’s a new interesting angle when it comes to the emergent behavior of LLMs
My 2023 in NYC, and what I’m thinking about for 2024language is more than just a symbolic representation to convey thoughts. It’s clear that language is contributing to making those very thoughts, in a circular feedback loop
My 2023 in NYC, and what I’m thinking about for 2024I haven’t learned a new programming language in a few years. It’s just Python and Typescript these days. It would be fun to pick up something new
My 2023 in NYC, and what I’m thinking about for 2024there’s a spatial element to learning
My 2023 in NYC, and what I’m thinking about for 2024Before zero-ing in on data, at Replit I mostly focused on shipping high-impact, low-complexity features to drive growth
My 2023 in NYC, and what I’m thinking about for 2024If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad. It takes me many cycles before I can get an essay past the stranger.
Putting Ideas into WordsPutting ideas into words is a severe test
Putting Ideas into WordsWe're betting on their three-pronged approach of growing virally down-market, owning the entire editor, and building a tool that’s already useful today – it’s reminiscent of Figma's winning strategy
Why You Should Join: Inside Editionthe advent of open-source models with strong reasoning capabilities and near-performance-parity has paved the way for new experiences with local LLMs, both in experimentation and in production
Why You Should Join: Inside Editionthe most exceptional projects & products often are the ones that introduce the greatest developer delight
Why You Should Join: Inside Edition