Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.

I was also never quite sure why he was in the orbit of influence and power. He had a failed bitcoin mining hardware company and that's about all I know of, and yet he kept seeming to fail upwards.

Oh and don’t forget that error message being returned when you try to call the API is because you didn’t give your project the proper permissions in google cloud console. What permissions do you need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Google Cloud Console feels like being stuck in the seventh circle of hell.

This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.

In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.

> The competition is therefore all the other activities that compete for the rapidly growing “discretionary time” of a population

His examples were bowling ball manufacturers competing with lawn care companies, but the idea is the same, go up an abstraction layer, and the competition is for time.

My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss.

And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading.

Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.

Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections—driven largely by anticipated data center growth"

With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than it did yesterday.

Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual impact on the world, engaging with the facts and understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.

It’s very rare to find a local coffee shop in the U.S. with a drive-thru.

If I'm running a lawn care company in the desert I can get all those annoying details right and still be unsuccessful. So strategy is not opening a lawn care company in the desert.

If you think I'm missing something you are saying, please let me know!

If you're in the wrong market or building for the wrong customers you can execute brilliantly on everything you mentioned and it won't matter. The only thing that matters is product market fit or finding it if you don't have it. That's what I see as unsaid in your parent's comment about "execute what though?"

I don't have a test like that on hand so I'm really curious what all you prompted the model, what it suggested, and how much your knowledge as a SWE enabled that workflow.

I'd like a more concrete understanding if the mind blowing nature is attainable for any average SWE, an average Joe that tinkers, or only a top decile engineer.

1. thefacebook

2. transition from desktop to mobile

3. building the machine that facebook became

4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.

Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.

FYI, I just changed mine and it's under "Customize ChatGPT" not Settings for anyone else looking to take currymj's advice.

A story with intrigue that chronicles the why and how Microsoft ended up extracting the most value from the PC revolution instead of the hardware makers and of course, why that was DOS instead of CP/M.

I liked the oral history nature of this podcast, walking me through things that preceded me in technology, and then things that I lived through like the 90's internet.

https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2016/03/the-man-who-c...

In practice when I have seen ARC brought up, it has more nuance than any of the other benchmarks.

Unlike, Humanity's Last Exam, which is the most egregious example I have seen in naming and when it is referenced in terms of an LLMs capability.

OpenAI and Microsoft are at a standoff over the terms of the startup’s $3 billion acquisition of the coding startup Windsurf, the people said. Microsoft currently has access to all of OpenAI’s IP, according to their agreement. It offers its own AI coding product, GitHub Copilot, that competes with OpenAI. OpenAI doesn’t want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf’s intellectual property.