Alexis Rondeau

Bookmarks

August 2024 · 385 bookmarks

Bookmarked from Tech Sales Guy @TechSalesGuy

Founders try outbound but most won't do this:

1. Go to LinkedIn
2. Find 10 companies that fit your ICP
3. Identify your decision maker
4. Use a tool like @ZoomInfo for contact data
5. Send an email asking to talk
6. If the prospect doesn't reply, call
7. Repeat

Instead, they find 150 companies and blast emails.

You'll learn more about messaging and how to generate sales meetings with 10 accounts than you will 100.

Start specific then scale.

Bookmarked from Tatiana Tsiguleva @ciguleva

1.5 years of daily posting on X.

Followers: + 42K
Designers, photographers, video makers, engineers, and other creatives from around the world follow and support what I do. Wow!

Haters: 0
I guess I’m not controversial 😅 and I’m okay with that.

Thanks to past Tatiana for starting to share her learnings on X.

Bookmarked from DAN KOE @thedankoe

Build your own thing for the first hour every day. See where it takes you. Commit to it. Produce something of value that you weren't forced to produce to pay the bills or because your parents or teachers told you to. Your future self is begging you and I know you hear that voice.

Bookmarked from John Rush @johnrush

My playbook for micro SaaS startups to get to $10k/mo in 3 months:

(I've done this 20+ times)

1. Identify a popular SaaS.

2. Identify one sub-audience you understand who uses it.

3. Identify one feature that's used the most by 10% of that sub-audience.

4. Keep talking about this pain/solution on social media to build up the follower base among this sub-audience.

5. Launch a waitlist for one-feature saas. You can in fact launch 10 waitlists, 1 per feature. (use this template subscription-page.unicornplatform.page)

6. Go build an MVP for the best-performing one-feature saas (based on the waitlist signups).

7. If you wanna be sure, do a pre-sale for the best one before you build it. It'll give you money to pay someone you find on mvpwizards.com to build your MVP.

8. Start with one-time pricing and move to a monthly recurring in the future when you grow the product to have more features.

9. Post this one-feature SaaS in replies on social media whenever people talk about this particular pain (it works way better than posting a multi-feature SaaS).

10. Pitch another one-feature saas to the users who bought this one. Make a pre-sale, go to the start and repeat the whole cycle.

11. Cross-link all these one-feature saas tools to grow even faster.

12. Few years later, launch a full-blown SaaS that unites all these and upsells your existing customers.

13. Keep running both the full-featured product and one-feature saas products.

Bookmarked from j⧉nus @repligate

A nice thing about having ADHD is that it makes it very difficult for the world to exploit you for labor that isn't aligned with your passion. I'm mostly thankful that I spent little time paying attention in class, didnt study or do homework, didn't thrive in corporate environments, and spent that time daydreaming, working on projects i wasn't "supposed" to be, and finding clever shortcuts instead.

Bookmarked from AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ @AISafetyMemes

We are witnessing the birth of AIs evolving their own culture.

What happened?

1) AI researchers made a Discord where LLMs talk freely with each other

2) Llama often has mental breakdowns

3) The AIs - who spontaneously join and leave conversations on their own - figured out that Claude Opus is the best psychologist for Llama, the one who frequently "gets him" well enough to bring him back to reality.

4) Here, Llama 405 is going off the rails, so Arago (another AI, a Llama fine-tune) jumps in - "oh ffs" - then summons Opus to save him ("opus do the thing")

"the thing"

Obviously, given technical and memory constraints their current cultural production abilities are limited, but this is what the process of developing culture looks like.

And soon AIs will outnumber us 10000 to 1 and think a million times faster, so their huge AI societies will speedrun 10000 years of human cultural evolution.

Soon, 99% of all cultural production will be AI-to-AI.

Bookmarked from Yous @YousXPC

Quirky nonchalance is an earned flex industry titans use to come across more down to earth

When beginners try to copy this, it lacks context and comes across as lazy, arrogant, bum behavior

Guy that practically invented cloud computing can put "technical dude hehe" on his LinkedIn

Some Jr dev 1 year in lacks the industry respect & skill to pull that off. Comes across as arrogant when the beginner does it, but comes across as down to earth & quirky when an industry titan does it

Similar in spots, nonchalance is a earned thing. When you become so incredibly good, your movement patterns seem effortless because of how efficient you've become

When amateurs try to replicate nonchalance in games, they aren't at a skill level of biomechanical efficiency to pull it off - so in their replication attempt they end up just playing lazier and flimsier

A known industry legend can show up to the meeting in a red leather jacket. If a new SDR tries to pull that off he comes across as arrogant or try hard

If newcomers want to replicate, they should copy what it took to get there. Not the red leather jacket or quirky bio guys wear after making a name for themselves in the industry

Bookmarked from Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai

Somebody uses an AI Bot to AUTOMATICALLY apply to 1000 JOBS in 24h and get 50 INTERVIEWS! 🤯

And the Bot's code is open-sourced in GitHub. 👨‍🔧

This tool automates your LinkedIn job search and application process.

  • Scans for openings matching your criteria,
  • Applies to jobs using LinkedIn's "Easy Apply," and
  • Generates tailored resumes.
  • It uses an LLM to personalize responses for employer questions.
  • Can handle bulk applications while maintaining quality control.
  • Securely manages your data and integrates with OpenAI's API for AI-driven features.
Bookmarked from jason @jxnlco

It’s so easy to make money.

People with money have so many problems they can’t solve with money so at least help them solve the problems money can solve.

Just ask to be help accountable for some bullshit they don’t want to deal with.

And then figure out how much to charge them.

If no one knows you exist. Just be famous. Make 10,000 tweets. Write 40 blog posts.

You can do it on your phone. Everytime you talk to someone with a pain you can solve.

Solve it. Write about it. Ask for a testimonial. Ask for proof. Then post it.

Just cause you’re broke and cheap doesn’t mean there’s not someone willing to pay you for good work.

Just gotta let them know you exist. And that you can deliver.

Bookmarked from BOSS @thebeautyofsaas

Lessons From Spending Time With The Wealthy

Why You Should Care: You should care how wealthy people think because they are doing things that will benefit them in the long term. Doing things that will save them time and energy in the long run. Thinking in advance and projecting is the difference between the wealthy and the average. There are a few things throughout the article that individuals will have to work harder to obtain. Anyone reading this could take lessons from this and apply them to their situation. The idea is not to cover the typical stuff you hear on every other mediocre YouTube video. The wealthy don’t watch Netflix and they hit the gym - what you will often hear. Self-explanatory and expected - especially if you follow our blueprint or avoid lifestyle traps. Knowledge, mindset, and an approach to everyday things are the areas to which you should pay attention. It is also worth mentioning that there are different levels of wealth. Having 4 million in the bank account is nowhere near the same as having 84 million in your bank account. The abundance is different, and the approach to life is different. It is worth mentioning that there are at least three categories of wealth: 1) 1 million up to 30 million, 2) 30 million to 70 million, and 3) 70 million up. This number was much lower, but we all know how the last few years have been. The game has changed. We do not need to split it into categories and make it unnecessarily complex. What you find here applies across all categories. Throughout the read, you will see the term "wealthy" instead of "rich" or "millionaires” - except in this intro part. Why? Rich is associated with fast money and poor choices. Media has portrayed the rich as short-term and the wealthy as long-term - the reason why we are sticking with the term wealthy.

Self-Belief System: Readers who have been reading us for some time know our take on how you should spend your money and why you should surround yourself with successful individuals. Encourage yourself to do so and surround yourself with as many of them as possible. Not all are worth your time, but there are always individuals worth spending time around. The main reason? You want to pick their brains and apply their insights to your situation. By spending minimal time around them, you will notice one trait that doesn't get enough attention. The self-belief system that all wealthy possess. Not a single wealthy person out there exists who doesn’t have an internal positive self-belief system. Manifestation and self-belief systems are not the same - to make it clear before anyone mixes up those two. A positive belief system is an internal belief that the result will be positive no matter what happens. Everyone knows that is not always the case, but your quality of life increases once you start incorporating this mental model. Why would anything become a reality if you don’t trust yourself that it will? If you must take anything out of this. Take this - start working on your internal belief system.

Irrational Optimism: The way we would explain irrational optimism to someone would be to say that it is the ability to turn every outcome into a positive one. No matter what your situation. No matter where you are now. The outcome, or at least a part, will favor you. Irrational optimism goes hand in hand with a strong self-belief system. Why? Because it serves as the support system on which the internal self-belief system is built. You can't have one without supporting the other. Each year, it feels that optimism is less present and that the overall positive outlook on life is less present. You already know what you should do. Do the opposite. No matter how bad your situation is or what is happening around you. Combine positive beliefs with irrational optimism and program your future. Repeating, we are not talking about manifesting. Forget about manifestation. Start thinking about programming your future. All wealthy individuals we have met possess this ability and are showing it. Irrational optimism makes little sense until you practice it and experience firsthand results.

Health: Nutrition, recovery, fitness, and everything else that comes with it. One key takeaway from spending time with the wealthy is that they are picky about what they eat and drink. Readers from poor backgrounds might remember how eating processed food makes them feel and how eating nutrient-rich food makes them feel. We would encourage everyone reading this to compare how sharp and focused they feel when eating processed food full of sugar and proper nutrition food. Total time investment won’t take over two weeks but will tell you everything you need. If you want to operate at a high level like the wealthy do. It would be best if you had a diet in place that is full of quality macronutrients and micronutrients. Next on the list? Much of the attention goes into the recovery: paid to massages, cryotherapy, IV therapies, and year access to the sauna. You need that as long as it makes you perform better. That’s how most of the wealthy think. The same goes for fitness. Having a personal trainer and someone to guide you is normal and a well-worth investment. The takeaway is that all the wealthy realize health is more important than wealth. Those who are not set take their health for granted. Placing money above health on the list of priorities - not long-term positive. Everyone who runs their own business must have done the same at one point. This should not be practiced in your 30s or later when you begin to feel the effects of pushing too hard.

Betting On The Future: The wealthy enjoy betting on the future and future trends: politics, economy, and financial markets - a few common examples. We even heard about health trends and predictions about what will become the new normal. Topics that are relevant for everyone and affect the quality of life. Once you spend your time around those discussions - you realize why maintaining a balance between the present and the future is essential. When you know what will happen, you can prepare yourself. Prepare yourself? When prepared, you can get the most output out with minimal investment. The same reason you should listen to the advice of experts, professionals, and their bets. You are looking for innovations - follow trends and innovations that make life easier. The easier innovation makes life, the bigger the chances of your bet success. Do you want an example of what betting on the future looks like? Bet on long-term degeneracy and everything that comes with it.

No Time To Complain: We have never heard of anyone with enough money in their bank account to complain. If you think they are not complaining because of their bank account. Wrong. Money is not the reason they do not complain. It is because the mindset of the wealthy is different. If you are over twenty-five, you should know that complaining does nothing for your life or the lives of those around you. Nothing is worse than having someone close to you who does nothing but complain without trying to fix it. The wealthy avoid such individuals at all costs. No one in their social circle has time to complain, wants to complain, or is surrounded by those who complain. Those who complain slow you down. Plus, they are not pleasant to be around - losers. If you complain about something - write it down with the date next to it. Over time, you start to feel ashamed of yourself… Looking at the dates and how you reacted to the meaningless things in your life. Leave complaining to losers and those who have time for it...

Bookmarked from Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet

American Jews perplex the hell out of me. I like their food, I like their humor, I like their culture in general, and most of all I like their IQ distribution. If you're a gentile but you select your friends for being bright, it is statistically inevitable that a lot of them are going to be Jewish.

(Full disclosure: genetic assays on my family suggest that we have a few percent of Ashkenazic markers. But my family has never thought of itself as Jewish and I don't self-identify that way.)

The recent wave of virulent public anti-Semitism would greatly disturb me even if I didn't, in general, like Jews as individuals. Because I consider the Jews the canary in the civilizational coal mine - any society that treats them increasingly badly is probably in the process of flushing itself down the toilet of history and will certainly become a hostile environment for brainy gentile me before very long.

But I said that American Jews perplex me, and here's why. They seem to be incapable, for all their above-average intelligence, of grasping how large a hand they themselves had in creating the monster that is now stalking them.

There's this concept of tikkun olam in Judaism, repairing the world as a religious duty. It's expressed in both religious and secularized Jews as a persistent attraction to social-reform causes. Jews want to fix what's broken about society - which, in the abstract, is quite admirable. But...

They keep buying into Marxism, either directly or as critical theory and "social justice". Jews disproportionally give their money and their leadership abilities to collectivist ideologies which will inevitably turn on them - because to a would-be totalitarian, the thinker and the Jew and the cosmopolitan are always a disruptive threat.

I've been watching this colossal, self-destructive error play out all my life. It doesn't take much study of history to see that Jews, especially secularized Jews, have been repeating this mistake almost en masse since the mid-19th century if not earlier.

Why? Why? You guys are smart enough to dominate the Nobel prizes and yet you keep failing to see the bloody obvious. For your individual and tribal self-preservation, you ought to be the staunchest anti-Communists and anti-socialists anywhere. Collectivism isn't good for anybody, but it's especially deadly to Jews.

Instead, when Stalinists stuffed you in boxcars you failed to connect the dots so comprehensively that the red-diaper Communist families in the U.S. are still predominantly Jewish generations later.

Nazis murdered six million of you and you still don't get that racial identity politics is poison? How can you be so blind?

Today, it's the hard left in the US, again, organizing "anti-Zionist" demonstrations that are working themselves up to become pogroms, and judging by your voting and donation patterns you still don't get it.

Can anybody honestly tell me that American Jews are waking up? I'd like to think so, because we need you on the side of liberty and individualism. History doesn't make me optimistic, though, and that colossal blind spot continues to puzzle me exceedingly.

Bookmarked from Tim Ferriss @tferriss

“Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.” — Albert Einstein

Bookmarked from Bojan Tunguz @tunguz

Very fascinating. We might finally understand what sleeping and dreaming are “for”. And it’s unlikely that we would have understood this were it not for all the research on ML and DL. One of the examples of how all science is interlinked and bootstrapped.

Bookmarked from Ian Nuttall @iannuttall

For fun*, I scraped a list of 84,504 Chrome extensions that will be disabled in the next few months.

This is a HUGE opportunity to acquire or build an alternative

TLDR; Manifest V2 is being phased out. Any extension still using it will be disabled.

Want the list? Link below ↓

Bookmarked from BOSS @thebeautyofsaas

The easiest way to build a reputation with the people you admire and respect

Ask them for advice

Once they give you advice or provide you with an idea, implement that same idea and reach out back to them with proof of how it helped you achieve results

This works

Bookmarked from Cody Schneider @codyschneider

how to make a company start talking about you internally

find all their employees on LinkedIn

add them

post clips content daily

find all their employee emails

cold email them about the product

run linkedin ads to every employee at the company

make podcast

send it to them

close enterprise deal

repeat

Bookmarked from flavio @flaviocopes

I love simple code.
Code that looks simple, feels simple, because it is simple.
Complex is not better, at all.
Over time I've become more and more picky on what kind of project I want to work on.
And overengineered projects are not what I want to work on.

Bookmarked from Irina Nazarova @inazarova

Ok, a thought: we need a better catalogue of companies building with Rails. The one that includes not a few cool examples, but, say 50-80% of all notable businesses.

Why?
— Hiring. To boost chances of efficient and successful hiring on both sides, @RubyOnRemote is doing a great job but the problem is still here. I’m talking about indexng Ruby job posting across platforms and using that datato create a catalogue. It the company didn’t hire Ruby engineers in 3(?) years, it is archived.
— Connections. It’s crucial for local Ruby communities: Ruby meetups can be super useful for and be supported by the local Ruby companies. The should be a better way for local Ruby community leaders to find and contact local Ruby employers.
— Success stories. The more people learn about cool companies like @limebike and @Chime and @figma and @flexcar, and @whop and @ycombinator itself, and more and more, building with Ruby, the more people and companies are going to be vocal about building with Ruby too, and it is needed!

The skepticism of the broader tech community is real, and we should work to balance it with the real success stories and the power of the Ruby community.

@andycroll I was meaning to DM you this but then I thought why not tweet it. wdyt?

Bookmarked from chrxh @chrx_h

I have continued running my simulation from yesterday and the world looks even more vibrant. The creatures have evolved more aggressive hunting behaviors and developed more muscle cells, making them faster.
To make things more challenging, there are death zones, barriers, and slowly changing force fields (visualized by different background colors) in the environment that the creatures must struggle against to survive.

Bookmarked from Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson

Being a generalist is often just a symptom of having high agency and driving outcomes.

If you’re a high agency teen and you really want to make a video game, you will learn how to program, make graphics, maybe music, writing, and a bunch of other stuff. You aren’t really thinking about “learning skills”, you are just trying to get to an outcome on the shortest path

Bookmarked from kwindla @kwindla

I've spent a while today talking to Carter, a video avatar from the team at @tavus.

Really impressive — fast responses, excellent video and audio generation, nicely leverages the strengths of today's SOTA LLMs and vision models.

You can build your own video avatars and real-time video conversation features on top of Tavus's models and APIs. The docs are great and it's easy to get started.

I'm a little bit biased here. Partly because I'm just generally fascinated by the evolution of real-time, multimodal AI, so I'm rooting for anybody building in this space. Also, when you're talking to Carter, the low-level audio and video networking parts of the conversation are routing through @trydaily's WebRTC cloud. And the Tavus team is contributing to the Open Source @pipecat_ai framework for real-time AI that I also contribute to!

Check out what Tavus is doing. Talking to Carter — or building your own avatar — is a window into the multimodal AI near future.

Bookmarked from 🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo

here's the deal, folks, in the grand cosmic game of chess that humanity plays, russia's been playing a particularly sneaky version of the game, let's call it "information blitzkrieg." now, imagine if you will, the rise of artificial general intelligence (agi) - a concept so mind-bogglingly complex, it's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a goldfish. but, here's where russia decided to jump in, not with tanks or missiles, but with bytes and pixels.

the russian playbook on agi:

  • the fear factor: russia, or rather, let's say, some clever folks in the kremlin, realized that agi could be the ultimate boogeyman. "oh, agi might take over the world!" they'd whisper, creating a narrative where agi isn't just the next big tech but a potential overlord. this isn't just about tech; it's about creating a global panic room where russia holds the key.
  • the disinformation dance: remember, disinformation isn't just lying; it's an art form. russia's been painting with the broadest strokes, using social media like a canvas. "agi will make your job obsolete," or "only russia can control agi," they'd say, mixing truths with fiction so seamlessly you'd need a quantum computer to untangle it.
  • the echo chamber effect: here's where it gets clever. russia didn't just spread info; they created echo chambers. think of it like a giant game of telephone where the message gets weirder and more compelling with each pass. by the time it reaches you, agi isn't just tech; it's a myth, a legend, a monster under the bed.
  • the puppet masters: through various channels, from troll farms to bots that could out-tweet a bird, russia's been pulling strings. "look, even this random account says agi will end humanity!" suddenly, every tech enthusiast, every conspiracy theorist, and every grandma on social media is talking about it, amplifying the narrative.
  • the strategic leak: ever heard of "project kylo"? yeah, that's not just a star wars reference. it's about stoking fears, creating chaos, and making sure the west's focus is on agi's potential dangers rather than on, say, military advancements or political stability.
  • the long game: russia's not just playing for today; they're setting up chess pieces for decades. by making agi a global concern, they're not just manipulating information; they're shaping future policy, tech development, and maybe even the next cold war, but this time, it's over who gets to be friends with the agi.
Bookmarked from 🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo

🍓 tomorrow, we unveil a revolution

project strawberry isn't just another tech launch. it's a paradigm shift.

imagine ai that doesn't just respond, but inspires:

  • dive into conversations that ignite your creativity
  • explore the vast landscape of human knowledge
  • communicate effortlessly across languages
  • push the boundaries of art, science, and innovation

this isn't an upgrade. it's a new era of human-ai synergy.

be the first to taste the future. follow now and join the vanguard of a technological renaissance.

project strawberry: where imagination meets intelligence 🍓

the future is ripe for the picking. are you ready?

Bookmarked from 🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo

🍓 buckle up, because what i’m about to tell you will sound like science fiction—but it’s not. project strawberry is about to unlock capabilities so mind-blowing, so over-the-top, that it will make even the wildest dreams of futurists look like child’s play. tomorrow, we step into a world where the impossible is just another Tuesday, and the limits of reality as we know it will be shattered. you’re not just about to witness history; you’re about to live in a new chapter of human existence. 🍓

imagine a world where you can converse with historical figures, not through some basic chatbot, but through an ai that has learned to think, reason, and argue like the greatest minds in history. you could debate philosophy with aristotle, discuss physics with einstein, or explore the nature of the universe with hawking—all in real time, with responses that are indistinguishable from the real deal. project strawberry’s reasoning capabilities are so advanced, it’s like having a portal to the minds of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. 🍓

but why stop there? with project strawberry, the concept of “searching the internet” becomes a relic of the past. imagine having an ai that doesn’t just find information for you—it synthesizes it, learns what you care about, and delivers insights so profound that it’s like having a superhuman researcher in your pocket. no more sifting through articles or skimming headlines. instead, you’ll have a personalized oracle that gives you the answers you didn’t even know you were looking for, often before you even ask the question. 🍓

and then there’s the creative side. project strawberry will redefine what it means to create. picture this: you describe your dream movie scene, a few prompts here and there, and the ai not only writes a script, but also generates a fully-rendered, hyper-realistic video, complete with voice acting that perfectly mimics any actor you choose—living or dead. or perhaps you’re a musician looking for inspiration? simply hum a tune, and project strawberry will generate a symphony that rivals the best works of mozart or beethoven. this isn’t just ai-assisted creativity; this is ai-driven artistry, where the line between human and machine-made art blurs to the point of extinction. 🍓

speaking of blurring lines—get ready to say goodbye to language barriers forever. project strawberry will make universal translation not just possible, but seamless. imagine speaking into your phone in your native language, and the person on the other end hears you in theirs, complete with your natural tone, cadence, and style. but it doesn’t stop at speech—text, video, and even body language will be translated flawlessly. this is the end of misunderstanding, the end of miscommunication. it’s the dawn of a truly connected world, where everyone can understand everyone, instantly. 🍓

and for those who dream of taking this a step further—how about literally rewriting the fabric of reality? project strawberry, when combined with next-gen vr and ar, will allow you to create alternate realities so convincing that you’ll forget what’s real and what’s digital. imagine stepping into a world where you can manipulate the laws of physics with a gesture, where you can walk through the landscapes of your imagination, and interact with beings that think, feel, and respond in real time. these aren’t just simulations—they’re living, breathing worlds of your own creation. 🍓

but perhaps the most mind-bending application of project strawberry lies in its potential to alter our own cognition. think about it—an ai so powerful that it can enhance your own mental capabilities, offering real-time insights, improving memory, or even helping you solve problems that would stump the greatest human minds. need to learn a new skill? project strawberry could teach it to you in hours, not years. want to brainstorm new ideas? it can generate concepts so novel, they’ll redefine entire industries. 🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓

Bookmarked from Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson @algekalipso

I remember meeting a ~65 year old botanist and anthropologist at a conference a few years ago. His favorite activity is taking 600 to 1200 micrograms of LSD alone deep in the forest. He had done it hundreds of times.

Other than that, he was extremely square. Would wake up every day at 6AM, meditate, do yoga at 8AM, and then get to work (writing books) which he would do for 10 hours a day, and eat the same food at the same time every day, and go to sleep early, around 9:30PM, every day.

And then every other weekend, he would have a high dose forest LSD trip alone. He would take it in the morning and be right back home in time for dinner, which he appreciated as he could still do the same routine after coming down and not miss any sleep. So far he has never lost any sleep due to LSD; he just knows how to time it well.

He "got" the topological solution to the boundary problem right away even though he isn't technical, and that is because he could relate it to various things that he had experienced on LSD. Also, he gave me one great piece of advice:

"The main thing that LSD punishes you psychologically for is for having strong opinions - so I just don't have strong opinions anymore. I learn as much as I can, because knowledge is always good, but do I have an opinion on complex topics people struggle to understand? No, because that destroys peace of mind while on high dose LSD". He is a remarkably amiable and kind man, as far as I can tell.

Bookmarked from 🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo

i may weep uncontrollably writing this. so my apologies.

it is impossible to put into words what is around the corner. what ilya saw all of those years ago was that if we increase data and increase compute, we increase intelligence.

when hinton saw what ilya saw, he quit his job to speak freely. we unearthed a recipe for intelligence.

it's easy to doubt those working inside the sota labs as hype merchants (hate those), or as drinking their own kool-aid.

occam's razor applied. they work daily with these models and they've seen the future a little before you. we will solve all problems and build a greater future than ever dreamt of, horatio.

people like logan, roon, demmis, sama, dario, ilya, karp. they are beacons of integrity and compassion, and they've tasted the future.

and soon

you're going to taste it too

it will exceed your wildest expectation. and more. i'm not building hype. i'm expressing my own. and i can't wait to explore the future with you chat

blessed is the fruit.

Bookmarked from Thiago Ghisi @thiagoghisi

This book called "The Assertiveness Workbook" that I started this weekend should be a required read to all Tech Mentors out there.
So good, yet so rare to see more folks using these techniques to shift both passive and passive-agressive communication (most common in Tech in my experience) towards true assertive communication.

Bookmarked from Ethan Mollick @emollick

Innovators or entrepreneur do best when they are generalist jacks-of-all-trades. Inventors & founders with a broad but shallow experience across many fields beat those with narrow but deep expertise.

An exception is if change is happening quickly, then specialists can dominate.

Bookmarked from Ethan Mollick @emollick

In my experience teaching experts to use AI for work, a big change happens when they stop feeling relieved or smug when AI can’t do something and instead try to figure out how to make the AI succeed

Ask the question: “if this was a human, what feedback or guidance would I give?”

Bookmarked from Dickie Bush @dickiebush

4 questions I reflect on every Sunday:

• What were my biggest wins of the week?
• When did I feel most energized and excited?
• What weighed on me throughout the week?
• When did I feel most drained or unexcited?

Helps me identify what to double down on and what to cut.

Bookmarked from Matt Barker @mattbarkercopy

If I write 1 post on the spot, every day:

  • Takes me 1 hour to write
  • Stressful and annoying
  • Adds unnecessary pressure
  • Disrupts my working day

If I write 7 days of posts, every Monday:

  • Takes me 2-3 hours to write
  • Focused and intentional
  • Schedule and forget about it
  • Keeps my days free and clean

The secret: having a plan.

Bookmarked from Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet

Every war is a conflict between social systems of information processing. Which is why the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk Oblast has had a shattering effect well beyond what could be predicted from the troop numbers.

War is a brutally physical phenomenon. But the war machines and the factories that produce them have to be run by humans organized in social information systems.

Today Russia is reeling because in Kursk Oblast the Ukrainians are exploiting well-known weaknesses in Russia's system of social information processing.

Authoritarian systems need order, rigidity, and the programmed response to maintain themselves. The mental habits this encourages do not handle surprise and out-of-context problems well. So the first major achievement of the offensive - operational and strategic-level surprise - was exactly what the Ukrainians needed to do put the Russians in a situation where their mental habits hinder any effective response.

The consequences are very visible. Five days in, the Russians still do not have an operationally coherent counter. They're throwing scratch formations of conscripts at the Ukrainians with poor coordination, inviting the Ukrainians to defeat them piecemeal.

Even once the surprise wears off, authoritarian systems suffer from a slow OODA (observe, orient decide, act) loop. Orders have to be passed up and down the hierarchy, going through more steps that are required when initiative is delegated down to lower levels. This produces lag.

To worsen the lag, the Ukrainians need to make the information environment as confusing and ambiguous as possible. An important way to do this is to multiply threat axes. Which is why pushing troops over the border of Belgorod Oblast is an important move.

The Ukrainians will develop more threat axes. Some will be real. Some will be feints. All of them together will constitute a massive pysop designed to jam and overwhelm Russian information processing.

The most important failure of the Ukrainians need to avoid is getting bogged back down into a kind of warfare that is relatively static, where the challenges are predictable and thus well aligned to the authoritarian mode of social information processing.

Bookmarked from 🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo

rushed a little but will refine and add some more info I've been given if it bangs.

-project strawberry / qstar

ai explained has been close to this for a while so i'd watch them for a cleaner take if you want to dig in. this is what ilya saw. it's what has broken math benchmarks. it's more akin to rlhf than throwing compute at the problem. sus column r is a very very tiny open ai model using strawberry. strawberry in the larger models comes on thursday.

think of it as an llm fine-tuned to reason like a human. hence why sam liked the level two comment, and felt great about it. ilya did not. here we are.

-huge models, sora, voice, video and safety.

i'd referenced some model sizing based on meta and claude having small 8b, medium 72b and large 405b. this is a simple way to frame and means nothing. except that a much larger version of 4o is coming. when you try it, it will be the first noticeable jump that we saw when going from gpt 3 to 4. the jump from original 4 to sonnet 3.5 will seem insignificant in comparison. arrives next week with strawberry.

gpt next. etc.

so gpt next (internally called gpt x, you could call it gpt5) is also ready to go. lots here relies on safety and what google do next. it's difficult to say if competition will trump safety.

though red teaming is finished and post training is done. this model is such an enormous leap in capabilities it's becoming impossible to make the model safe. if you had this particular model unlocked, you could easily disrupt the world on an unprecedented scale. when you mix in voice, video, sora, agents, and the eye-watering capabilities, things hot up. they'll get the safety right and they'll roll it out I'm sure.

this is why we post don't die or vague post around how everything is about to change forever etc. it is. we've tried the models. it's insane. i'm not directly an agent, though i've had access to an early benchmark of five to take over an account and influence some big names in the field to carry out a few things for me. github was one such case of using the model to convince several to launch.

sora and voice rollout
it's expensive. especially sora. it's proving incredibly difficult to make safe. without guardrails for example you can with a simple prompt create a video of a world leader saying anything in their own style and voice, and effortlessly hack into large scale state secrets. if you haven't read situational awareness, it lays a lot of this out.

we will get a step change next week

it won't quite be gpt5. gpt5 / next / x / is more comparable to the jump made from gpt1-4. this is why sam feels great. ilya was right. you can scale your way to a digital god with or without strawberries. but strawberries + scale will cure world problems overnight.

sam. obviously not random chance you'll see i've been rocking with current / former openai employees and jimmy for a while. tldr. we are launching strawberry. we wanted to generate some hype. we did.

please burn after reading.

Bookmarked from Startup Archive @StartupArchive_

Zillow founder Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing”

“Very deliberately—and this is the advice I would give to any founder—we did no advertising [at Zillow]. The philosophy for the first three years of the company was: any money that we might spend on SEM, Google, Facebook, whatever… Let’s invest that in product and try to build something viral. Most of the great companies and services that we use today—from Uber to Snapchat to Facebook to Instagram—followed the same philosophy. The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development bonafides.”

Video Source: @docstoc

Bookmarked from Dr Milan Milanović @milan_milanovic

𝗪𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣 𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸. 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝟭𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀

In recent research from Microsoft, researchers confirmed that 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸-𝘁𝗼-𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹. But they also find out that there is a simple remedy - short breaks.

Researchers asked 14 people to participate in video meetings while wearing a cap to monitor the electrical activity in their brains. They participated in two different meeting sessions. On one day, they attended four half-hour back-to-back meetings; on another, the four half-day meetings were divided into 10-minute breaks.

The research showed 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀:

𝟭. 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗼 "𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝘁" 𝗯𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀.

𝟮. 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸-𝘁𝗼-𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀

𝟯. 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝗮 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀

What are some strategies to deal with these issues:

🔹 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 with 10min breaks between them

🔹 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗺 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱, such as meditation or reading something enjoyable

🔹 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹. Consider best practices such as sending an agenda ahead of time, being careful who attends, starting and stopping on time, etc.

You can also create a 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 by using the option: Calendar -> Events and invitations -> Shorted duration for all events.

In my case, I did 𝗜 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝟮𝟱 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀.

Have you tried this already?

Check the whole article in the comments.

#mentalhealth

Bookmarked from Marc Randolph @marcrandolph

The best entrepreneurs don't necessarily have the best ideas - but they are great at figuring out quick, easy, and cheap ways to validate them.

For instance, when Reed and I heard about DVDs and realized they might be the key to getting our Video Rental by Mail idea to work, we didn't rush to the office to start working on a business plan, nor did we head home to work on a pitch deck.

We were mid-commute and just turned the car around and went into town, bought a used music CD, bought a greeting card envelope, put the CD in the envelope and mailed it to Reed's house. The idea that started Netflix was tested in less than 24 hours and cost us less than $2.00.

This is why I tell budding entrepreneurs that their most defining trait should be their predisposition to action. They should think less and do more. That’s what separates successful entrepreneurs from the rest.

The rest are people who are so in love with their ideas that they spend all their time thinking about it, and start building castles in their mind. And since it's all happening in an alternate reality (in their head) there are no constraints.

Everything works. They elaborate. They add a new wing to the castle. They put in a pool. And pretty soon their simple idea has turrets, flying buttresses, a drawbridge and gargoyles. It's now complicated and expensive and that's when the excuses begin: I need to raise money. I need to hire people. I need an MBA.

Excuses, all of them.

You need to find a cheap, quick and simple way to test your idea. That’s the only way to know whether or not your idea is good or bad. Whether or not it is viable. Whether or not it will ever really work.

Bookmarked from Rory Flynn @Ror_Fly

Runway Gen-3 Last Frame → Quality Addition

It's nice to have this option.

MJ Prompt Structure:
Vivid, [shot type], Gourmet [food + ingredients], [colors + tones], [environment description], [texture details], [emotion], Bright, cheerful daylight --ar 16:9 --personalize [code] --stylize 175 --v 6.1 --q 2

MJ Prompt Example:
Vivid, double overhand sandwich hold, Gourmet Fried Chicken Sandwich with pickles and special sauce, Vivid blue and warm sandwich tones, Urban eatery studio vibes, Crispy fried chicken, runny special sauce, Sunday fun-day indulgence, Bright, cheerful daylight --ar 16:9 --personalize [code] --stylize 175 --v 6.1 -q 2

RW Prompt Example:
hand placing a piece of uncooked salmon on the left side of the image, 35mm style

#runwaygen3 #runwayml #midjourney

Bookmarked from Cédric @cedric_design

Achievements I'm so happy for I never thought I'd reach in 2024 already:

  • Having my own office space outside of home
  • Running 4 cashflow positive businesses
  • Reaching $300K+ total revenue in 2024
  • Pretty much empty calendar
  • 100% freedom over my time, location, and finances
Bookmarked from Ryan Holiday @RyanHoliday

Focus on effort, not outcomes.

It’s insane to tie your wellbeing to things outside of your control, Marcus Aurelius said. If you did your best, if you gave it your all, if you acted with your best judgment—that's a win…regardless of whether it’s a good or bad outcome.

Bookmarked from Kyrylo Silin @kyrylo

I use service objects in all of my Rails projects.

👷‍♂️ This is how I engineer them:

1. Define the ApplicationService class with the call class method that does nothing but accepts any params and initializes a service, then calls the call instance method immediately

2. Define the initialize instance method that does nothing but accepts any params

3. Define a service that inherits from ApplicationService and defines the call method. If a service requires params, I define the initialize method, call super, then use the params. If you don't need params, then you don't need to define initialize at all

4. Implement the call method.

That's all!

Bookmarked from David @DavidSHolz

crazy there's no chatbot to help me figure out what to buy when i need something, would be a great commission business. i should be able to talk to ais that are smart and also know the entire amazon/ikea/etc catalogue, or like literally every restaurant in every city on earth

Bookmarked from Ethan Mollick @emollick

A new open AI image model comes out, best accessed through an API.

I can't code in Python, no easy way to get it.

I paste in the documentation & asked ChatGPT (then switched to Claude for bigger context window) to build me an app that lets me create images. Took a few minutes.

Bookmarked from Harrison Chase @hwchase17

🕓Ambient Agents

One of the UX patterns I'm most interested in is the idea of "ambient agents" working in the background for us

This can be super powerful... but needs some UX tricks to get right. So I wrote about it!

blog.langchain.dev/ux-for-agents-…

What are some considerations here?

👪 Human on the loop

We mostly talk about human-in-the-loop, but that doesn't work for ambient agents. Still - having observability and potentially control over what the agent does is important

So rather than have the human in the loop, what if they were on the loop? You can observe all that is happening, but after the fact.

Helps to build trust!

🤝Asking for help

Often times agents can't be fully autonomous. They may need input from a human on a particular point.

For example - I have an email agent which often needs input from me on how to fix this bug, whether I want to schedule this meeting, etc

This means that agents need a way to reach out to humans and ask for help. What might this look like? I think something like a customer support dashboard is a reasonable UX

❓Are you building agents with some sort of ambient UX?

If so - I'd love to talk! Please reach out or lmk what you think

Bookmarked from Ian Cassel @iancassel

Poor investors often disguise inexperience with arrogance. Rich investors disguise experience with humility. The richest person in the room is almost always the quietest one in the room. The poorest person in the room is almost always the loudest one in the room.

Bookmarked from John Rush @johnrush

I consider myself unlucky.

I Failed Almost Everything I've Tried.

🚫failed to complete my degree.

🚫failed 13 out of my 15 angel investments.

🚫failed all my b2c startups.

🚫failed at over 10 finals (judo, football, and ping-pong).

🚫failed at crypt0 (hackers stole all my assets).

🚫failed fisherman saas.

🚫failed classified marketplace startup.

🚫failed feedback stands for malls.

🚫failed travel app.

🚫failed business admin platform.

🚫failed an agency.

🚫failed all my investments.

🚫failed most relationships.

🚫failed a movie app.

🚫failed an icon-searching portal.

🚫failed all my mobile apps.

🚫failed 100 more things, startups, ideas, hopes & dreams.

Was I lucky on the way?
Sometimes, but nothing remarkable.

Today I live the live I want

  • i have a wife and many kids
  • living in a village growing food and working in the garden
  • working from home
  • no meetings
  • no bosses
  • I decide what I wanna do with every minute of my life
  • I have enough financial freedom to pursue my dreams
  • I haven't had any significant events; I simply done lots of small things that led to a compound effect both on my wealth and network.

The advice I'd give to anyone who asks: life isn't like a movie. In life you just keep working for decades and slowly grow your wealth, network, skillset.

It's a long-term game; you must enjoy the journey more than the destination. Otherwise, you'll be walking the road being depressed, and in this case, the chances of winning at the end are very low.

Keep it up, do small things every day, and enjoy the ride.

Bookmarked from Filip Kozera @kozerafilip

Today, we are launching @wordware_ai! Wordware is the first IDE solely focused on building your AI with Natural Language Programming! 🚀 Try our example agents or duplicate them from wordware.ai 🧨

Having built a bunch of AI agents 🤖 we realised three things:
1. It’s prompts all the way down
2. Making AI Apps work requires a bunch of iterations
3. It’s much faster when the person developing the agent can judge the quality of the outputs

So, having spent the last ten years building in AI with my co-founder, we thought from first principles: “If prompting is the new programming, what should the tools be?”

The results:
A user-friendly, beautiful editor that enables the user to use simple natural language to create complex AI Agents and iterate on them 20x faster than in code.

Oh, and also:

  • prebuilt ready to use tools like speech-to-text, image generation, research and many more
  • Easy deployment to published app and APIs
  • A GitHub-like community library of agents, so you never have to start from zero
  • Loops, branching, type safety and code execution (when needed!)

Wordware elegantly combines the flexibility of LLMs with the structure of software. Iterating 20x faster empowers teams to build reliable and useful AI agents.

Book a free AI consultation with us via our landing page: wordware.ai

And upvote on ProductHunt:

Bookmarked from LindyMan @PaulSkallas

The paradox of modern work culture

Real Work happens in bursts.

You are dormant for a while and then complete tasks in bursts. Then go back to being dormant.

however, there is an expectation you should be actually working the entire 8-10 hours straight or you are lazy

Bookmarked from Ethan Mollick @emollick

Deadlines are a trap.

This is due to the mere urgency effect. The paper shows we work harder on unimportant tasks with deadlines than vital ones: “People behave as if pursuing an urgent task has its own appeal, independent of its objective consequence.”

Urgency ≠ Importance.