PSA: Please stop comparing paper wealth to flows. GDP is a flow, like a company's revenue not its marketcap. If you must compare people to countries, at least do apples-to-apples: Elon Inc revenues (revenues of his companies times his share in those) vs US GDP. That's around $30 billion vs $31 trillion, or ~0.01%. So you're off by a factor of 400 @davidrichards

"The founders are celebrated as proof that regulation creates markets — which is true, in the way that potholes create axle shops." LOL. Very funny mockery of Europe's tech policy

Having just encountered an example of IRB hell -- it took almost six months to get approval to send out a simple online survey -- I fully support @RuxandraTeslo's proposals to reform the IRB process: ifp.org/protect-human-subjec…

As an editor who has fired people and been fired, I find the self-importance of Pelley and other @60Minutes bigshots laughable. Staff changes are a fact of life in business and especially in journalism. No one owes you a job for life. Their absurd reaction just confirms that Bari made the right decision.

"HIPAA was a mistake". Yes, and this is true for almost all of the "precautionary principle" regulations, from GMO restrictions in Europe to AI regulations across US states. Rather than imagining all the things that might go wrong and seeking to prevent them, let the marketplace work and if and when things actually do go wrong, regulate *then* based on real-world harms not fantasies.

I'm going to be in the UK for six weeks starting this Wed. Mostly London-based but planning to travel around the country visiting research groups working on self-driving labs and other AI science. Hit me up if you want to meet up!

Notes on 100 Recent Technical Interviews I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions 1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers. 2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through. 3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself. 4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing. 5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation. 6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20 people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into. 8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually. I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

Some teaser shots ahead of next week's reveal of how to turn an off-the-shelf electronics pick-and-place machine (the @OpuloInc Lumen V4) into a high-throughput "bugpicker" that picks up tiny insects and puts them into 96-well plates for DNA sequencing, 1000xing the pace of DNA barcoding of species. cc @Ryanphelan6 @stewartbrand

Hinges on the definition of "ship" vs "boat". Boats are smaller and hundreds are built each year in the US

Calibration sheet for our bug pick-and-place machine at @BioKEAAI

Agents suck at estimating how many tokens they'll use and thus how much they'll cost to run, according to this fascinating paper from @krishnanrohit. This explains why agent marketplaces have been so slow to take off. andreyfradkin.com/assets/mar… From latest @windfalltrust brief windfalltrust.substack.com/p…

The Swiss grid is almost completely carbon free, yet it is largely illegal to install air conditioning in a house in Geneva, without a doctor's note and heat pumps have the a/c mode disabled and fines issued if used. A mean spirited degrowth mindset that transcends class and hides behind an environmental narrative even when it has nothing to do with the environment, like here. This is emblematic of a pathological hatred of the future and progress, that is a threat to Europe.

This seems like both an accurate inside view of what happened at Meta over the past five years and also kinda an understandable way to spend the ungodly amounts of cash the machine keeps spitting out. Are you sure you wouldn't have done the same? joshuasaxe181906.substack.co…

I asked Sean to "get a better computer than this trash $200 laptop" to run the pick-and-place and so he shows up with this monster with 1.5TB of RAM, which he got surplus at a great price to do genome analysis. I've never seen 1.5TB of RAM before but here it is. I've also never seen a boot-time memory check take so long!

Larping as a biologist today at @BioKEAAI