Uian Sol retweeted
Tech startups are struggling to recruit.
The problem isn't a lack of skilled engineers.
It's the incompetence of the people recruiting for them.
Over the last couple of months several in-house recruiters have reached out to me asking if I can introduce some great engineers.
In once case, I agreed to and asked for the job spec to share, the recruiter never sent it.
With another, I agreed to and passed on some relevant CVs. I've not even had an acknowledgement that they were received.
And so on.
If you're struggling to recruit right now, it's not that great engineers aren't available, it's that your recruitment is broken.
Uian Sol retweeted
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.
They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.
I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.
I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.
I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.
Number one tip: act with agency.
Whenever I see an online discussion about anything at all, I notice something serious: people have tied their opinions on trivial matters to their own personalities.
Saying you dislike something someone else likes has become a personal offense.
This is a symptom of deeply empty souls. What times we live in.
Uian Sol retweeted
Is it time we admit the Amish were right?
Maybe the Amish were right about more than we want to admit.
Not about every little rule, and not because technology itself is evil. But look at what modern society has become. We have more convenience, entertainment, information, and material comfort than any generation before us, yet people seem more anxious, isolated, distracted, indebted, medicated, and spiritually empty than ever.
We were told that throwing off old traditions would make us free. Instead, a lot of people became slaves to screens, pornography, consumerism, social media approval, debt, casual sex, and endless distraction. Family life has weakened. Marriage is treated as disposable. Children are raised by institutions and algorithms while parents are exhausted chasing careers and bills. Sunday became another shopping day. Community became a group chat. Neighbors became strangers.
Meanwhile the Amish looked at "progress" and asked a question most of us forgot to ask: does this actually make the family, the community, and the soul stronger?
There is something deeply sane about building your life around faith, marriage, children, productive work, local community, modesty, self-reliance, and limits. Not every new invention deserves a place in your home simply because it exists.
Maybe progress should not mean doing whatever we are technologically capable of doing. Maybe it should mean becoming better Christians, better husbands and wives, better parents, better neighbors, and more disciplined human beings.
Looking around at the culture we created, it is getting harder not to wonder whether the people we laughed at for being "backward" understood something we didn't.
And make yourself an outcome machine. Grow long term high value skills.
Beware people obsessed with outcomes instead of building outcome machines. Its worse than ever with AI, but these people existed before. Short term results above all else, etc. Don't fall into the trap. Invest in building strong fundamentals, invisible supports, and outcomes flow like water. An outcome machine.
Worth the full read. I cannot explain how much it helped me now.
I used to think God’s purpose for my life was probably one big thing.
One big calling.
One door I had to find.
And if I walked past it, chose wrong, got scared, messed up too much, wasted too many years, or took the wrong road, then that was it.
I’d missed it.
Somewhere out there was the life God had meant for me, and I had somehow taken a wrong turn twenty miles back.
But I don’t believe that anymore.
Because the longer I walk with God, the more I realize His purpose ain’t usually hiding behind one mysterious door waiting to see if I’m smart enough to find it.
God’s purpose starts much closer than that.
Love Him.
Love people.
Tell the truth.
Forgive.
Pray.
Help somebody.
Use what He put in your hands.
Be faithful where your feet are standing today.
Sometimes we’re looking toward the horizon asking God to show us our purpose while He’s pointing toward the person sitting right beside us.
We want a burning bush.
God may give us a telephone call we need to make.
We want a great ministry.
He may give us one hurting person.
We want to know what we were put on this earth to accomplish.
And sometimes God says,
“Start with today.”
I think about all the people in the Bible who probably didn’t understand what God was doing while they were living it.
Joseph had a purpose, but for a while it looked like a pit.
Moses had a purpose, but for forty years it looked like sheep.
David had a purpose, but first it looked like being overlooked by his own family.
Peter had a purpose, but there were days when it looked like failure.
Paul had a purpose, but before he understood it, he was walking in the completely wrong direction.
And still God found him.
That comforts me.
Because if God could reach Paul while Paul was literally headed down the wrong road, I reckon God knows how to find us too.
Maybe you’re afraid you’ve wasted too much time.
Maybe you’re thinking,
“What if my purpose was twenty years ago?”
“What if I was supposed to do something and didn’t?”
“What if I made the wrong choices?”
“What if I missed God?”
But God is not standing twenty years behind you yelling for you to come back.
He is here.
Right now.
And as long as there is breath in your body, there is still something you can give Him.
Maybe purpose isn’t one assignment anyway.
Maybe it’s a lifetime of little obediences that only make sense when God finally lets us see the whole picture.
A prayer you prayed over somebody.
A child you encouraged.
A stranger you treated kindly.
A testimony you finally told.
A person you forgave.
A meal you carried.
A Bible verse you shared.
A lonely person you sat beside.
A broken person who watched you survive and thought,
“If God carried her through it, maybe He’ll carry me too.”
You may never know how many times God used you.
And that might be part of the beauty of it.
We spend so much time asking,
“God, what great thing am I supposed to do?”
Maybe heaven measures greatness differently.
Maybe one day we’ll discover that some of the most important things we ever did were things we barely remember doing.
So how do you know God’s purpose?
Stay close to Him.
Read His Word.
Pray.
Pay attention to what breaks your heart.
Pay attention to what He has placed in your hands.
Pay attention to the people He keeps putting in your path.
And take the next faithful step.
You don’t have to see the whole road.
God does.
And what if you mess up?
Then turn around.
What if you waste some years?
Give Him the years you have left.
What if you walk down the wrong road?
God knows where roads lead.
What if you miss a door?
He knows how to open another one.
God’s plan is bigger than one mistake.
His mercy is bigger than your confusion.
His ability to guide you is bigger than your ability to get lost.
Maybe the question isn’t,
“What if I miss my purpose?”
Maybe the better question is,
“Lord, what can You do with me from right here?”
And then give Him your yes.
Not tomorrow’s yes
A few weeks ago I was using AI a lot to brainstorm and do some planning. For a moment I thought I was being productive.
Today I understand that the simple act of writing down my thoughts in the conversation with the AI was the real gain from the conversations, as it made me think more clearly.
I replaced AI with more consistent note writing and the gain was enormous. Mainly mental calm and less cognitive fatigue.
People really buy from People because of People. At my use case any terminal do the work. I use Ghostty because of Hashimoto. It's inspiring.
"Make things better because they can be better and let the results naturally play out."
Mind boggling to me that I can make a thing faster and there's always people that ask "but why?" What kind of mentality is that? The pursuit of excellence does not need justification. Also, I find in so many cases, we can't know the impact of an improvement until we do it.
For example, one I've talked about before: Ghostty's high IO throughput has enabled terminal program (emulator and TUI) fuzzing at a speed thats incomparably fast to prior solutions. This has resulted in upstream patches to resolve issues in popular projects like btop, tmux, and more.
Speed enabled that anecdotally example that lifted the tides of adjacent communities that don't rely on Ghostty technology at all. I didn't predict this.
Make things better because they can be better and let the results naturally play out.
Inspired by @ThePrimeagen and @cmuratori I started play with graphics/ray-tracing and using Odin, full handed code.
Don't remember last time I had so much fun with code.
A truly foolish notion in modern times is the attempt to judge everything and everyone based on averages or percentages.
Every human being is different, with distinct needs, performance levels, and tolerances. Defining good versus bad, or success versus failure, based on averages is simply stupid.
Nice @ThePrimeagen, wait to see you on Procedural Generation. You will delight. \o/
Uian Sol retweeted
Let me sum up where I think we are on jobs and AI.
1. AI is capital. Like trade, capital substitutes for labor. Historically it destroys some jobs and creates others.
2. There is still no clear evidence that AI is causing net job losses. Look at the aggregate data. No strong signal yet.
3. There is no evidence of an intelligence explosion that renders human beings obsolete. None. Yes, AI can write C++26 faster than I ever could and prove theorems better than I can. Sympy already does algebra faster and more accurately than any human. My car moves faster than I ever could without a motor. None of this makes people obsolete.
4. There is evidence that AI is making us slightly richer. It acts like other capital investments: it raises productivity. That is good.
5. AI is a breakthrough technology that will require us to reshape institutions. Simply bolting it onto existing processes produces only small gains. The real payoff comes when we redesign processes from the ground up. We should expect larger gains later, even if the underlying models stagnate.
6. Globalization made the West richer overall, but at the expense of parts of the working class. Those workers stayed financially viable largely through increased government transfers. Over the longer term the arrangement mostly benefited China while we deskilled our own population.
7. There will be disruptions. Some people in the laptop class will be displaced. We have no reason to expect a job apocalypse; that claim is pure speculation. A healthy society tolerates a fair amount of creative destruction.
8. Handouts are a poor solution. We should not have relied on them for the working class, and doing the same today for financial advisors or translators is bad policy. We need to favor and protect activities that give people real autonomy and skills.
The West lost ground to China during globalization because it decided that where things are made does not matter. It does. The West should have invested far more in capital. Canada is the poster child of the opposite choice: decades of trade focus with little capital formation.
What we should do in the AI era is the same thing we should have done for the last few decades. Encourage entrepreneurs. Ensure cheap and abundant power. Make AI itself cheap and abundant.
People in the West do not need more university degrees. They need more entrepreneurial spirit. We need to value actual skills. We need to put builders and entrepreneurs at the top of our hierarchy.
Look at the historical evidence, though its current ideological fixations are hurtful Germany treated manufacturing as a core competence rather than something to offload, and they did better than most in the 1990s when China came in. Switzerland and the Netherlands focused on high-value manufacturing and did well.
As AI comes in, we must not make the mistake to stop working. « Well, it is over, AI is replacing us but that's ok because we have money » is just like « Well, it is over, China is replacing us but that's ok because we have money ».
The lesson should be that money is not our primary concern. Making stuff people want is. To help the people who will unavoidably be displaced in the next 10 to 20 years, we should encourage growth. Cheap electricity. More data centers. More innovation.
Don't be fooled and let China win the second round once more.