phoneafriend

Legally permissible, but still bad faith contract management by the government.

Every battlefield from here on out is a competition between autoshot ai capabilities and the armies building/deploying/maintaining them.

It should not be up to an AI company to point out that this breaks the founding conditions of the United States, nor should they be placed in a position to be scapegoated for potential implications of this if left undefined.

Rock and a hard place, by a government with shockingly few qualms about placing any and all Americans in such positions whenever polling, survival, or perceived personal benefit dictates.

Yeah this is good stuff. Shocked to click around the site and find Intuit [working to follow] it. Today they get a nod.

Tomorrow it's back to wondering why they needed 10 GUI revisions and a 65% price hike in the past year alone.

[palms forehead; returns to coffee + codebase]

Who am I talking to? Am I empathizing with them? Meeting them where they are?

This is the iterative process of saying what people want. Live. With stress tested feedback. The ultimate taskbot (you) and your harness (human body).

Customer? Discovery.

Public? Reputation & stability.

(Most people, most of the time? Nothing.)

Is communication at risk? Perhaps more demanding of one's attention, more insistent in its attempt at inclusion and contribution?

Large Language Models are the most powerful communication tools to have ever existed - probably behind the written and spoken word and marginally behind the internet, maybe more important than phones and texting.

With understanding now on tap in this new form of infrastructure, the tower (codebase) and our coordination within it are both very customizable - up, down, sideways - per the will of the team and maintainers.

The sample size of your architectural taste, intuition, or expertise at abstraction may never be large enough for a LLM to match it. But if you want it to, it too can keep getting better and closer at this as it seeks alignment with your acceptance.

Once your tower is built, what's next?

Our internal voices are often very different. A core feature of not only functioning teams but also democracies is that room exists for a strong diversity of these to be expressed (& heard) freely & frequently.

Absent this, we can backslide very quickly, or stagnate.

Or sometimes grow until market conditions no longer favor us, when underlying limits are surfaced by well positioned rivals.

"A QALY is a health metric. Most of Scott's giving targets economic mobility, education, and equity, whose value is largely non-health — income, opportunity, rights, wellbeing. The model therefore understates her total social impact; it answers one specific question. The largest dollar buckets (equity & justice at ~22%, education at ~18%) contribute little health precisely because no credible study ties those grants to QALYs, not because the giving lacks value."

Which other metrics could be included to balance these economically? - society-wide morale lift & improved individual output - international desirability & forex lift

Or just re-weighting giving to normalize out non-health targeted expenditures?

Oh, and f** Malaria. Go get 'em, GiveWell and all working to reduce Malaria deaths. Polio too, heartbreaking that we have not beaten this one down yet. Suspect spend per paralysis/mortality is very high on Polio right now, but probably most agree the spend is very worth it given the payoff of a Polio-free planet.

Paul focused on the most beneficial pathway - finding product market fit and growing into it - what many of us here aspire to provide.

What comes after?

Both things can be true:

- the incredible benefit brought about by YC companies as they grow into their markets and mint billionaire founders... - monopolizing, price fixing, what can feel like gouging, etc. as the temptations of what may be currently possible war with what may be ultimately wise (and for whom)...

Kind of like: - the temptation to appeal to the increasingly common set of hash-taggable moral & political absolutes... - the more measured, wisdom-dense sharing the best possible, and fortunately (hopefully? maybe?) most common form of billionaire-minting...

Is, or was there previously, a different, more American-value-compatible status quo?

... Historically did we IPO earlier, leaving more of the exponential on the table, leading to greater public wealth, resilience, opportunity, and capability? ... Is the profit-margin gas pedal ever pumped a tad aggressively preceding this, inducing trust wobbles in the public and customers as prices are raised and services degraded the quarter before, with share price corrections the quarter after? ... Do we (should we) maintain relatable humility in the face of success and wealth - surely earned, though perhaps better enjoyed by more enduring trophies (disease eradication; public works enhancements; life extension progress) than a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean?

Very easy to be a keyboard-warrior. Very hard to provide $1B in new capability and value.

Good read as always. Back to work.

Stick to the science folks. Let the MDs do what they do.

Stats and population level studies are hard work. You need to vote somebody in who will support this, or live with the consequences.