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Biggest mistake I see technical start ups make in hiring: not realizing the recruiter is the face of the company that your prospective candidates see first. If your company depends existentially on attracting and closing top tier technical people, your recruiter needs, at the very least, to be legibly one of them, able to speak the same language, and able to articulate that your company values talent. I can count the number of times I've spoken to a hiring person at a technical company who could do this and was not currently employed there as an engineer on a single finger.

This is pretty much how I got through grad school.

Just realized this post is 18 months old, time for an update. Any questions? caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2…

A pair of scissors cutting a single hair.

There is unbelievable value to be unlocked by intermediating the back end hassles of running any business. Let's let the APIs talk to each other about this nonsense and spare founders avoidable brain damage. Focus on making the product as good as it can be!

This podcast inspired me to do something that's been on my bucket list for 15 years - add a geology layer to my mapping tool. Explore Cerro Gordo's tunnels and geology at maps.caseyhandmer.com.

Yudkowsky wrote a million words of Harry Potter fanfic, but we needed AI to make Malfoid. Clearly he was onto something.

Actual video of an activity I would consider a vacation.

Typical garbage idea reputable capitalists would never touch.

they told us in math class in the early 2000s that we wouldn’t have a calculator with us always and 20 years later my friends argue whether or not my pocket phone contains a conscious machine god

I am RTing this to sub-tweet you. Yes, you.

I recently spent some time with former colleagues from academia. All of them brilliant, peak human capital. Almost all of them fundamentally unable to plug into the economy, inoculated against productivity by a youth spent experimenting in laboratories instead of building wealth for society. Dealing with real people in the real world. 90% of them have left academia in the last 10-15 years, and 90% of those are functionally unemployed. Grad school does a lousy job of training scientists to be professors (since most of them don't get the good postdoc or tenure track position) and an even worse job of preparing people for real life. We complain that our societal infrastructure is collapsing, our state capacity is low, our incumbent industries are faltering. Where are the next generation of leaders that can push us forward? A huge fraction of them were conveyor-belted into academia by schooling systems that have no mechanism to channel ambition and 99+%ile competence, and our universities are mostly hedge funds with glorified psych wards/academic departments on the side, running an insane pyramid scheme that exists only to prove, over and over again, the Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. We literally poured trillions of dollars into state-funded research and effectively neutered our elite civilian technical leadership development programs. I recently asked a few academic friends if they were finding AI useful in accelerating their programs of research. You know, to solve the Big Problem their entire field exists to solve? Some were. But most were complaining about how it created pedagogical issues, explaining how their department decided to ban the use of AI, or how it took 18 months to approve an enterprise account, or how they tried Gemini 2 on a puzzle a year ago and it wasn't very helpful, or repeating nonsense about datacenters and water consumption, or supposed IP theft by model companies, as though that has any bearing on their ability to, eg, accelerate a cure for cancer. Elon sometimes calls AI a supersonic tsunami - a huge wave you don't see coming. I see it coming. But even the people who you'd think have been waiting for this their entire careers are steadfastly looking in the other direction.

Who is doing this?

Can @grok add tags to vague posts that explain them? I'm sick of this nonsense.

Should income tax of parents be taxed at the capital gains rate?

Close your windows, Potter.

Found this hand drawn map of Lighthaven in my 8 year old's stuff, should I be worried?

The exhaust actually is blue at first as condensation drops nucleate at optical sizes then grow.

Pillage based economy