科技大佬的X

In the essay I just wrote about how to prepare students to be founders, I talked about the importance of working on their own projects. In this essay from I explain in detail how and why to do that. A Project of One's Own: paulgraham.com/own.html

It's much harder to write an essay that has to cover a topic completely. In a normal essay you just do a core sample through some interesting topic and talk about what you notice en route. But if an essay has to be complete, you sweat over what you might miss.

How Universities Should Prepare Founders: paulgraham.com/prepare.html

At the high water mark of wokeness, the American Museum of Natural History in New York put labels on the glass of this diorama telling people the correct way to think about it. I took this picture in Are they still there?

When she was younger, Jessica sometimes felt she faded into the background.

LinkedIn users have been editing their work histories to add "AI" and remove "DEI".

Trump had to start a war with Iran to distract us from asking what it says about him in the Epstein files, but that went so badly that he now has to start a beef with Canada to distract us from the war with Iran. Expect two more years of these.

"I feel like I'm the squarest eccentric I know." — Jessica

Someone asked what I'd do if I were I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.

When a mechanical watch gets a full service, they take it completely apart, clean the pieces, and then put it back together again. This is (the components of) an Omega one of the great automatic movements of the golden age.

When I posted this, it was considered right wing — a university had just claimed that saying it constituted a "microaggression." Now it reads as left wing, because it implicitly supports immigration. Paul Graham

It's generally a bad sign when people use the adjective "quick" to describe something they want you to do. Have a "quick call" for example. It means it will be unpleasant and thus not lasting long is a feature.

It's very common for founders not to know how well they're doing. In both directions. It's obviously common for founders to be making mistakes and not realize it. But it's also surprisingly common for them to be doing great and not realize it.

I did office hours today with a startup growing at 30% per month. They were worried this wasn't high enough. They stopped worrying when I pointed out that if they kept growing at this rate, they'd need an office 23x bigger every year.

If the Chinese government were sufficiently organized, they'd be funding opposition to data centers in the US. But the Chinese government is very organized. So they presumably already are.

I asked ChatGPT to make me a map of territories on the Italian mainland controlled by the Saracens. It is not very good at making maps yet. How strange to simultaneously worry about AI and get this from it. Made with AI

Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.

yo asked what DHL stood for. I said it was probably something German. Deutsche heilige Lager?

There may not be many people left in years who can write, or want to read, things longer than a page or two. But there will be at least a few of us, and we'll be a powerful club.

The way to win at capitalism is to focus on what it actually does (make customers' lives better) rather than the socialist caricature of it (squeeze every penny out of them). The latter gets you 2x returns at best, whereas making new things for people can get you 10x.

I did office hours today with a startup that had three different paths to get huge. I told them to optimize for growth rate and let that decide. Maybe the winning path will be a fourth one we don't know about yet.

The dials of golden age watches are more vulnerable than modern dials. But I wouldn't trade. Modern dials seem too hard and perfect, in much the same way the digital versions of mid-century metal typefaces do.

yo: If Y Combinator had a mascot, what would it be? Me: I suppose it would have to be a cockroach. yo: Not a very appealing mascot.

How should universities respond to the Arday scandal? Should they crack down on plagiarism and academic fraud? Ghent University's response, apparently, will be to fire the person who reported it. Nathan Cofnas

Teenagers rejecting all their parents' ideas has an advantage similar to the one that leaving fields fallow has in interrupting the lifecycles of pathogens and parasites. It's annoying, but it means stupid stuff isn't perpetuated forever.

The Tesla that Jessica just bought cost $48k and has a range of about miles. The one she bought in cost $135k, adjusted for inflation, and had a range of miles. People who think they dislike capitalism don't know how good they have it.

The trouble with having Zane Hengsperger visit your house is that instead of the usual random house gift, he brings you a pound block of solid aluminum.

I was thinking about how I recognize AI writing, and one big tell is excessively colorful verbs. A handful of journalists might write that a proposal "drew" votes, but any normal person will just say "got".

It's a bad sign when someone denying you something uses the phrase "at this time." That phrase means they've gone full bureaucrat.

If you're a good person, you should try to date people who are good judges of character, because they have fewer options. They're prevented from dating all the various kinds of bad people, because they can see how bad they are.