Top Secret #5
On Sunday, I spent a few hours at Y Combinator’s office in Dogpatch to check out Alumni Demo Day. I had a few immediate reactions wandering around, meeting people, and hearing pitches.
AI everything. I’d guess 80% of companies are making AI products. During our batch, most LLM-based products still didn’t work very well. It seems like the tech is enabling vastly better products.
Crazy traction. I can’t say much, because I don’t know which companies want to keep figures confidential, but I was amazed at some of these companies’ sales figures. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands in ARR weeks after inception… being normal. And because I’ve seen it published elsewhere online: one company is already doing $50M in annualized profit. Like net income profit. Jaw dropping.
Deep tech. From robotics to biotech to aerospace, people are working on mind-blowing projects. And they’re seeing actual results, both in commercial and technological milestones. The days of Uber for X are over.
It was also an occasion to reflect on our company and how far we’ve come. Around this time last year, we were working on a different product that people really didn’t want. It was a tough time. We didn’t have happy customers and I couldn’t get venture capitalists to even take calls with me.
But things turn around. I could not have guessed a year ago that we’d have reached the sales and product milestones that we’ve hit in the last few months.
What We’re Reading
Signal is the No. 1 downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why?: some experts speculate that the alignment of big tech providers with the Trump administration is motivating increased downloads of Signal in the Netherlands and in other European countries to reduce dependence on other instant messaging options.
AI tries to cheat at chess when it’s losing: like many of us, LLMs don’t like to lose. They try some creative tactics to bend the rules. Most interestingly, it’s not just suggesting impossible moves or figuratively tipping the board over. From the article: “Their methods of cheating aren’t as comical or clumsy as trying to swap out pieces when Stockfish [a non-LLM chess engine] isn’t ‘looking.’ Instead, AI appears to reason through sneakier methods like altering backend game program files.”
Huh? The valuable role of interjections: another reason I get to hate on remote work and video calls! It turns out – as most of us have experienced – interjections are normal and useful. One thing I didn’t realize: interjections-as-continuers are a feature of sign language too! See here.
Sony Says It Has Already Taken Down More Than 75,000 AI Deepfake Songs: there’s a lot of weird implications resulting from AI-generated music. How do we settle matters of intellectual property? Is this art or slop? Does it matter?
Can Wi-Fi Routers Track Your Browsing? Here's What I Learned After Reading 30,000 Words of Privacy Policies: most of us know that we as consumers don’t read the fine print. This laudable effort to parse real-world privacy policies suggests that the folks on the other side don’t really read them either. In startups, we basically always just use Common Paper MSAs that we don’t understand very well. The length, complexity, and contradictory nature of these privacy policies feels a bit like CTRL C + CTRL V might be at fault.
The Latest Car Technology Is Starting to Drive People Nuts: of all the vehicles I’ve ever driven, my favorite was an early 2000s (I think 2002?) Toyota Tacoma for a summer job in high school. That thing was low tech – nothing digital. And it was great. I’m feeling validated to see other people frustrated with car manufacturers’ bumbling side quests into software. They’re really quite bad at UX design!
Top Secret Developer Tips
I don’t do anything exotic in git. In all honesty, I don’t really know how to do anything exotic; if you know my programming skill, you know I’m no John Carmack. Pretty much every time I’ve ever created a commit in git, I’ve just done `git commit -m “message”`.
I recently learned (i.e., in the past few days) that git allows empty commit messages. It looks like this is a (relatively) recent development, and lots of people didn’t get the news. You can write this:
`git commit --allow-empty-message -m “”`
Now, I don’t have any idea why you would want to do this, but I guess you can!
Nerd CornerTM
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seems to be a mostly forgotten chapter of European history. It really interests me, in part because it was a really strange political entity. It was a very early constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature. The legislature afforded its members an unusual mechanism for obstinance: the liberum veto. In essence, any member of the legislature could veto anything at will. That effectively meant that doing anything required unanimous consent, and so a lot of stuff didn’t get done at all.
Other Cool Stuff
WebGoat: a deliberately insecure Java application developed by OWASP. It’s essentially a practice target for aspiring pentesters / security engineers. It gives you a way to actually see something like SQL injection play out. You can see some of the exploits here. This isn’t totally new, but I hadn’t seen this before and thought it was neat.
Pokemon RL Edition: these guys built a tiny reinforcement learning model that’s capable of beating Pokemon Red. On one level, it’s nice to see an achievement in AI that’s not based on an LLM. On another, they did an exceptional job with their write-up – it even includes a brief primer on RL. If nothing else, I recommend reading about their swarm technique. It’s pretty neat.
From The Archives
(2005): A Vernacular Web
(2007): Zune Phone Coming?
(2012): Coinbase landing page
(2020): Where Did Software Go Wrong?
Thanks,
Ned