In 1953, Freeman Dyson went to see Enrico Fermi, eager to present his calculations on the strong nuclear force. As Dyson later recalled, Fermi listened politely, then told him that his work had neither a clear physical basis nor a rigorous mathematical foundation. Dyson pointed out that his results agreed with Fermi’s experiments. Fermi asked how many arbitrary parameters he had used. “Four,” Dyson replied. Fermi recalled a remark by his friend John von Neumann: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” The point was simple. With enough adjustable parameters, a model can match the data without explaining the physics. It was a painful conversation, but Dyson later credited Fermi with saving him years of wasted work.

opus 4.6 is the last anthropic model that i had no problem reading the writing of quickly all of the models since, incl fable, are a lot less legible. for both coding and convo is it an RL artifact? what's causing it? i've seen this sentiment shared by friends

What if the best startup advice came wrapped in a story you couldn't put down? It’s finally here! After a year of hard work and many sleepless nights, I can finally say that my book has been published. Amazon and Ingram links are in the comments if you want to pick up a copy for yourself or your company. ArrowProof is my attempt to package insights about the Startup journey into something more engaging than “yet another business book”. Rather than lecture with a framework laid out in a highly sanitized format, I wanted to show an Advisor’s “wise advice” in action through the eyes of two first-time Founders navigating their own impossible journey. And because I can’t help but break from convention, my characters aren’t what one would expect. I chose Achilles and Tortoise as my protagonists as an homage to a remarkable literary heritage that’s near and dear to my heart. These characters first appeared in Zeno's famous paradox, were brilliantly reimagined by Lewis Carroll in his mathematical dialogues, and found new life in modern literature in Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and "I Am A Strange Loop." What drew me to them was how these great writers used them as a convention to make complex ideas accessible through conversation. They represent the art of distillation that I've spent my career perfecting. My superpower has always been the ability to take nuanced, sophisticated concepts and make them digestible without losing their power. And this is why using Achilles and Tortoise was my obvious choice. This book is for Founders who want to see the Startup journey mapped out honestly, without sugar-coating the inevitable challenges or overselling the victories. It's for Investors who want to better understand what Founders actually experience during the critical moments that determine success or failure. It's for anyone curious about how real companies emerge from the chaos of Entrepreneurial ambition. Most importantly, it's for anyone who appreciates that the best business wisdom often comes not from textbooks or case studies, but from the messy, complicated, deeply human process of building something from nothing. AI might eventually replace me with better advice that’s wrapped in a better-written book, but until then, I hope ArrowProof serves as a useful guide for anyone brave enough to build something new. Please enjoy. Please share. And please reach out if you're looking for advice. Onwards and upwards. Fintechjunkie

My view of Anthropic today:

I know people who supported him who are neither stupid nor evil. Warren's minions in the Biden administration alienated a lot of people in crypto, for example.

Indeed. Taste / Point of View is the new software. In fact, all of this is making investing harder than ever before because you literally can’t invest in anything but taste and it is incredibly hard to place your finger on. It’s a new world .. of taste. And we are all learning to understand what it means.

Research suggests that heavy metal provokes brain activity in sedated critically ill patients. Playing them classical music reduces their brain activity.

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.

Benchmark’s newest GP shared an insightful comment about how evaluating AI native companies requires a different set of metrics (taxonomy) versus traditional SaaS ones. According to him, the key difference lies in the fact that SaaS is characterized by high gross margin % whereas AI (delivered services) are characterized by high absolute gross margins per customer. Few more points to think about⤵️

Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”