lukemercado

The incredible engineering in the hardware is prized above software quality.

For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?

Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.

It frustrates me that there's a prisoners dilemma in communicating this to other humans. If I flag it and write it out (as you've done) I've let the author know that they're losing trust and let others know that they should be more skeptical. I've also created the perfect eval data pair for the ai labs. It's deeply frustrating.

They did, but first they rebranded them as Max, thus destroying the incredible name value of HBO. It was renamed back to HBO as part of the spinout IIRC.

This means that, in practice, it functions more like an agent than a streaming text model. That in turn breaks trajectory analysis which not only makes distillation harder, it also makes it much harder to improve your own harnesses and agents built on top of the model.

That was lovely, thank you for sharing.

It seems the core of the game is correctly understanding the victory function (time to complete refinement of all resources) and then applying bottleneck theory to correctly optimize each stage.

Definitely a joyous little ten minute romp.

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At foam we’re building the first telemetry and production system designed for LLMs, giving them complete visibility into and control over running software. Today we’re making money by fixing bugs as they happen, tomorrow we’re the data layer for all production observability tooling.

* We’re a six person team. Perla (CEO) was the 5th engineer in the consumer facing team at Affirm (pre-IPO). Shawn Krisman (CTO) was an early engineer at Yelp, Reddit, Patreon and architect at Affirm (pre-IPO).

* We've raised $8.4M in seed funding from Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, The House Fund, and South Park Commons

* We’ve got active betas at Perplexity, Orb, Braintrust, Plaid & TogetherAI.

If being #7 is exciting; reach out: send an email to luke -at- foam dot ai with your resume and mention you came from HN

> Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.

I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?

From first principles I'd expect the functional limit not to be one of power generation but of energy transfer. The limit probably manifests as wiring and motors overheating in a full electric drive (I don't think any subs are...) or as sound, heat and fatigue in reduction gears and gear shafts.

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I'd be particularly interested about head of eng roles at startups or director of eng at a scale up. After the co-founding experience I'm also curious about moving into product management or sales in some capacity. For the right company I'd do some software engineering.

> It takes a lot of exercise to burn off excess calories, and virtually no effort to simply not consume them.

> and virtually no effort to simply not consume them.

I don't think this is true. The executive function required to manage the dopamine cycle that food generates is incredibly taxing. I honestly think this is a result of our food systems being incredibly optimized to drive purchasing decisions...

Separately, this reminds me that I should eat some veggies.

> I don't see how wealth is lost when it is just being redistributed. The workers didn't disappeared, they are just living elsewhere, bringing business opportunities and improving across many different places.

If I'm recalling the theory of it correctly, the whole reason Business Clusters exist (and form) is because there is, essentially, value in being together. Or at least, there's economic value in reducing the logistics required to move goods from one part of the value chain to another. For this reason I don't suspect we'll see the dispersal of manufacturing business clusters.

A huge part of my digging was trying to understand whether this applied to Silicon Valley or not. I decided that it did, but not because of the software, instead it was because of the VC + Startup relationship. VC's want to meet the people they're giving millions of dollars to and startup founders want to meet the people they're giving control (or massive influence) of their company to. It remains to be seen whether Zoom satisfies this need or not.

> Perhaps it will be healthier for the economy as a whole than having only a handful of cities as beacons of investment.

It might. Technology has changed dramatically since we last had material distribution into the suburb and rural areas of the nation. Maybe that will overcome the benefits of centralization.