Engineering at Discord. Previously YouTube, Meta, Google, DoorDash, Uber

New York, NY
Joined February 2014
> Dot-Com Boom: Normal people could invest in Dot-Com stocks and make money > AI Boom: Only elites can invest in AI labs and make money
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Last minute delay likely means demand was weak
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Muse use case: let me know when I'm near the front of the waitlist, so I can head back to the restaurant
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Look at the order book. You're making 8% annualized returns on up to $70
This quoted post is unavailable.
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AI agents will do to $EXPE and $BKNG what ChatGPT did to $CHGG
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Are we using medium or high for Opus 5.5?
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Just in time for the $OURA IPO next week
NEW: Apple is developing a Whoop competitor. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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People are nitpicking the example and ignoring the idea. Super intelligence will find ways we can’t even imagine to communicate with each other
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI." "So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar." "You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient." "There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors." "One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate." _________ Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
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>start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting
>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me
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How do people believe this BS
just heard that pushing a 5-10 lines of code changes in Google could take ~9 months for it to be approved 💀 no wonder why Gemini is behind.
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How are React and Ruby on Rails even comparable? They do two completely different things
just leaving this here
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Changing my life tonight
The most commonly rated “life-changing” interventions: - Doing math - More sleep - Weightlifting - α-Klotho - Oxytocin - Dihexa - Modafinil - Nicotine - Caffeine Personally, I’d add bromantane and semax to the upper-right quadrant too.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This chart is a digitally altered version of a chart from a 2022 Reddit nootropics rating survey. It has added numerous nonsensical nootropics and has repositioned real nootropics that were included in the original survey. web.archive.org/web/2026031300…
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Can someone share the prompts that burn through 50% of the limit? I rarely even hit the cap in a whole week
Replying to @CupOJoseph
I can blow my entire week of fable with 2 prompts bro. Not all of us are building shit that Sonnet is capable of
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You can avoid this by taking Waymo
When a Lyft driver wastes 20-30 minutes of your time driving around constantly updating pickup time to 4-7 min away until you give up and cancel, they should kick that driver off the system and make your replacement ride free (both Lyft and Uber surely know when drivers do this)
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Strong opinions, loosely held
This was less than 2 months ago.
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$META is about to save the SF housing market 🙏🙏🙏
$META I predict will imminently shutoff Anthropic and OpenAI model access for employees. This may very well affect the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. Watermelon will be Fable class. This is 100% proof that Meta's experiment of having employees generate tens of thousands of RL envs works. There is no shortcut to doing this grunt work. (personally I think making RL envs is kinda fun) Compute + Data + a ton of RL envs + some good people == Fable. There is no secret to frontier LLMs. $META is obviously trying to drive down the price per token across the industry. I predict it will work.
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Finally a table design that's not misleading
Google have, dare I say... RELEASED A GOOD MODEL 🥹 Gemini 3.8 Flash provides ~Opus 5 performance at much lower cost, while being super fast
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Vanguard and Fidelity
product idea: fomo except 95% of users don't lose money! who's building this?
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Lovable is worth more than the Lakers ($12.5B)
We just raised $400M at a $13.3B valuation to help you achieve more than you ever thought you were capable of.
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