Paul Graham

It's well known that as companies become more bureaucratic, it gets harder to ship new software. I wonder if you could use this  relationship in the other direction: if you had a culture of  constantly shipping new stuff, would that prevent you from becoming bureaucratic?

This is what Zuck was aiming at with "Move fast and break things." But I wonder if there are ways to institutionalize it. We're still early in the evolution of what a startup is.

If there's a company I hope will continue to be able to ship new things, it's Replit. Partly because they've always had a culture of shipping, and partly because I know Amjad is so determined to avoid becoming bureaucratic.

How should schools teach writing now that AI can do it? Should they allow AI or ban it? They should do both. They should have classes where students use AI. But they should also have classes where students learn to write without using AI at all.

The reason is that writing isn't just producing a stream of words. Ultimately, learning to write is learning to think. You don't want to stop learning that.

The standard midwit reply to this argument is that the arrival of AI is no different from the arrival of electronic calculators. But the two cases are very different. There's much more thinking in writing. Or at least, there *should* be.

If you're an ambitious engineering student and you're wondering what to work on to advance your career, you're asking the wrong question. Work on whatever you're most excited about; if you're ambitious, your excitement will outweigh the hotness of the field you choose.

This is a somewhat self-correcting answer, because ambitious engineering students naturally tend to be attracted to promising fields. In fact, it's hard to imagine a better way to predict which fields are promising.

If investors are wondering how to deal with all the change that's been happening in AI, the answer is to do what you should normally do: bet on founders.

Founders who are doing something AI-related are at least working in AI. Even if their immediate plans have been upset by some recent change, they're at least in the right territory. And good people in the right territory is as good a bet as you ever get.

In particular, I wouldn't wait till things "settle" to make investments. Waiting is never a good strategy in the venture business, or for that matter when dealing with anything that grows exponentially. And what if things don't "settle" for 5 or 10 years?

10 yo asked me to read a draft of his latest story.

Me: The teacher is called Mr. Masnapos? Where did you get that?

10 yo: It's Hungarian for hung over.

It's a pretty dystopian story. Our hero arrives in middle school and is offered a shot of gin by an older student.

"This tastes like shit!" he splutters.

"It should," replies the older student. "I made it in my toilet."

An actor friend explained why he didn't want his kids to become actors. Not just because it's financially precarious, but because the nature of the business means you're constantly being rejected.

Salespeople also get told "no" all the time, but in their case it's what they're selling that's being rejected. As an actor, *you* are being rejected.

The Collisons are playing the long game. That's one of their secret weapons.

If you want to understand just how powerful a weapon it is, imagine someone leaked to you that this was your competitor's strategy. How would you take advantage of that leak? About all I can think of is: raise money now, before investors realize they're going to beat you.

Jessica: What's new?

Me: OpenAI just released a new version that's much better. And people hadn't even stopped talking about the previous version yet.

Jessica: Are you scared about AI?

Me: A little. At the very least, it's going to change everything.

One of my tests of the magnitude of a change is: How does it change what advice I'd give my kids? And when I try to answer that question, it's scary how little I can predict. The best I can do is tell them to surf this wave rather than be crushed by it.

One possible qualitative change: The rate of change in AI could be too fast for governments to react to. Usually they wait till the last moment to deal with a problem. With AI, I can easily imagine them acting at what they think is the last moment, when in fact it has passed.

AI vs EU, for example. Who wins? I can imagine them acting quickly to create regulations that shoot themselves in the foot, and I can imagine them getting the right answer, but too late. But it's hard to imagine them getting things right quickly.

Though this seems obvious in retrospect, adding bicycles to Paris doesn't turn it into Amsterdam. You still have the aggressive chaos of Parisian traffic, but now it's silent and could be coming from any direction.

I'm not saying it was a mistake for Paris to become more bicycle-centric. It's probably good for the city, and its people. But it does feel significantly more dangerous to walk there.

It's easier to see how fashion and convention (about e.g. how to smile) make everyone look the same if you turn pictures upside down. https://t.co/eqp5vsISNV

I think the reason is that we're so sensitive to differences between people's faces (since we need to be able to identify them) that this ordinarily dominates our perception of group photos. If we invert the photo, it's turned off, so we see the similarity.

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