Don't delegate understanding There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it. The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better. Instead of understanding it yourself, you choose to give the parasite control over your health, education, money, housing, business, identity, data, infrastructure, climate, justice. Even your beliefs. The parasite has three stages: acceptance, extraction, intervention. First is acceptance. Everyone else seems to have the parasite already. You are expected, even encouraged, to accept the parasite into your life. You are invited to follow the norm, outsource, consume. It’s okay! Use all the services and amenities. Satisfy your desires. Eat the cheap food, watch the cheap media. Your money and time are meant to be spent. Show off what you got in exchange. Please do not try to understand how it works, it’s too complicated for you. The parasite wants you fattened. Literally and figuratively. You are paying the parasite for the privilege of being ripened. Second is extraction. Under the influence of the parasite, you have developed unhealthy habits and you are suffering the consequences. Stress, anxiety, obesity, disease, ignorance, fear, lethargy, decay. To dampen these problems you pay the parasite for help — support, medicine, loans, fines, rent, taxes. Enforcement of some homeostasis. You try to abate the issues, but you don’t have a stable foundation to build on. You have ignored the root causes. The parasite thrives. You are paying the parasite to be harvested, milked, sucked dry. Third is intervention. The side effects of the parasite’s extraction have reached a critical level. The parasite tells you it’s an emergency. You need doctors, lawyers, firefighters, a military effort. You’re in a surgery room, a court room, a psychiatric ward, a jail cell. The disease can no longer be controlled, it has festered. The flame has turned into a raging fire that needs to be put out. You are paying the parasite to go back to square one. The three stages of the parasite are interdependent. Every stage benefits someone who is not you. Everyone tells you this is just the way it is. Never mind that the parasite is living large. Why? Extraction and intervention pay well. Education and prevention do not. The incentives are aligned to make the parasite persuasive. You are alone against a coordinated system that is exceedingly effective at packaging problems you should never have with solutions you should never need. A symbiotic loop. You must recognize the parasite in its earliest form. To inoculate yourself don’t delegate understanding. If you build your own understanding you will be the one who earns the dividends.

- @remarkablepaper to draw things for the first draft - kitten for printing images in the cli [1] - mmdc for generating mermaid pngs [2] - skill as a small personal wrapper [3] - iterate with an agent on telling it how to change colors, flows, etc and only modify the syntax directly when it gets complex. Note: I've started using HTML instead of mermaid for things that need to be "prettier" [1] sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kitt… [2] github.com/mermaid-js/mermai… [3] github.com/Olshansk/agent-sk…

We got bored. Time for Man vs. Machine x.com/i/broadcasts/1qGvvkQMg…

/goal is underrated

BREAKING NEWS: HubSpot co-founder/CTO buys $1.8M of his own company's shares. Disclosure 1: Yes, I'm that guy. (And no, I'm not used to talking about myself in the third person -- will not make a habit of it). Disclosure 2: This is not investment advice. Please do not buy or sell $HUBS shares based on this. So, why am I sharing this and writing about it? Well, for one, at least in my little world, it's noteworthy. It's been a while since I've bought HubSpot shares (I think it was back in 2022). Also, instead of answering the common questions from friends, family and colleagues, I figured it would be easier and more efficient to just answer them just once, here. 1) Why buy more HubSpot shares? Simple. I'm a big believer in the long-term vision of HubSpot and the team driving it. 2) Why do this now? Hasn't the stock been falling? Yes, the share price has dropped considerably despite what was a pretty strong quarter (results reported publicly last week). We added 10,800 net new customers in the quarter (well above the expected range), growing to about 300,000. Revenue, as reported grew 20% . 2) Why $1.8M? That's an odd number. I purchased 10,000 shares at whatever the market price was. 3) Isn't HubSpot going to get disrupted by AI and agents? I"m biased, but I don't think so. For AI agents in GTM (marketing/sales/service) to do their work they're going to need a platform that can provide the context they need and a work engine that can take action on their behalf. They need a customer platform they can *operate* to do what they need to do and drive outcomes. They're not going to reinvent/rewrite a CRM. They're way too smart for that (and getting smarter). They're going to use what's out there. They'll bias towards systems that have a great Agentic Experience -- not just a great User Experience. (HubSpot will have both. Headless is great, but we don't think completely humanless is a good idea). 4) I heard that others bought shares on the same day. True? Yes. Our fearless leader Yamini Rangan bought shares. Our board chair Lorrie Norrington bought shares too. 5) It's been almost 20 years since you started HubSpot, why don't you slow down a bit?! (That may or may not have been from my wife). :) Answer: I love HubSpot. I love what I do. I'm a builder at heart. I'm up 2am most nights learning, tinkering and building. There's never been a more exciting time to be a builder and to serve small and medium sized businesses. I think we are going to see *millions* of entrepreneurs start businesses leveraging the power of AI. HubSpot's mission is to help them grow better. If you have other questions, leave a reply. Can't promise to answer all of them because...laws and regulations, but I'll do what I can. Cheers.

If I were a college career counselor or in career services, I’d quickly be figuring out how to get students to understand these forward deployed engineer jobs exist and how to get them. The requirements are a mix of deep technical skills, often CS majors or minors. You must be great at understanding problem solving, how to have systems thinking, and have a strong business acumen. The kicker, of course, is to make sure you’re very deep in AI agents; you need to have fluency in coding agents, MCP, CLIs, Skills, and so on. Hundreds (thousands?) of technology companies will be hiring for these roles, same with any consulting and IT services company, and the vast major of mid-size and large enterprises will be hiring for this talent internally as well. One great example of opportunity for highly technical talent out there.

I am building out Meta's compute desk. I am looking for folks with background in any of: deep learning, supply chains, commodities, semiconductors, sovereigns, energy, Excel, prediction markets, monitoring situations, etc. Candidates should have experience in at least one of these domains, and novel ideas on how to apply LLMs to their work. If you'd like to help manage $100b of compute spend, please DM and include information about why you're a fit. (If you're in doubt about being a good fit please apply! Epistemic humility is in short supply these days.)

Fine-tuning frontier models was a mostly dominated solution anyway. Use an untuned frontier model for prototyping or personal use, but for the large majority of production use cases where you’re going to be doing the same task thousands to millions of times and/or your business depends on the quality of your solution, fine-tuning is basically required. And if you’re fine-tuning anyway, why not get the dramatically better cost, latency, privacy, and control benefits of building on an open source base. The gap between fine-tuning vs not is usually much larger than the gap between closed vs open.

you can outsource your thinking but you cannot outsource your understanding