Nico Aragón retweeted
Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers — Ukraine intensifies bombing of Yandex data centers in response to Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv data centers tomshardware.com/tech-indust…
Nico Aragón retweeted
Survey time:
"Nobody can actually teach debugging. It's something that you only learn by fixing tons of bugs."
Do you agree with this? Feel free to explain why.
26%Totally Agree
42%Mostly Agree
16%Slightly Agree
16%Disagree
258 votes • Final results Nico Aragón retweeted
It's really crazy how strongly wealth inverse correlates with regulatory burden
If you make it easy for people to start and run businesses and don't get in their way too much, everyone gets wealthier
If you make it hard for people to start and run businesses and get in their way constantly, everyone gets poorer
You can see the effect clearly within the EU:
Countries with low regulatory burden like Switzerland and Ireland have much higher incomes than places like Spain or Hungary where its regulatory burden is high
nomads.com/europe/chart?char…
Nico Aragón retweeted
Jesus christ
Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app.
We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.
Nico Aragón retweeted
Este pequeño dispositivo escondido en el interfono de la comunidad es el que permite a Amazon entrar en el portal sin llamar
👇
bandaancha.eu/articulos/este…
Nico Aragón retweeted
my mother took this photograph of the light in her apartment in lisbon not knowing it was the eclipse
Nico Aragón retweeted
I needed to move a sofa.
I mentioned this to an American. He said, "You know anybody with a truck?"
I did not know anybody with a truck.
He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.
"You gotta know somebody with a truck."
I asked how one acquires such a person.
He said, "You just do."
This is the third time I have received that answer in this country. It is the answer to everything here. You just do. There is no process. There is only the eventual fact of having.
He said, "Ask Kevin."
I do not know a Kevin. He said Kevin like I should. He said it the way you say a shared uncle.
I met Kevin four days later. Kevin owns a truck. Kevin does not own a truck for himself. Nobody owns a truck for themselves. Kevin owns a truck for a fifteen mile radius.
Inside I said: THIS MAN HAS TAKEN A VOW. HE DID NOT ANNOUNCE IT. HE SIMPLY PURCHASED A BED AND ACCEPTED THE CONSEQUENCES.
Kevin arrived on Saturday. He brought the truck. He also brought a second man.
I had not asked for a second man.
The second man's name is Tony. Tony came because Kevin came. Tony did not know me. Tony did not ask what we were moving. Tony brought gloves.
They moved the sofa in eleven minutes.
I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.
I asked what I owed them.
Kevin said, "Buy the pizza."
That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.
Inside I said: THE FEE IS FIXED ACROSS THE ENTIRE NATION AND WAS SET BY NO ONE.
We ate on the floor because the sofa was against the wall and none of us wanted to be the first to sit on it.
Tony told me his daughter plays soccer. I asked if she is good. He said, "She's aggressive."
I still think about that.
Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.
"You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge."
He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.
Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CALLED UP. I DID NOT ENLIST. THE PAPERS WERE FILED ON MY BEHALF.
I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.
Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.
I said, "Yeah, I got a guy."
I have a guy.
I am somebody's guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.
He describes me as "the guy who's strong for his size."
I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.
another example: a developer used the exact same $8 ESP32-S3 chip and local AI setup to build a real-time object recognition camera
the fact that this is running entirely offline, on an eight-dollar microcontroller, without any cloud API calls, is wild...
it captures the video feed, processes it locally through the model, and identifies objects in real-time.
we are entering an era where you can just glue intelligence onto any physical object for less than $10.
the hardware barrier is completely shattered.
forget the $699 AI pins. this $8 chip just shattered the barrier for local AI hardware.
a developer just forced a 28.9 million-parameter LLM onto a standard ESP32-S3 microcontroller. it costs roughly 8 dollars, runs completely offline, and draws the power of a single LED.
conventional wisdom said a model of this size simply would not fit. the chip only has 512 KB of fast SRAM and 16 MB of flash.
the breakthrough is architectural. the developer moved the bulk of the embedding table into flash memory and memory-mapped it. the chip only needs to pull about 450 bytes per token, keeping the active working memory inside the fast SRAM.
this means you can now embed a capable language model into a physical node for the price of two coffees.
and we are already seeing the beginnings of this custom physical hardware. in the video, a creator built a minimalist voice-controlled universal remote using an ESP32.
it captures voice and remotely controls the computer over bluetooth LE. he simply says "open chrome and open 20 new tabs", and the custom hardware executes it instantly.
we have spent years watching model sizes explode upward. but the true frontier is the opposite direction.
when an eight-dollar chip can power offline intelligence and custom physical interfaces, AI becomes local infrastructure rather than a cloud service.
Nico Aragón retweeted
They showed us this sequence in my first year of film school and it was one of the first things I remember truly blowing my mind back then
Nico Aragón retweeted
I’m reading an old collection of interconnected science fiction stories by Jerry Pournelle, written in the early 70s. His best books were later co-authored with Larry Niven, but it is still solid work in my favored “competence porn” genre, with entrepreneurs as protagonists.
It stands out to me that he was despairing for America when he wrote the stories. Things looked bad at the time, and his fiction projected it into the future. Social unrest, Vietnam, Watergate, economic recession, energy crisis, and for a patriotic space guy, abandoning Apollo.
The backdrop for the stories was that America was unfixable, which is, of course, a motivation to go to space in fiction, but I do think he was genuinely worried by what he saw around him.
But over the next decade, things got better, and Jerry had a front row seat for the rise of the technology sector, writing the Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine for many years. He also got to see the founding of SpaceX, a company straight out of a hard SF novel, and they re-flew a landed rocket shortly before he died.
Trends aren’t fate.
Bad situations can be fixed, and good ones still need to be defended.
RIP Jerry, I’m glad you got to see things turn around.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_…
Nico Aragón retweeted
A friend just revealed to me that the middle name of Benoit B. Mandelbrot is Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
Nico Aragón retweeted
An engineer built an interactive book on data structures and algorithms of 680 pages:
Nico Aragón retweeted
The best piece of advice Brian ever got was from Paul Graham (@paulg):
"It's better to have a hundred people love you than a million people sort of like you."
"That came from Paul Buchheit (@paultoo). Paul was a partner at Y Combinator. He created Gmail.
The famous story was he couldn't ship it until 100 people inside of Google love it. It actually took two years to get 100 people to actually like the product.
But once a hundred people like something, a hundred million people like it.
The problem is, if you try to make something a million people like, you can't talk to a million people. It's like you're trying to heat up an ocean and you can't tell. Instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub.
Make the problem as small as possible.
Do things that don't scale, then scale. Product market fit is a distinct problem from industrialization.
Understand the user, put yourself in their shoes, blow their mind. Do things you've never thought before. Do them by hand. Make them unscalable. Don't worry how much it costs. Just prove the model."
My guest today is Brian Chesky (@bchesky), founder and CEO of Airbnb and one of the great consumer founders of the last 20 years.
Paul Graham coined "founder mode" based on Brian's experience running Airbnb. This conversation is about what comes after it, what he calls AI founder mode, and how it will force founders to focus even more on the details.
We talk about his eleven-star exercise for finding product market fit, why your first hire should be a recruiter, and why Airbnb's $100B IPO became one of the saddest days of his life.
Brian still comes across like the 17 year-old at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who picked to study industrial design. His heroes are all artists. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs, all of whom were working the week they died because they loved what they did.
Rick Rubin taught him that an artist is only an artist when they make things for themselves. Now Brian believes AI is the opportunity for all of us to do the same.
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
1:00 Studying Industrial Design
11:33 AI Founder Mode
17:02 Lack of Consumer AI Companies
22:10 Small Teams and Focused Problems
30:52 The Evolution from Founder to CEO
38:13 The 11-Star Experience
41:07 AI as a Canvas for Creativity
48:17 Detaching from Success
53:12 Founder-Led Moats
58:34 The Next Chapter of Airbnb
1:03:08 What Endures in the Age of AI
1:06:43 Lessons from Bodybuilding
1:10:20 The CEO's No. 1 Job
1:17:01 Activating Talent
1:20:39 The Kindest Thing
Nico Aragón retweeted
MAPA INTERACTIVO DE «LA TIERRA MEDIA»
Tiene una zona donde puedes seguir los movimientos de los distintos personajes. Por otro lado, puedes marcar/desmarcar los eventos que aparecen en cada uno de esos libros. Está muy curioso.
middle-earth-interactive-map…

































