flâneur

Shivam Siddaiya

51 followers · 40 following · 1986 views

on the atlas — 149

highlights — 188

  • What I find attractive in others is often directly correlated to what I’m missing in myself
    personal failings - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Abode's approach is thoughtful automation “where it makes sense.”
    Building a national property-tax engine with near-zero variable cost | Mercury
  • Bad VCs will push founders towards strategies, bets, models that have a 1% chance of working, but pay out 200x if they do. In the process they destroy a good business--one which has earned the trust of dutiful employees and loyal customers--all for a lottery ticket to build a unicorn. They will throw 100 darts at the dartboard and maybe 5 will land, but what is it like to be the dart? You may have good expected value, but all of that EV is from spikes super far away from the origin. Is it pleasant betting everything on this distribution?
    .:: Phrack Magazine ::.
  • The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, and I think that appeals to people politically. Environmentalism is a form of peace and safety. The Boomer gerontocratic vision of the future, a locked-down society for 75-year-old grandmothers, is a form of peace and safety. I don’t think stagnation is sustainable, because so much of our society—the budget deficits, the overproduction of PhDs, the student debt—is predicated on a lot of future growth, but that doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to people in the meantime
    Interview: Peter Thiel on Scientific Stagnation
  • I think for Gen Z, inheriting wealth will be the most important metric for how successful you are economically
    Interview: Peter Thiel on Scientific Stagnation
  • But the most incorrect, optimistic prediction it made was that if we have a slowdown in extensive growth with faster planes and cars, we can still have intensive growth in hard-to-measure things: Human community and healthcare can still be better as we degrow. There’s this intuition that a stagnant world would correlate with a more egalitarian world. And that was spectacularly wrong.
    Interview: Peter Thiel on Scientific Stagnation
  • : Yes, but to abstract just a little bit, I tell people that you can measure progress however you want. You can measure it by plane speeds, or curing cancer, or per capita GDP. But it has to be measurable.
    Interview: Peter Thiel on Scientific Stagnation
  • after building ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century, we hit a peak with the Concorde, which was decommissioned in 2003
    Interview: Peter Thiel on Scientific Stagnation
  • n 2026, the word “technology” usually means information technology and computers. One could call this a failure of imagination, but on another level, if we define technology as that which is progressing, our narrow-mindedness simply reflects our narrowed range of progress. By contrast, “technology” in 1967 would have meant computers, but also rockets, supersonic aviation, the Green Revolution in agriculture, new medicines, and more. Society was advancing on many different fronts
    Interview: Peter Thiel on Scientific Stagnation
  • A lot of the work that matters in enterprises still isn’t exposed cleanly through APIs – it lives in screens, thick clients, VDI sessions, and half-documented admin consoles. That’s why modern “computer-use” agents are such an important complement to API-first copilots: they expand the reachable surface area of automation to the last 30–40% of workflows where there simply isn’t a reliable endpoint to call. The core capability isn’t “clicking buttons,” it’s reliability under mess – agents that can perceive the UI, anchor to stable elements, recover from pop-ups and layout drift, and checkpoint …
    Why the World Still Runs on SAP | Andreessen Horowitz
  • 18 the best Israeli students get recruited into into Tsahal’s elite technology units, Unit 8200 which is their equivalent of the NSA trains these kids in cyber intelligence, ML, signal processing electronic warfare & data analysis at a level that civilian universities elsewhere in the world barely offer at the doctoral level, Unit 81 trains them in hardware, R&D, sensors, drones & embedded systems & the Talpiot unit which is the most selective of all recruits the MOST brilliant minds in the country and trains them for 9y in physics mathematics & engineering with mandatory service in applied mi…
    Mehdi (e/λ) on X: "why Israel is striking Iran and why it has nothing to do with what you’re being told" / X
  • High availability - Platform remains accessible and minimizes downtime. Scalability - Infrastructure expands and contracts to meet demand. Performance - Code runs efficiently even under heavy load. Security - Safeguards prevent data breaches and hacking. Reliability - Robust monitoring minimizes crashes and anomalies. Recoverability - Capabilities exist to quickly recover from failures.
    Understanding Development, Staging, and Production
  • every new generation of agents will force you to rethink what is optimal, which is why less is more. When you use many different libraries and harnesses, you lock yourself into a "solution" for a problem that may not exist given future generations of agents.
    sysls on X: "How To Be A World-Class Agentic Engineer" / X
  • every new generation of agents will force you to rethink what is optimal, which is why less is more.
    sysls on X: "How To Be A World-Class Agentic Engineer" / X
  • The Shenzhen electronics factories and San Fran startups running 996 schedules and the Goldman analysts sleeping under their desks are all doing the same thing that is compressing a human being into a deterministic function.
    We Turned Ourselves Into Robots
  • We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,
    Palantir’s Alex Karp Talks About War, AI and America’s Future - The New York Times
  • “the finding of hidden things” — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior.
    Palantir’s Alex Karp Talks About War, AI and America’s Future - The New York Times
  • We need to develop stimulants with shorter half-lives. Caffeine, while tremendously useful, can be detrimental to our sleep quality.
    Future
  • Current agent offerings more closely resemble advanced robotic process automation (RPA) tools than true autonomous systems. While LLMs have made advances here, they typically rely on intricate prompt engineering, carefully orchestrated models, and predefined workflows, such as scripted CRM record updates.
    The Rise of Computer Use and Agentic Coworkers | Andreessen Horowitz
  • If only there were a way to start a city or an army made up of lovers and the boys they love! 11 Theirs would be the best possible system of society, for they would hold back from all that is shameful, and seek honor [179A] in each other’s eyes. 12 Even a few of them, in battle side by side, would conquer all the world,
    Symposium
  • After all, my greatest pleasure comes from philosophical conversation, even if I’m only a listener, whether or not I think it will be to my advantage.
    Symposium
  • that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man's everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough
    Notes from Underground (Everyman's Library)
  • I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.
    Notes from Underground (Everyman's Library)
  • The Gmail team built a horseless carriage because they set out to add AI to the email client they already had, rather than ask what an email client would look like if it were designed from the ground up with AI. Their app is a little bit of AI jammed into an interface designed for mundane human labor rather than an interface designed for automating mundane labor.
    Pete Koomen
  • I believe that democratic countries must remain ahead of autocracies in AI. But these policies also have an additional benefit. If the US and other democracies have a clear lead in AI as they approach the “country of geniuses in a datacenter”, we may be able to “spend” a portion of that lead to ensure interpretability10 is on a more solid footing before proceeding to truly powerful AI, while still defeating our authoritarian adversaries
    Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability
  • generative AI systems are grown more than they are built—their internal mechanisms are “emergent” rather than directly designed.
    Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability
  • the underlying technology is inexorable, driven by forces too powerful to stop, but the way in which it happens—the order in which things are built, the applications we choose, and the details of how it is rolled out to society—are eminently possible to change, and it’s possible to have great positive impact by doing so
    Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability
  • Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designed to operate on people, and be good or bad depending on how effectively it does so
    Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
  • Dry powder specifically earmarked for VC secondaries more than doubled from 2023 to June 2024, reaching $7.2 billion, indicating growing buyer interest.²
    Dan Gray on X: "Venture Trifurcation: How Secondaries Could Reshape Allocation, Returns, and Market Structure" / X
  • So in summary, here’s what blockchain-the-technology is: “Let’s create a very long sequence of small files — each one containing a hash of the previous file, some new data, and the answer to a difficult math problem — and divide up some money every hour among anyone willing to certify and store those files for us on their computers.” Now, here’s what blockchain-the-metaphor is: “What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone?”
    Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future | by Kai Stinchcombe | Medium
  • It can be tempting to view (great) taste as objective. But that omits the fact that taste demands a personal connection. It's a kind of intimacy with detail. It requires deep familiarity and skillful consideration or creation of quality.
    Taste, Time, and Attention - Jackson Dahl
  • Logic doesn't scale, but stories do. Most great things involve paradox. Hold both sides at once. Sit with them. Enjoy the mess. This is life.
    30 Things to Remember - Jackson Dahl
  • Ubiquitous Computing, defined by Mark Weiser in 1996. He imagined a world where technology "disappears" into the things we use everyday, anticipating our needs and delivering relevant information or actions based on context and behavior, without requiring our direct attention.
    Power of Metaphors in Human-AI Interaction
  • Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
    A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
  • Even now, we face a “pacing problem”,89 where digital technologies develop faster than the regulation and social norms that govern them. A technological explosion intensifies that problem tenfold.
    Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion | Forethought
  • the basic paradox is you have to be just like them, so they can trust you — but you have to be very different from them so that they think you have something they don’t have.
    Palantir’s Alex Karp Talks About War, AI and America’s Future - The New York Times
  • He said that Mr. Karp would not be suited to running Airbnb or Uber “or some mass consumer product.” But Palantir, he said, “is connected with this great set of geopolitical questions about the Western world versus the rising authoritarian powers. So if we can get our governments to function somewhat better, it’s a way to rebalance things in the direction of the West.” “Normally,” Mr. Thiel continued, “these are bad ideas to have as a company. They’re too abstract, too idealistic. But I think something like this was necessary in the Palantir case. If you didn’t get some energy from thinking ab…
    Palantir’s Alex Karp Talks About War, AI and America’s Future - The New York Times
  • BPOs tend to be older incumbents that lack cutting-edge tech and operate in a well-defined category of work with clear, existing budgets; this makes them prime disruption targets for startups given the proven market need, available budget, and legacy competition.
    Unbundling the BPO: How AI Will Disrupt Outsourced Work | Andreessen Horowitz
  • it divides people into those who get how the world really works (the Sociopaths and the self-aware slacker Losers) and those who don’t (the over-performer Losers and the Clueless in the middle).
    The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
  • the Loser game is not worth becoming good at. He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit. He knows his under-performance is not sustainable, but he has no intention of becoming a lifetime-Loser employee anyway. He takes the calculated risk that he’ll find a way up before he is fired for incompetence.
    The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
  • The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of “cool”), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks.
    The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
  • Union Square Ventures even predicts that in 2025, direct bank-to-bank payments will surpass credit card interchange payments in a few categories in the US. Better regulation, specifically the CFPB’s Section 1033, makes it easier (via an explicit government endorsement of open banking) for retailers to offer A2A transactions — which subsequently allows them to avoid card processing fees.
    On a stablecoin bank - by Bridget Harris and Abhi Desai
  • If we believe that the vertical software layer becomes a commodity and pricing is a race to the bottom, then ultimately we’d want to own the customer of the software, not the software provider itself.
    The Dawn of AI Rollups – The Vin Diagram
  • There is an entire element of philosophy which focuses on speculating on how humans might interact with something that’s not there–the counterfactual. This part of philosophy can conduct thought experiments (the subject of my Oxford Master’s thesis) and ask, “If we build it, will they come?” And just as importantly, how might potential competitors respond. This kind of predictive anthropology is one of the potential strengths of philosophical training.
    Philosopher Versus MBA | Greylock
  • The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There's less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).
    By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI — LessWrong
  • Acquire low-quality companies with white-collar desk employees doing manual, repetitive, rules-based work and avoid companies where LLMs can’t really reduce COGS (like many businesses in the real world). Think insurance TPA and tax prep, not HVAC installation.
    Artificially Intelligent Barbarians - Andrew’s Substack
  • that company can expand either horizontally— i.e., by using the same tool to serve a new set of customers—or vertically, by creating new tools to address other problems that its existing customers are facing.
    The Religion of Ramp
  • Every semester of college, you can grow by up to 2 years.” And this past semester didn’t yield as much growth as I’d hoped. The dropoff in the college experience is significant between each semester, and it no longer outweighed the opportunity cost of not being in either SF or NYC.
    Entering my 20's - Calix Huang
  • This tends to view AI as higher or more than us even though paradoxically it is a product of us, as a final embodiment of nature's directedness towards “an optimization process” that “[creates] life which constantly expands.”
    Existential Pessimism vs. Accelerationism: Why Tech Needs a Rational, Humanistic "Third Way"
  • An excessive focus on the extreme case too often blinds the long-termist school from the banal and natural threats that lie before us: the feeling of isolation from hyper-stimulating entertainment at all hours, the proliferation of propaganda, the end of white-collar jobs, and so forth.
    Existential Pessimism vs. Accelerationism: Why Tech Needs a Rational, Humanistic "Third Way"