Field Engineering @ ▲. Former toddler. Building dev tools and automation. Once crashed two cars in less than 24 hours (not on purpose)
North Carolina
Joined July 2017
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This is unironically a great analogy. Plastic manufacturing opened up huge markets but also accelerated consumerism. The phrase "cheap plastic knockoff" is basically a universal idiom today.
I would also point out that we're still discovering side effects of plastic consumption however many decades later. Pareto efficiency doesn't mean something was automatically good
I'm not saying plastic was a mistake btw. Just that it's complicated and we don't have to make everything out of plastic now just because we can.
notion.com/blog/ai-is-the-ne…
Phil Zona retweeted
this is a very creative capital structure. everyone at anthropic agrees to lock ~half their shares as illiquid collateral for funding the kinds of research anthropic already does a lot of. float is majorly restricted but everyone gets donation write-offs. brilliant.
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
I once saw a reddit post about a guy who tried to form an LLC for his life so he could say everything is a business expense and claim tax writeoffs.
idk if that's what they're doing here but it's similarly funny
techno optimism is a way different thing from anti-humanism. seeing a lot of people confuse the two lately.
Phil Zona retweeted
we're entering another wave of attempting to make the web more interoperable but i am not sure if anything important has changed
idea is simple - if apps published APIs in a standard spec this would allow for maximum interoperability
pretty much the only system we use day to day that works like this is email - can use it with any client/server and talk to anyone even if they made different choices
it's a nice ideal:
- would be easier to embed posts from other sites
- could have alternate clients to popular networks
- could trigger actions on other platforms from anywhere
there are two dimensions to this problem, technical and economic
the technical solutions historically sucked - trying to model every possible case is effectively impossible
saw this with semantic web and smart contracts in crypto
but LLMs seem to solve this - you actually don't need an intense standard anymore they can figure out how to call any system
so that leaves the economic which is the bigger issue
there really is very little incentive for interoperability - no companies want to give up the last mile
uber eats has a very specific checkout flow that is optimized to get you to spend more
why would they publish an MCP server that releases control of that?
it would only happen if there was overwhelming consumer demand like with mobile - if you refused to publish a mobile app you effectively died
and even if there is, they might just do one off integrations with chatgpt / claude
as much as i want the ideal to happen the underlying economics push things towards centralization and walled gardens
Why shouldn’t every parcel of land be its own sovereign nation with development rights decided by the blade?
Carelessly built agents will be at least as big a problem as malicious DDoS over the next few years.
Everyone is saying this short sighted but it really does generate a shit ton of extra resource consumption (including waste, eg stuck loops) and support burden.
notice..
> Delta is blocking AI agents from booking flights
> JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accounts
> Yelp requires paid data licensing for agents
> Amazon has blocked Grok bot and other shopping agents.
the internet is starting to block AI agents that were supposed to do everything for us
Phil Zona retweeted
AI slop. Almost everything is mislabeled or wrong.
Allow me to explain...
If you are new to procedural generation within game dev, here is a great starting point on how to leverage noise!
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The chart is AI-generated and contains multiple mislabeled/inaccurate depictions of noise functions (e.g. base Perlin/Simplex visuals show layered patterns; Billow/Hybrid are variants or nonstandard).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_no…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_n…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worley_no…
mini.gmshaders.com/p/gm-shaders-m…
x.com/slashskill_/st… (author reply)
Car accidents kill like a hundred people a day and everyone’s excited that now they can fly over your house?
the Tampa Bay Mutiny were the pinnacle of professional sports team names (excluding minor league of course)
Phil Zona retweeted
Credit to Lehman Brothers for proposing a mortgage safety bill that lets banks write their own rules. That’s more than the other banks have done.
Phil Zona retweeted
a lot of alpha in applying basic software engineering principles to ur product
Phil Zona retweeted
they said the devil was in the details. we said, why? why should the devil be confined to the details? why should access to the devil be limited to a privileged few?
today, after years of research, hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and countless sleepless nights, we’re proud to announce that we’ve successfully removed the devil from the details.
he’s everywhere now.
this is what democratizing access to the devil looks like. and we’re just getting started.
we’re hiring!
