flâneur

Ray Arayilakath

14 followers · 13 following · 610 views

on the atlas — 103

highlights — 33

  • The best way to enforce rules is to treat people like adults. ”No working on school or work because those are the rules!” is a lot less compelling than “When you started coming to Socratica, is school really what you wanted to use the space for?”
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • If there is a task that is being completed halfheartedly, the cause is usually that it doesn’t feel meaningful or important to the people who are being asked to do it — your response should not be thinking about how to motivate them to do it anyways, but questioning if it’s worth doing at all. Trust your team. If you know there is real value in doing the work and can communicate that value, it’s usually pretty easy to get the work prioritized.
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • You should be pulling people in to do the work that gets you excited, not the work that makes you groan. For maximum personal and organizational growth, you should be doing handoff the second others are ready for more, even if you’re emotionally attached to the work they’re eager to do.
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • Instead, focus on the experience of the people who did show up, and have so much fun that the people who skipped feel FOMO for not being there. In your post-event marketing, show people laughing and having a good time, and set it to fun music.
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • TLDR: Prioritize the experience of the people who DO show up
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • Organizations are nothing more than idea-transporting vessels and friend-making machines.
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • I want Moth to be known for taste, thoughtfulness, and putting people first. While hot sectors change and business ideas pivot, people continue to be the core atomic unit of this industry.
    bulls, bears, and moths - by Molly Mielke McCarthy
  • Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. So they claimed, at least. But Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before. Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff that business schools think business consists of—you can figure out along the way. The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal. If this …
    Five Founders
  • Dynamic memory management - Firecracker's RAM footprint starts low, but once a workload inside allocates RAM, Firecracker will never return it to the host system. After running several workloads inside, you end up with an idling VM that consumes 32 GB of RAM on the host, even though it doesn't need any of it.1 Discard operations on storage - if you create a 10 GB file inside a VM and then delete it, the backing space won't be reclaimed on the host. The VM will occupy that disk space until you delete the entire VM drive.2
    Why We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU | Hocus Blog
  • At the same time, smaller, heavily optimized models are proving they can alter the cost-performance curve. Public proof points like Cursor's Composer 2 or Windsurf with SWE-1 demonstrate that it is far easier to optimize a smaller model narrowly in one direction than to make a general model perfect for every workflow.
    Introducing Apex: A Fast, Specialized Model for React Native
  • Instead of creating foundations, hiring grant officers, selecting nonprofits, and monitoring thousands of projects, donors distribute money directly across millions of individually owned accounts.
    Trump Accounts Could Replace Most of Government
  • Chips will continue to capture enormous value and so will the applications closest to the end user. But the frontier labs aren't playing the role the middle has played before. They're vertically integrating faster than any prior cycle, they benefit from an improvement dynamic that thins the app layer above them rather than enriching it, and they may be approaching the kind of recursive capability that compounds the frontier-open gap in ways benchmarks won't show.
    Bending the barbell of value accrual
  • I think a key idea of note here is that recursive intelligence happens across the entire stack simultaneously (e.g., models designing chips that train better models, writing code that speeds up inference, generating synthetic data for training, etc.) which then leads to advantages untethered to a single functionality.
    Bending the barbell of value accrual
  • Now AI flips that. Ability is basically free, so for most people, ability exceeds taste. You can make anything, and you don't know what's worth making.
    jason on X: "If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat" / X
  • Buy goods/services from your friends It’s not weird unless you make it weird Everyone knows some starving artists and needs to buy holiday gifts Doesn’t apply to every service obviously: don’t take out loans from your friends
    Milan Cvitkovic
  • Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.
    A Fundraising Survival Guide
  • software should not replace humans, it should enable them
    I've sold out
  • As the "OSS guy", who held pull request contests for the RoboVM repo and did most of the community management on the side, I was also the guy who had to write the "Sorry, no more OSS, suckers" blog post. You cannot imagine what people called me on social media and via email, despite me having zero control over the situation (I was not a majority shareholder). RoboVM going closed-source was devastating, and it made me sour on both VC-funded startups and OSS. But ultimately, none of this bullshit mattered.
    I've sold out
  • Now, for me, deal making is usually a very dry, mechanical affair. But it becomes hard if it involves friends. I'd lie if I'd say it wasn't an emotional struggle for all three of us. But I think that was actually valuable. We got to test how the three of us work together under stress. I got to see Colin work. And we set expectations. Eventually, we worked it out.
    I've sold out
  • Yeah, I wrote that story a couple years ago and thought it would be fun to include as one of the easter eggs.
    Dan Salvato on X: "Yeah, I wrote that story a couple years ago and thought it would be fun to include as one of the easter eggs." / X
  • Star Wars people only have one set of cloths, and fly/live in ancient used star ships. Lack of consumer culture is an understatement.
    The "Forever Ship" Phenomenon is Brilliant - YouTube
  • Scalability. Most harnesses run one process per agent, which means the agent is tied to the machine running it. When the log is the state, you flip that model: one process can advance thousands of agents, each reconstructing its state from the log on each turn. The agent isn't tied to any single machine or worker, making failover trivial. And scaling out is just adding more workers: no sticky sessions, no state migration, no coordination overhead.
    The Log Is the Agent
  • ✅ Instead, try this Ask for context: "Can you tell me more about what you've tried so far?" Offer suggestions, not commands: "Have you considered using a different library? I'm curious if there's a blocker." Acknowledge complexity: "I know this stuff can get messy. What's making it tricky to switch?" Be humble: "I might be missing something—what's stopping a quick update?"
    neverjust
  • DeepSWE prompts are aligned with the way developers talk to their agents: behavior-focused, short, and free of large interface-definition blocks, rather than overly verbose and prescriptive.
    DeepSWE
  • A benchmark is a thing you can measure, and a thing you can measure is a thing you can train against. Thus, coding agents matured first: a compiler is a free verifier, a test suite is a free verifier, and when the answer checks itself for nothing you can grind against the check until you beat it. But passing the test never told you the change was the right one for a decade-old codebase with three undocumented reasons that module exists and a deploy pipeline held together by a cron job no one will admit to writing.
    The Untrainable
  • Without worrying about the specifics and implementation here, let's talk about your title. Is there any reason things shouldn't be smart? I mean, sure, when it's implemented poorly that's one thing. What frustrates me is this weird culture of increasingly young people being mad at tech innovations. The thing is, I'm old. I remember thinking people were super crotchety and anti-tech in their 40s and 50s. This was stuff like VCRs and wireless phones (not smartphones... not even cell phones... wireless home phones). I remember my aunt thinking it was irresponsible of her son to burn a CD on a 1x …
    Steinway with ipad connectivity. Does everything need to be smart? : r/piano
  • the street finds its own uses for things
    “I don’t like it but at least I know. Thanks.” – Unsung
  • AT&T, the company that makes the routers for Doorking, is smarter than a bag of rocks in that SSH is protected on their router. Sadly for them, they lose to the bag of rocks in providing a way to download their entire system configuration from the web interface, containing a way to reset the root password to whatever you want:
    Box of Secrets | Jack Hogan
  • He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
    Folklore.org: -2000 Lines Of Code
  • We mitigate latency through a variety of methods: colocating the GPUs and VMs in the same cloud region, using cumulative sequence length packing, tuning a low-latency VNC configuration, and writing custom Rust bindings for device input. The combination of these optimizations lets us achieve a round trip screen capture to action latency of 11ms.
    The First Fully General Computer Action Model | blog
  • Every time a developer sneezes, three new PaaS projects are spawning.
    Self-hosted PaaS - Peter Demin
  • The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experi…
    Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss
  • i write a lot more now. i carry a notebook everywhere. i read occasionally, but when i do, i read voraciously, and it changes how i think. i'm more grateful for those who choose to love me, because i understand now how rare that is.
    Goodbye 20 | Aiden Bai