I've only interacted with people with that level of wealth in a professional capacity. In my personal life, I know a lot of people who own multiple properties and businesses including some of my own family members but I don't think I know anyone with a private jet. The top of the range I know have big boats and big houses.

I feel like there is a social boundary between the old money and the new money.

The new money tends to be much wealthier and they don't like the old money folks. In theory, they could both talk with each other about exotic holiday spots, fine dining and boating/yachting but there is a different discomfort. And it's not about tech understanding because a lot of children of old money went into tech. I think the discomfort is that the new money folks see the old money folks as spoiled brats... But IMO, this is a result of the new money folks not seeing their own privilege; not granted by daddy, sure, but granted by the system itself.

My view is that nobody earned anything. They were chosen by luck of birth, chosen by a rich friend, chosen by a rich investor, or chosen by algorithm or a combination thereof. Usually based on highly superficial aspects. Their efforts have very little to do with it besides providing plausible narrative cover.

Agency seems to correlate with the ability to make good decisions. It's kind of surprising how much agency is required to make good technical decisions. It's not even about business domain knowledge; a lot of agency is needed even in a pure tech context.

I think the Australian version of naivety is more about meritocratic ideas and flat social hierarchies. Australians aren't usually loud or opinionated. European CEOs may not like it if an employee reaches out to them directly. In Australia, the startup CEO usually tries to be friends with the employees so it feels natural to reach out to the CEO directly and they often reach out to you. In Europe, I get the sense that CEOs believe that they're too important to talk to employees. This has been my experience at startups of similar sizes.

Australia is extremely egalitarian. I think even more so than the US. In both Australia and the US, you can usually talk to the CEO of the startup directly; they actually like to talk to their staff directly. But in the US, the power differential is usually much bigger, I am more cautious about what I say.

In Germany, there seems to be a more rigid hierarchy and the founders tend to avoid talking to employees directly; they tend to communicate mostly through middle-managers, even in relatively small startups.

After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.

Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.

Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.

The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.

Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.

I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.

Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.

When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.

Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.

At scale, I can see a benefit in terms of being able to process large amounts of data intelligently to gain a competitive advantage in terms of accruing nominal gains but I think that as long as AI is pursuing dollars, those gains won't translate to real value to the people who control the AI. At best, will translate to more political control; but with added risks and threats too. I suspect it will look more like controlled decline with a small number of entities getting an increasingly large slice of a rapidly shrinking pie.

I think AI may just figure out really complex ways to legally steal people's money. It will probably look all legit on the surface, it will look like the majority of people are just freakishly unlucky and a tiny number of elites are just extremely lucky... But it will be AI behind the scenes orchestrating seemingly random events; choosing who gets lucky and who doesn't.

Might end up literally like a game of monopoly. One player could dominate the game and start receiving all the money but, if you look at the big picture, none of the players are doing anything economically useful; just sitting around a board and moving pieces of paper amongst each other.

It's like the industrial revolution. Many kings and emperors did not like the idea of industrialization because they were already living a luxurious life and understood that it would not benefit them and would only create risks and problems for them personally. They could already afford as many human servants than they needed, what was the point of replacing them with machines to provide the same service they already received? It would give their servants more free time? To an emperor, that would have sounded more like a problem than a solution. It's a bit like that with AI. The people who control AI won't benefit from it beyond what they already have. If it doesn't serve a social cause then it serves nobody.

Open source 'winning' just means that there exists at least one open source alternative to closed models which is as good as, say, GPT 4... I mean, we're essentially there already with Google Gemma models.

As a software engineer, I didn't notice any difference in my productivity since Sonnet. Of course Opus is better and I'm sure Fable is better yet, but we're already hitting diminishing returns in terms of economic value.

I went from Cursor running one of the earlier GPT models to Claude Code on Sonnet and that was essentially a 5x productivity boost for me. Before Claude Code, I only used AI for small snippets. With Claude Code + Sonnet, I could trust it for entire sub-tasks... But I still don't trust Opus with full end-to-end features. I'm not sure it will ever get there. It probably doesn't need to.

Companies need software engineers to have a certain moderately high level of talent but above that level, they really don't care AT ALL. They don't even notice the difference, even if the gap is significant.

A good honest approach is just to build a few complex but essential tools so that other engineers have to keep coming back to you. It's a good way to stay relevant. You become really good at identifying misuses of that particular tool and it makes you look way smarter than you are when you can identify bugs in other people's code in mere seconds. This tends to happen naturally as you become more familiar with all the common gotchas that people tend to run into when using your tool.

Ideally you want your tools to be reliable and useful but complex... That way, whenever other devs run into bugs while using your tool, they keep coming back to you and you can point out their mistakes. The mistakes must be almost always be on their side for the strategy to work; this is key. Your code has to be rock solid.

If they find a genuine bug in your code, hopefully a small edge case, you have to be very humble and apologetic about it and you should praise the developer in the team meeting for identifying this complex bug.

This approach is better than getting credit for fixing your own buggy code; that only works with management and junior devs but other senior engineers will hate you.

The approach of building complex but reliable tools gets you credit over and over (often much more than twice) and the approval you get from other devs eventually finds its way to managers' ears. Smart leaders know that this is a better signal than flashy demos.

The leaders who just dish out praise onto specific devs for producing prototypes quickly tend to learn their mistake sooner or later. Many young founders tend to go through this phase though when they praise superficialties.

I already tested all earlier models against all my open source projects and they are yet to find a vulnerability so I'm keen to try out Mythos.

I've been waiting to be vindicated for years and finally we have a tool which can do it with high confidence but I don't have access.

Also, my code is minimal and highly succinct so it would prove correctness with even more confidence since each library/module and integration fully fits in the context window.

Like the Protobuf.js fiasco is just pure vindication for me because I was being looked down upon for choosing JSON as the interchange format. Turns out their software was insecure all this time... With a literal remote code execution vulnerability!

It's interesting that it works like fish and mercury contamination. Big fish accumulate mercury in higher concentrations than little fish. The little fish accumulate small amount over certain periods and are eaten by big fish which rapidly accumulate the chemical. The higher in the food chain the fish, the more mercury. It's a parallel with the degree of food processing. The more processed the food, the more contaminants.

You could characterize it as a general problem that humans and the planet are facing now. We have a problem with long chains. We are neglecting their costs. Even in the software industry, as a software developer, long chains of logic introduce their own problems with slight side effects at every stage accumulating into problematic unexpected behaviors and adding significant maintenance burdens. Guess what AI coding is contributing to? Longer chains of logic to solve the same problem.

At some point we have to put our foot down and reject unnecessary complexity and reject minor conveniences. There is too much fake convenience and fake safety which actually create much bigger inconveniences and hazards in the long run.

Everything in our society seems to be mirroring the debt-based system upon which our society is founded. Everything works like a debt which will have to be repaid later, with interest.

This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.

Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.

I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.

The right UX for scenarios where accuracy is essential is to let users know when they are offline. The offline-enabled approach is not suitable for a lot of situations.

Humans fundamentally haven't changed since the time of Galileo or Socrates. Being too early tends to be a bad thing.

It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.

You don't like it, stop using it! You hate it, boycott it! Don't expect change. They care so little about you and your opinions; demanding change from a multi-trillion dollar company is almost cringe-worthy at this point. Like a cockroach begging for mercy as your shoe is coming down onto it at full speed.

It's so frustrating how people nowadays complain about systems that they can easily change (or substitute, in this case) and nobody seems to complain about those systems which they cannot change nor substitute.

If you complain to abstract entities which don't care about you, about problems which you can easily solve yourself, you're the problem!

You're the reason why everything is shit and stays shit.

The best ideas I've had came to me overnight or over the weekend while my mind was at rest. Those ideas are those that keep paying dividends.

But I also need frequent breaks day-to-day, especially if using an LLM to code; I need to step back and refine my approach. I don't want to let the LLM seamlessly vibe-code me into a bad decision.

I've never met anybody who could come up with good ideas in a rapid-fire way. The stress associated with the need to churn out a steady stream of work makes you fall prey to sunk cost fallacy because you don't pause to reflect on anything you do and it gets worse over time. You end up creating unnecessary problems without even realising it because your mind is subconsciously trying to fill the time with work. The goal takes a backseat.

The taboo is awful because I see the effect in my junior colleagues sometimes, leading to over-engineering and I just want to tell them to take more frequent breaks to let the idea rest but it feels like something I'm not supposed to say.

The main purpose of the software is as a narrative device for making sales.