Hardeep Gambhir

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on the atlas — 439

highlights — 362

But “experience” has become a blurry concept. If the internet is real life, does living inside it count as experience?
Earn Something To Say - by Chisel and Anu - Chisel
and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online.
What is New Media? | Andreessen Horowitz
These future-defining problems are hard to recruit for, difficult to raise money for, and nearly impossible to build near-term businesses around, which is why they are exactly the types of problems we need the most well-resourced players pursuing.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
Almost all of these founders have deep personal motivations to keep building
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
Therefore, there is a moral imperative for our best players to choose good, hard quests.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
History is the record of top players completing good quests.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
they’ve allocated talent (including their own) and resources away from hard, important problems.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
But if a talented nuclear physicist with compelling insights into the field, ample resources, and many well-connected peers decides to open a tiki bar in Bali that is an extraordinarily bad quest.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
A hard quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success. Reversing aging, going to Mars, curing cancer, building a supersonic plane, creating AGI, or founding a new country — these are all hard quests, and most players attempting these quests will fail.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
There are important challenges facing humanity that no one is working on, including critical, and even existential challenges. In other words, if you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral. It constitutes a loss for humanity.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
A far cry from refrigeration or running water, but a nice life. As you’ve probably already intuited, not all quests are created equal.
Choose Good Quests – Founders Fund
My “bicoastal elite” card is in the mail.
Leaving San Francisco (for now)
No matter how internet-influenced San Francisco may be, the city’s raw density lends itself to a neighborhood atmosphere that, if really taken advantage of, can hardly be beat.
Leaving San Francisco (for now)
I have stubbornly analog tendencies. I write in my leather Paper Republic journal each morning, I shoot a few rolls of 35mm film each month, and I refuse to ever own a TV.
Leaving San Francisco (for now)
How well did people predict the final impacts of the printing press? How well did people predict the final impacts of fire? We even have an expression “playing with fire.” Yet it is, on net, a good thing we proceeded with the deployment of fire (“Fire? You can’t do that! Everything will burn! You can kill people with fire! All of them! What if someone yells “fire” in a crowded theater!?”).
Response to Tyler Cowen's Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history
The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring. No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring.
Response to Tyler Cowen's Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history
No matter how positive or negative the overall calculus of cost and benefit, AI is very likely to overturn most of our apple carts, most of all for the so-called chattering classes.
Response to Tyler Cowen's Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history
Of course there are obvious exceptions, like gain of function research and bioweapons and nukes to make the rubble bounce, and also I can see the argument for things like television and social media and crack cocaine and American cheese (so it’s clear it’s not only lethal weapons here, don’t let this list distract you), but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Response to Tyler Cowen's Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history
During the pre-production process, time costs money, and this allowed us to move faster without sacrificing quality or craft.
Martin Scorsese × Black Forest Labs
I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences.
Martin Scorsese × Black Forest Labs
Even if you’re not going to be remembered by history, you want to be remembered by your barista.
What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin
We’re building the Y combinator of new-age media.
Camp Studios
Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.
some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
there are certain arrangements of words that seem to reliably hit the algorithm like an incantation
maja 🔭🍒 on X: "i’m fascinated by how this specific sentence and idea goes semi-viral every time i post it. it’s also the title of my most viral substack essay ever there are certain arrangements of words that seem to reliably hit the algorithm like an incantation ‘some parts of you only https://t.co/jgR7LkG9qk" / X
The choice of sign relies on both the user and the technologist. The GLP-1 that saves a diabetic’s life collapses the action space of an otherwise healthy person. The LLM that allows a mathematician to solve an open Erdős problem robs an undergraduate of their ability to work through difficult ideas and ask meaningful questions. As we tear closer and closer to the 21st century technocapital singularity, these dualities will only become more extreme: AI-enabled BCIs will grant unprecedented agency to the disabled, but will inevitably and consensually turn millions of people into purely mimetic …
Poison Fruit - Will Savage
Driving to the airport, Rohan pointed at a billboard. “I like the Lyft ads. Probably my favourite ad campaign recently. I feel like I actually check Lyft more now.”
Attention is all you need | Alexandria
I mentioned wanting to grow SF Alexandria’s Instagram presence, and Rohan’s been sending me reels for inspiration ever since. The fact that he cares enough to help me unprompted[4], it makes me want to stick around.
Attention is all you need | Alexandria
He’ll get a chef friend to cater his party for free and have the chef thank him for it, because to them, it was a chance to practice running the operation instead of being a line cook.
Attention is all you need | Alexandria
Use AI to get smarter and don’t let it make you dumb.
The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
You won’t imbibe tacit knowledge in a classroom’s confines, so find a mentor to take you under their wing. Textbooks are out; apprenticeships are in. Absorb everything that experts know.
The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
The key is to sound like you’re going no matter what. People like to join people who already have a plan.
The Old World Is Dying: Advice for 2026 graduates
If you cannot conquer hunger, how will you conquer worlds?
Poison Fruit - Will Savage
Jesus fasted for forty days before beginning his ministry.
Poison Fruit - Will Savage
To carelessly submit the body to a GLP-1 or the mind to an LLM is to give up the jagged, vivid highs and lows of struggle in exchange for a sort of grey smoothness.
Poison Fruit - Will Savage
They’ve solved the struggle of thought itself, allowing one to leave behind the agonizing friction of learning in favor of a narcotic flow of surface-level knowledge.
Poison Fruit - Will Savage
history is the record of top players completing good quests.
Fission - Will Savage
It is no surprise, then, that the backlash to AI, particularly the opposition to data centers, has come in the form of protests and public comments at town and city-council meetings across the country. People are taking up their agency in one of the few places they can: the physical world.
AI Is Causing a Crisis of Agency - The Atlantic
consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge
AI Is Causing a Crisis of Agency - The Atlantic
This is why being glued to our phone and feeds can feel so extractive and joyless, even numbing.
AI Is Causing a Crisis of Agency - The Atlantic
One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?
AI Is Causing a Crisis of Agency - The Atlantic
They bet on taste-driven founders who can capture the cultural zeitgeist.
Taste is Eating Silicon Valley. - by Anu Atluru
The likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are admired not just for their technical innovations but for the way they turned their products, and themselves, into cultural icons.
Taste is Eating Silicon Valley. - by Anu Atluru
"We recorded them and put them out on SoundCloud, just for fun", she recalled.[27]
Billie Eilish
You can’t air a season finale on Friday and immediately premiere the next season on Monday. You need to reset the stakes, rebuild tension, and give the audience a reason to return.
The Season Finale of TBPN - Working Theorys
If I was meant to do something, if I’m here for a reason, I think it’s to be the guy who teaches AI how to code.
The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
It’s the same in every field, and we’ll get to a point where you can just do 10 times more of the 10% you actually love.
The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
When people say they really love building software, it’s usually the former that they gravitate towards.
The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
How many ideas does one person have in a day, and how many of those things do they actually get to do? Until that proportion is 100%, you know there is a pretty meaningful bottleneck in terms of the drudgery of execution. I don’t think it’s anywhere close to 100%
The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus
In this case, it has to happen faster.
The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition's Scott Wu - Colossus