I feel like there's a tech version of this as well. – at North-East Region, Singapore
Longer form thoughts on the quoted post.
585k for one year for the below is probably worth it, except that's never the deal. You get 585k a year after 8+ years of grinding, and by the time you get the 585k a year it feels low.
Biglaw gives you an absolutely mental starting salary. Cravath scale is 250k for a first-year now, you're straight out of law school and suddenly you are early 20s and "rich".
You go from eating instant ramen and drinking shit vodka to expensive restaurants and cocktail bars. You go from sharing a shitty apartment to a nice one-bedder.
Its your first 'real money'. The salary scale is far more than when I was practising but even then, I felt rich.
And it feels real good for the first year or so but then the hedonistic treadmill does hedonistic treadmill things and that becomes your new normal.
Meanwhile the mentally ill hours also become the new normal. Its actually not the long hours that get you, its the completely unpredictable midnight calls and 'pls fix' resulting in all-nighters that start to fuck with your sanity. I never had an issue grinding 80 predictable hours a week on a predictable deal. What sucks is getting to office at 9am and twiddling thumbs for 3-4 hours, before realizing at 5pm you are slammed for the next 48 hours. Then at 2am you get pens down (but stay on standby!), before going full steam again at 5am.
Its fine at first bc you feel amazing - you are 24-25 and there are literal 11 figure deals hinging on your dumb ass to complete because you hold some damn signature pages and ancillary documents.
Its after 3-4 years, you start seeing signs of burnout, especially as you start hitting late 20s. You kind of have some responsibility now which makes things better and worse. As a 1Y you are kind of mentally constantly available out of anxiety, but as you reach 4Y-5Y you feel like you have to be constantly available because you have some real responsibility on deals. You also start wondering why you are only paid 50% more than the dumbass 1Y when you basically have to supervise and probably redo all their work, all while managing the partners.
Normally around this time you see people start considering other options, unless they legitimately think they might make partner or they have some insane mortgage they picked up while high on the money in their second-third years.
By the time you get to around 8 which is where you start making that 585k salary, it feels kind of shit. You are only paid 2x as much as a dumbass 1Y. Meanwhile your responsibilities are up by far more than 2x. You now need to deal with clients, participate in 'mentoring' younger lawyers, do business development, 'network' etc because otherwise you don't have a chance at partnership. You literally are on call 24/7 because you never know what shit might happen.
You are also now in your early 30s, which means metabolic slowdown. Your back sucks from years of staring at a computer. Your health sucks from shitty sleep and probably bad nutrition.
But the hedonistic treadmill keeps doing hedonistic treadmill things.
Early 30s is when you start seeing some real divergence in outcomes for your peers. You might have a sell side friend move to buy side and just knock it out of the park on a trade and is now semi-retired on the carry. Your rock star trader friend now runs his own hedge fund with 100m+ AUM, a lot of which is prop capital. The entrepreneur friend exited a stack at Series C. The rainmaker lawyer friend successfully cornered a niche and got fast-tracked to partner and prints 3-5m++ a year on his own book. Obv these are the edge cases and most people have crashed out into a mid career but thats the edge cases you compare to.
So at this point you feel like you are forced to grind, just to maybe hit that equity partner outcome. Like you have come so far right? By the time you get the 585k in salary, you are gunning for the multi-million equity partner payout, not the measly salary.
But you still need the salary to fund your lifestyle creep. So you end up becoming a very expensive wagecuck, praying that the powers that be decide you have enough of a 'business case' to make partner.
Which is itself... a different can of worms.
Source: left biglaw early to full-time cryptolaw + entrepreneur but very close to other lawyers and my ex-bosses.
Justice for Kurt Cobain
We are publicly asking @SeattlePD and @GovBobFerguson to consider reopening the Kurt Cobain case.
In 1994, authorities publicly characterized Cobain’s death as self-inflicted before a full forensic analysis could be completed.
In 2005, then-SPD Chief Gil Kerlikowske asked former Capt. Neil Low to audit the case. Low was given full access to the case file and concluded the evidence pointed to a homicide and that the case should be reopened.
In 2025, a multidisciplinary team published a peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Forensic Sciences concluding that its analysis of the publicly available evidence was inconsistent with a self-inflicted death and supported homicide.
We believe Kurt Cobain’s death deserves to be investigated as a potential homicide, without beginning from the preconceived assumption that it was self-inflicted. Whoever was responsible could be walking free to this day.
For those who want to examine the evidence for themselves, see our full investigation here: youtube.com/watch?v=Osb9eF2R…
Hear, hear – at Central Region, Singapore
go fuck yourself @sama
claiming that you solved navier stokes because 10000 agents ran in circles for 88hours on a multimillion dollar gpu cluster to formalize in lean a blowup case under controlled external forcing is pure scientific vulgarity the clay mathematics institute millennium prize does not ask m whether you can artificially force a singularity in a fluid by injecting an ad hoc smooth external forcing term f(x,t) to twist the vortex until it breaks the real problem questions the fundamental stability and global smooth existence for 3dimensional incompressible euler & navier stokes equations under natural conservation laws and viscous dissipation alone using a mathematical loophole on forced equations to parade a century old victory is a major conceptual scam Altman
technically & epistemologically what you present as an agi breakthrough is nothing more than bruteforce combinatorial autoformalization the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians like tristan buckmaster/ levent alpöge / diego córdoba or tarek elgindi coordinating 10000 agents to check the logical consistency of a 100 page proof via lean is a software engineering feat and computational parallelization triumph not an intrinsic scientific discovery it is the victory of the compute bulldozer over abstract human intuition repackaged for the public as a higher mathematical consciousness
to this theoretical imposture you add a disgusting ethical and industrial cynicism taking advantage of private codex sessions and informal preprints from academic researchers to siphon their research leads and then trying to redact or erase the contribution of levent alpöge under the pretext that he works at rival anthropic is intellectual serfdom openai behaves like a feudal lord of silicon appropriating the cognitive subsistence of independent scholars threatening their careers behind closed doors if they protest and turning community academic labor into a privatized pressrelease
this entire staged event serves a desperate financial agenda in a pre ipo panic facing the slowdown of scaling laws and growing investor skepticism over the profitability of foundational models openai needs to manufacture an artificial sputnik moment claiming to solve a millennium prize without immediately submitting the proof to traditional peer review means using the prestige of fundamental mathematics as cheap marketing fuel to inflate a delusional valuation!!!
real science is not a clout chase on social media or a compute spike spent to rob the clay mathematics institute it is a quest for elegance physical truth and universal rigor to decode reality true artificial intelligence will not emerge from hostile corporate takeover of academic work hidden behind computational bruteforce but from architectures capable of generating new conceptual paradigms by masquerading constrained formalization as the collapse of physics greatest mysteries you did not solve navier stokes you only proved how far silicon valley will go to prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle
Echlori retweeted
Longer thread on why 'legitimate' crypto use cases never take off.
Lets imagine a real use case of crypto built around social participation in a common enterprise. For this example, lets assume a communal dog-walking platform is a legitimately wholesome and workable enterprise.
Adam creates DogeWalk, a fun application for dogowners and dog lovers around the world to connect and dog lovers can sign up to walk the dogs of the dogowners. In order to maintain trust but anonymity amongst the participants, Adam decides to incorporate crypto into DogeWalk, allowing crypto payments and Walk points, a reputation system which supports the legitimacy of the participant.
DogeWalk takes off amongst a community of dogwalkers. Turns out that there is legitimate demand for people to walk dogs in an anonymous manner. Adam makes some money from platform fees charged on his some 1,000 users.
Bob sees DogeWalk taking off and sees an opportunity. He creates PupStroll as a competitor to DogeWalk and informs the PupStroll users that they can get a piece of PupStroll! Instead of giving all the fees to Adam, together they can share in the decentralized ownership of a dog walking platform! PupStroll is almost exactly like DogeWalk, except PupStroll users get Stroll points, and a referral link. DogeWalk users start moving to PupStroll.
PupStroll does a token launch and suddenly everyone is talking about how the future of dog walking is decentralized. People who have never walked a dog in their lives start signing up with PupStroll to walk dogs and farm season 2 of the STROLL airdrop.
Charlie sees PupStroll take off and trade at an implied FDV of 20m with 5,000 users. He raises $500,000 from a venture capital fund BrandName Capital by selling 10% of the future supply of HoundTrek.
HoundTrek is almost exactly like PupStroll except it has a slightly cooler 'dark mode' UI. Charlie proudly announces his funding round and launches an aggressive points and referral programme. He even provides zero fees and bonus payments, funded from BrandName Capital's investment. PupStroll's users start moving over to HoundTrek given the economic incentives. The price of STROLL declines and angry purchasers of STROLL begin yelling at Bob for not keeping up with HoundTrek. Bob simply does not have the firepower to match. PupStroll's users give up on season 2.
HoundTrek announces a second funding round right before TGE, led by DarkArts Capital. DarkArts Capital purchases another 10% of TREK allegedly at a valuation of $20,000,000 but really at a valuation of $10,000,000. HoundTrek launches the TREK token which opens at 25m FDV alongside a small airdrop. The TREK token climbs steadily upward for a while as Charlie uses the funds raised to provide price support while paying for marketing. When the token reaches 100m FDV, DarkArts Capital and BrandName Capital take profit on the token. Number goes down. Everyone gets mad at BrandName Capital and DarkArts Capital.
David who sees all these play out, realizes that there is an opportunity. "Tis all the fault of the greedy venture capital funds!" he says. We need "true community ownership!" With that, he opens a funding round for WanderPooch via an 'ICO', valuing WanderPooch at 'only 10m'. He raises 2m of capital. David knows nothing about dogs nor dogwalking platforms. He simply pays himself the money and shuts down the project after a year.
Eugene is a former venture capital hotshot. He pulls together a coalition of his VC friends and raises 10m at a 100m valuation to break the dogwalking industry once and for all. CanineHike is the cleanest dogwalking application ever, and in order to generate demand on both sides, he even invests the money into cute dogs for dogwalkers to walk! He pays ever KOL that was early to PupStroll, promising them both money and tokens for writing long threads on why decentralized dogwalking will work this time. To increase platform metrics, Eugene even pays an agency which hires homeless people to walk dogs on CanineHike! Eugene doesn't even like dogs but the marketing works. On TGE, the token trades at 1bn FDV through clever supply control, marketing and a limited airdrop. Eugene dangles a season 2, while amplifying those who made life changing money farming the airdrop. Meanwhile him and his VC friends sell locked tokens at a 60% discount on secondaries. Within 6 months, the HIKE token declines in price.
And at the end of it all, decentralised dog walking is decried as a scam by retail users who do not like dogs as they scream at builders who do not like dogs who have been funded by investors who do not like dogs.
As for Adam and the people that actually wanted to walk dogs?
Yeah they just do it between themselves in hobbyist groups now and will never touch crypto again.
Level 2 Chaotic neutral male barbarian with stats = sum of parents' stats. How ah.
Echlori retweeted
Feels like every Singaporean in a mall (or MRT) walks with the purpose of ragebaiting one another
The starter pack:
> Use phone while walking
> Back hunched
> Knocks into you and instead of apologising, looks at you as if it’s your fault
> Points phone at you to start recording if things escalates
My colleagues (mostly Caucasians) have always said Singaporeans walk really slowly and are always on their phones
They’re not wrong
Echlori retweeted
Google DeepMind just released a paper (arxiv.org/html/2606.12683v1) on the path from AGI to ASI, and I’ve been thinking about one part of it.
The paper lays out four possible paths from AGI to ASI:
-Scaling
-Algorithmic paradigm shifts
-Recursive self-improvement
-Multi-agent collective intelligence
Personally the fourth one feels most plausible for me (I’m far from an expert, so definitely don't take my word for it).
But if so, then superintelligence may not show up as one giant model that knows everything. It could look more like millions of AGI agents working together across automated companies, research labs, markets, and economies.
Then the conversation we should have is not only about model capability anymore. It is also about the resources and coordination behind the system: compute, energy, infrastructure, access, and governance.
Thus this becomes more of an infrastructure problem than just an AI model one. And this is where I keep coming back to blockchain.
If ASI does end up looking like a multi-agent economy, then parts of governance may need to become machine-readable, auditable, programmable, and interoperable across borders. This is the layer that the blockchain could be proven useful as an importance piece of the governance infrastructure.
Echlori retweeted
Most Singaporeans are millionaires. On paper.
Average household net worth: S$1.7–2M.
But ask: if you needed S$100K by tomorrow — no flat sale, no CPF — could you access it?
That one question changes everything. 🧵 [1/8]
Most people won't say this: the fun part of going to conferences like #superAI is that sometimes you attend a talk that is so full of BS that it's entertaining.
Had a talk yesterday where a speaker from a very not AI-native org talking about being AI-native and the first half of the talk was just "duh" statements about AI. The second half was case study examples (because BS people are formulaic) and the final punchline was about a company that needed AI to figure out what their actual product should be and "AI delivered the freedom to imagine".
Somewhere John Lennon is spinning so hard in his grave that a dynamo attached to him would be able to power an entire data centre.
Yeah, #superAI is the new #token2049. – at Singapore
Echlori retweeted
Meta’s Oversight Board says account bans lack due process, transparency techcrunch.com/2026/06/04/me…
Echlori retweeted
KARPATHY JUST DROPPED 2 HOURS OF BRUTAL HONESTY ABOUT AI
> we're nowhere near real autonomous agents - including Claude Opus 4.8
> AGI will blend into daily life and nobody will notice
> he quit AI research to fix education. that's the problem he thinks matters more
save this👇
KARPATHY WAS RIGHT. THIS 40-MINUTE Y COMBINATOR LECTURE PROVES IT
Karpathy said we're in the 1960s of AI - most people using Claude Opus 4.8 are still acting like it's just a search engine
> software 3.0 - LLMs as operating systems, not chatbots
> autonomous agents that run entire workflows without you watching
the 32 skills in this article are how you actually cross that line
bookmark this 👇
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The featured interview was published in October 2025, not recently, and predates Claude Opus 4.8 which was released in May 2026. dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpa… anthropic.com/news/claude-op…
I would have learnt Catalan, but whatever makes him happy ig
Echlori retweeted
“Baby ah - we got BTO number”, she shouts from across the room.
The hairs on your skin shiver. Endorphins flood your brain. Your heart palpitates as it rapidly redirects blood to your half erect cock, quickly bringing it to full mast.
“What number?”, you ask cautiously, not wanting to get ahead of yourself.
“132” - she replies.
132. Out of a 976 unit development. 5 year MOP. Should be able to get mid-high floor. Without morning sun.
450 - 550k purchase price. 5% due now, the remaining 20% due on key collection.
Gahmen recently announced a new revitalisation programme for the area. New mall, new bicycle path, new MRT link.
Easy flip for 1m+ after 5 year MOP.
Finally the time has come for your ascension.
You gaze upon her, eyes filled with love. She has never looked so beautiful. Sitting there in her university T-shirt, phone in hand. Her red brown balayage hair pulled away from her acne scarred face in a low ponytail. You watch her pull a funny face as she updates her Instagram and besties Telegram group with a 5 second video.
Sure she’s a 5/10 by any objective measure. To anyone else, she is a mid SMU psychology student with questionable job prospects and bland hobbies (food 🍔and travel✈️❤️).
But to you - she is the angel of your financial ascension.
Years pass.
You have since graduated and now hold down an office job at Shoppee. So too has your wife, she does 'marketing and comms' at some SME. After three years of living with your parents, it is finally time to collect the keys.
You hand over the cashier's order for 100k to the HDB employee. It wasn't easy but between your savings, a loan from your ah ma and the angbao profits from your wedding (off-peak Thursday lunch reception @ Holiday Inn Orchard no open bar suckers!), you got there.
As you finish signing the papers, you mentally write up your net worth by 500k. Then you add an asterisk on it. Just in case you know. Your wife has just finished her selfies with the HDB sign and pulls you into a photograph with her.
You smile.
A few years pass.
"No lah! No lah!" - you exclaim loudly at a gathering of your secondary school friends who jest that you have 'made it already' because of your luck in securing your BTO. "Cannot sell la - still got MOP!"
But deep inside you smugly muse "Yes bro - I did fucking make it". A friend who became a lawyer humble brags about how busy he is and 'offhandedly' drops his salary and how much he spends on rent. "Sucker paying other people's mortgage" you quietly muse as you sip on your mug of Tiger.
As you return home you observe your wife being dropped off by her handsome ang moh colleague in an Audi. She laughs as he hands her the Chanel handbag she bought on Atome and waves her goodbyes. The wide smile on her slightly red face - a smile you haven't seen in years - fades slightly as she sees you.
"We had team drinks and Thomas offered to drop me off. Very nice of him."
"Yea ok cool" - you reply, unsure if you want to start another fight.
Sensing the tension, she tries to change the subject.
"Oh by the way ah, I spoke to my secondary school friend Celine. She in real estate now. She say ah - that our unit probably can sell 1.1 - 1.2m+ when MOP leh!"
You smile - blood returning to your phallus.
2 long years pass.
"Thank you Sir" - the DBS banker smiles warmly as you hand him the signed housing loan agreement.
After eight arduous years, you were finally able to dump your HDB on the next sucker for over 1.1m. After agent fees etc, you got away with a clean profit of over 500k.
And today marks the culmination of your ascension to the condo class.
A 2 bedroom condo in the newly TOPed Merdeka Jewel - 750 square feet at $3000 per square foot at 2.25m. Sure it is a little smaller than your 990 square foot HDB but its not like you need that much room. Your wife made it abundantly clear that she does not want to have kids because she is 'too busy focusing on her career' (although you still question what the fuck her actual job is).
Rolling your savings and your HDB profits into the 25% down payment and taking the 30 year loan at 2.6% interest was a no brainer. 8k a month in mortgage payments seem steep but is manageable. As long as you both keep working. I mean it will all pay off right? Singapore property is up only after all.
You look to your wife and her Chanel handbag. She smiles back at you, she too celebrating her ascension to the condominium class. You can hear the gears in her head turn, the dopamine firing at the thought of all the likes her house tour video is going to get on Instagram.
"Ill be out tonight with friends" - you tell her. "Ya ok I got plans also" - she replies.
You text your real estate agent to confirm that you will exercise the option to purchase. Your cock is now fully erect at the thought of your ascension.
Then you go on WeChat and text Lanlan "我好想你 - 今晚见！❤️"
You smile and take in the Singapore sun.
Damn it feels good to be a Singaporean son.
Real wealth?
Multiple residencies - Singapore passport does not give this, no dual citizenship. Our passport is about as strong as silicon breast implants. Looks great from a distance but real ones know it does not hold up to touch. How many young sinkies have the balls to leave? only know one who fled to Japan.
Land, soil, connection to Nature - lmfao we are a tiny island, our leaders aren’t pushing for more reclamation, our leaders also bochap. Average Moldovan peasant whose parents make wine on their land, have swine for ham and sausage, fields to lie upon in the warmer seasons is richer, if you remove the religion of GDP per capita.
Children - our TFR?? Brother…
Family, relationships - Sinkie pwn sinkie
Happiness, inner peace - no I must be better than my colleagues n ex classmates, must flex, must prove I am better than some retard named Aloysius Wong Boon Khua Kway Chap or some shit like that
Eventually you find yourself in your nice house (hopefully paid off) with a fat portfolio but your wife and kids hate you, what’s the point? Nice sports car but you’re playing within a restricted field. Your shekels will be worth an estate anywhere else in the world, on the little red dot you feel small and minuscule. You know 10 thousand hawker stalls but cannot cook a noodle dish to save your life. You can critique a steak a million ways but fear the splash of oil from the pan. For all your love of opulence you have never tasted life beyond the humid banks of the East Coast. You have means that 99% of the world will never experience, yet you lack the heart and soul to even try to experience it beyond a tiny island lying on the equator. Our ancestors that chose to leave their previous homelands for a chance of better pay for their labor had more balls than we do today.
Such is the way of the kiasu sinkie. On paper you beat the world, in reality, you became a true slave to the system. Mass hypnosis. And so it goes.
Echlori retweeted
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Stay humble, stay foolish.
Complacency is the start of downfall.
Some folks seem to have a hard time understanding this post.
Yes, Singapore is incredible on many fronts: best run government that I've seen, very business-friendly, great for families, amazing schools, tons of investment from all over the world, ...
When you compare it to most of Europe and Asia, it's ahead.
But people are getting a little bit too cocky about its actual accomplishments on the tech/AI/startup front.
That's all: tone it down, do the work, and don't act like it's already a major AI hub.
Echlori retweeted
Joined a new AI-native company this week and it’s kind of wild how different it feels already.
The laptop arrived, I logged in, and an agent basically took over from there. It set up my dev env, pulled repos, fixed dependency issues, got permissions approved, pointed me at the backlog, linked the architecture docs, and surfaced the Slack debates I actually needed to read before touching production.
When I needed context on something, I asked the agent and it found the exact thread from months ago explaining why a decision was made, who owned it, the related Linear issues, and the PRs connected to it.
I’ve only been here 3 days but it honestly feels like I’ve worked here for a year because the usual friction and scavenger hunt for context just isn’t there anymore.
We should probably stop calling this “onboarding” and rename it to “mounting” because this feels a lot more like mounting a distributed filesystem called “institutional memory” than slowly getting drip-fed context over 6 months.